mass immigration

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pages: 420 words: 126,194

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, glass ceiling, high net worth, illegal immigration, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, open borders, post-industrial society, white flight

It is a habit Europe has got into, and one which becomes harder to kick with each passing year. DIVERSITY One of the most striking things about the arguments for ongoing mass migration into European countries is that they are so readily able to shift. Whenever the economic cases for mass immigration are briefly dislodged, along come moral or cultural arguments. Without making any concession they state a position along these lines: ‘Let us pretend that mass migration does not make us financially richer. It does not matter, because mass migration makes us rich in other ways. In fact even if it makes us financially poorer, what you lose in economic benefits you will pick up in cultural benefits.’

Because such things are so obvious, it requires a concerted effort to pretend they are untrue. One example of just such an effort is the report that was a foundation document for the wave of mass migration during the Blair government. ‘Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis’ was completed in 2000, a joint production of the Home Office Economics and Resource Analysis Unit and the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit (even their names seeming designed to bore any opponents to inattention). Both entities were staffed with people already known to be in favour of mass immigration and therefore clearly intended to provide ‘intellectual ballast’ to support the existing views of ministers.1 Among the claims of this seminal report was that ‘overall, migrants have little aggregate effect on native wages or employment’.

The cliché of the ‘average immigrant’ being an economic boon for the country only works when such exceptions are made to appear as though they are the rule. All efforts to make an economic case for mass immigration rely on this trick. Among those to have used it are EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström and UN Representative Peter Sutherland. In a 2012 piece they suggested that unless Europe opens its borders to mass migration, ‘Entrepreneurs, migrants with Ph.Ds’ and others will all be ‘flocking to places like Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, China, and India’, thus leaving Europe to be a more impoverished place.2 One of the few studies in this area is from the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration at University College London.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

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

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

Because climate change and population imbalances and mass migration are not problems dropping like European microbes out of a clear blue Mesoamerican sky, nor are they accidental Y2K or nuclear-launch disasters that can be feared but not exactly predicted. Instead, they are challenges that follow from long-term technological and economic trends, long-term patterns of human behavior—which in turn means that they’re the kinds of trends that a vigorous, nondecadent, advanced civilization should have been able to cope with and head off before they led to some dégringolade. If mass migration ultimately overthrows the Western political order, there will be a cautionary story told by reactionaries ever after, in which the foolish elites of America and Europe couldn’t see that their relaxed attitude toward immigration and their indifference to the most basic aspect of human flourishing imaginable, the birthrate, were both species of decadence, which richly merited the destruction that followed.

And the consequence would be what Bill McKibben, one of the most eloquent climate alarmists, calls the “shrinking” of the planet: “Until now, human beings have been spreading, from our beginnings in Africa, out across the globe—slowly at first, and then much faster. But a period of contraction is setting in as we lose parts of the habitable earth.” At a sufficient scale, that contraction would accelerate mass migration to a point where it ceases to be politically manageable. In the Syrian refugee crisis, in which drought played a supporting role, you had a preview of how migration can upend political normalcy in the developed world. If that one crisis helped give us Brexit and Trump and various populist victories across the European continent, it’s not hard to see how a rolling, decades-long pattern of climate-driven migrations could put stresses on the developed world that our sclerotic institutions and political coalitions simply aren’t prepared to bear.

The Neo-Medieval Future If something like this happens, we will look back on Trump-era disturbances and recognize them not as the playacting that they often seem to be but as a kind of dress rehearsal for a looming tragedy—Karl Marx’s dictum about history repeating as tragedy followed by farce, but in reverse. And more even than in the first scenario, the scenario of economic crisis, in the climate crisis/mass migration scenario, impulses that today belong (at least officially) to the disreputable extremes will become near universal. In a landscape of rolling calamity and constant migration, the concepts of reform, renewal, and renaissance will lose their salience entirely, and what will be sought, quite understandably, is a kind of Augustus or Diocletian option for the West: a figure or figures capable of imposing order, guaranteeing public safety, and ensuring continuity of government when all else seems to be melting into swiftly warming air.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

It’s easier for people whose lives are relatively comfortable to appreciate the benefits of migration; poorer people in ‘left-behind’ towns can be fearful of the impact of immigrants. Given the mass immigration that is coming as people are displaced everywhere, it is the job of political leaders to reassure them – not stoke these fears – with policies that reduce poverty and create housing, services and jobs for everyone. This coming mass migration has been clearly signposted for at least a decade, as we have accelerated towards global climate change. There is no excuse for lack of preparedness from our leaders. The way migration is ‘managed’ today is a moral, social and economic failure – lives are being needlessly wasted daily.

In the coming decades, many will be receiving applications in at least the hundreds of thousands. Consider that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created 10 million refugees in just the first three weeks. It’s to be expected that people will have concerns about mass migration, particularly in places with small, fairly homogeneous populations. These fears are a significant issue, and must be tackled if climate migration at scale is to be peaceful and successful for migrants and host communities. Managed well, mass migration will be part of life and cosmopolitan societies will be considered unremarkable by the generation who do not remember more homogeneous times. Younger, urban people are already comfortable with a far greater diversity of people than their grandparents are, and this is partly a reflection of demographic change: in the US, just 18 per cent of the post-war baby boomer generation is non-white; whereas almost half of Gen Z, those born 1997 to 2012, are of Black, Latino or Asian heritage.

Globally, for every 0.1°C rise in temperature, the number of sinkholes increases by 1–3 per cent.15 Heat even causes flights to be grounded, as planes struggle to take off in temperatures above 43°C.16 There will be manifold problems societies face as we move suddenly into a very different world. The date when scientists expect extreme heat to make parts of the world uninhabitable is also shifting closer because newer models now realize it will happen at lower global temperatures. Researchers initially put this threshold for mass migrations within a 5°C scenario; it’s now between 3°C and 4°C, although even at a global temperature rise of below 2°C, at least a billion people would have to move.17 At 4°C, models show that exposure to extreme heat globally increases more than thirty-fold, compared to today, while in Africa it increases by at least a hundred times.18 And it is not only the tropics; mid-latitude and even sub-polar regions will experience months of heatwave temperatures every year.


pages: 190 words: 56,531

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

The Scots and the Protestant Irish accepted to be included in the revised conception of the country, and the Act of Union with Ireland of 1800, followed by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, invited the Irish fully to share in the deal. The years that followed were not harmonious: the Highland clearances continued, as did the oppression of the Irish smallholders, exacerbating the disastrous famine of 1845–52. So too did the mass migration to the industrial towns, the exploitation of child labour, and the dehumanizing factory regimes. However, as I noted above, the British do not, as a rule, confront problems with an attitude of resignation and laissez-faire. Their instinct is to combine in order to solve them. The Factory Acts, the Friendly Societies, Building Societies, church schools and people’s dispensaries, the Chartist movement, the second Reform Bill extending the franchise to large sections of working-class men, the growth of the Labour movement – these and many other social and political initiatives overcame the worst of the problems in England, and ensured that the pre-political ‘we’ of Britain was strong enough to reconcile the many resentments.

Fair-mindedness, acceptance of eccentricity and a reluctance to take offence, combined with an aversion towards abuse and slander – all these were attributes of the British, and belonged to them by virtue of public institutions in which they placed their trust and which they were tutored to defend both in thought and deed against those who might otherwise destroy them. Such citizens fought for the freedom of their country, and for their own freedom as part of it. And that, in a nutshell, was the British character. Nothing in history stays still, however. Years of peace and prosperity, the decline of the Christian faith, mass migration and the spread of global trade and communications – these and other vast changes have produced a generation of young people more attuned to networks that connect them to their peers than to the liberties that their grandparents fought for. They have not been confronted in their lives with the emergency to which patriotism is the only cogent response, although the jihadists are trying hard to rectify this.

Without the countryside and all that it means there would be no Coleridge or Wordsworth, no Jane Austen, no Brontë sisters, no Walter Scott, no George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, no Elgar, Vaughan Williams or Ivor Gurney, no Constable, Crome or Turner. When, in the nineteenth century, people began to confront the questions posed by the mass migration to the cities and the rise of the factories, therefore, it was in part with a view to protecting the countryside from further spoliation at the hands of the industrialists. This feeling for the countryside has profoundly influenced urbanization in both England and Scotland. From the eighteenth century onwards developers have provided potted versions of the rural environment – green squares, small parks, tree-lined streets, sometimes gardens front and rear – with scant respect for the kind of economy of land use that we witness in Italy or France.


pages: 303 words: 83,564

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

But in this instance the argument smacks of a sleight of hand. To see the limitations of an argument, it sometimes helps to guy it to an extreme. Suppose, entirely hypothetically, that mass immigration led to the exodus of most of the indigenous population, but that the remainder intermarried with immigrants and their joint descendants ended up better off. Knowing this ex ante, the indigenous population might reasonably determine that mass immigration was not in its interest. Whether it would then be legitimate for this perceived self-interest to translate into restrictions on entry would depend upon whether freedom of movement is a global right.

Currently, the most high-profile settlers are Jewish Israelis: while the rights of Jewish settlement of the Occupied Territories are hotly disputed—and entirely outside the scope of this book—no one attempts to justify Jewish settlement on the grounds that it is beneficial for indigenous Palestinians. In the post-Napoleonic period, when mass migration to North America took off, the group with the greatest appetite to become settlers was the Protestant community in the north of Ireland (emigration by Catholics from southern Ireland did not take off until after the potato famine of the 1840s). The most likely explanation for this propensity is that the Protestants in the north of Ireland were already settlers, brought in from Scotland and England by successive British governments to establish a loyalist population in the unruly colony.

Extreme libertarianism denies the right of governments to restrict individual freedom, in this instance the freedom of movement. Universalist utilitarianism wants to maximize world utility by whatever means. The best possible outcome would be if the entire world population moved to the country in which people were most productive, leaving the rest of the earth empty. A useful supplement to such mass migration would be if Robin Hood could rob all the rich people and transfer the money to all the poor people, although economists would caution Robin to temper robbery with concern for incentives. Evidently, neither of these philosophies provides an ethical framework by which a democratic society would wish to navigate migration policy.


pages: 405 words: 121,999

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Attitudes to immigration correlate more closely to an ‘out’ vote than to any other factors, other than to the EU itself. Moreover, support for Germany’s far-right AfD surged after the highly publicised mass migrations of Syrians in the summer of 2015. Without its early lead in the demographic transformation, Britain could not have exported its people to run an empire on which the sun never set. Without the sharp drop in fertility rates that followed–and the simultaneous rapid expansion of populations in lands where Britain had once ruled–mass immigration and the arrival of a more multicultural society would almost certainly not have happened. If one wishes to understand why Californians speak English or why there are five times more Muslims than Methodists in the UK, consider the great forces of population change in recent times.

Estimates vary–the record keeping was not very good–and of course many people came back, complicating the picture, but one estimate is that in the 1850s alone, more than 1 million people left the country.7 By contrast, in the peak year for immigration in the century before the First World War, barely 12,000 from outside the UK came to stay.8 Given that there was a mass migration out of England, and yet its population nearly quadrupled in the course of the century, the cause of the population growth must have been a vastly greater number of births than deaths, sufficient not only to generate this large domestic population growth but also to fuel the emigration. The poor, narrow streets of London’s East End, into which Jews were packed by the end of the century, representing the bulk of immigration into the country, counted as nothing when compared to the vast spaces into which emigrants poured out from Britain, in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and beyond.

When the musical West Side Story received its premiere in 1957, featuring the line ‘Puerto Rica–you lovely island… always the hurricanes blowing, always the population growing’, the women of this US dependency in the Caribbean were bearing nearly five children each; today they are having one and a half. (In fact, even in the late 1950s the population was not growing, despite the high fertility rate, thanks to mass migration to the US mainland.) The rise in life expectancy and fall of infant mortality are objectives which all societies will achieve if they can. It is a biological imperative and part of human nature to want to preserve one’s own life, to put off the moment of death and to do what one can to preserve the lives of one’s nearest and dearest, particularly one’s children.


pages: 256 words: 75,139

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

It is not just about immigration; it is also about economies, trade, sovereignty and liberalism in general. But, as we cope with the new realities of mass immigration and the moral necessity to take in refugees, we must not lose sight of core values. If we do, we may condemn all future Europeans, from whatever background, to live in a more repressive society than at present. It’s worth remembering that most of those coming to Europe are trying to get away from despotic regimes that have failed them. We need to deal with radical Islamism, manage mass migration and care for refugees, but in a manner that does not undermine our liberal values and rule-of-law-based systems.

Berlin, Germany and then Europe were united once more. They were heady times in which some intellectuals predicted an end of history. However, history does not end. In recent years, the cry ‘Tear down this wall’ is losing the argument against ‘fortress mentality’. It is struggling to be heard, unable to compete with the frightening heights of mass migration, the backlash against globalization, the resurgence of nationalism, the collapse of Communism and the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. These are the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come. We are seeing walls being built along borders everywhere. Despite globalization and advances in technology, we seem to be feeling more divided than ever.

To achieve this involves a mass uprooting of people, along with the destruction of villages and the building of cities, megacities, roads and high-speed railways. The majority of the movement continues to be from west to east, the west still tending to be more rural, with higher illiteracy rates; the east, especially towards the seaboard, is increasingly urban and oriented towards technology, industry and business. However, the mass migration to the cities reveals and exacerbates another gap within the urban population, again between rich and poor. It has been created by the hukou system, a form of registration that is rooted in the social structure of the country. It is one of the things that have helped to entrench the perception of the rural population as second-class citizens.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, climate change refugee, colonial rule, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, GPS: selective availability, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Ken Thompson, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, open borders, out of africa, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl

Conservationists warn of the “invasive” appetites of alien species moving into habitats already populated by native ones. Biomedical experts warn of migrant species carrying foreign microbes into new places, sparking epidemics that will threaten the public health. Foreign policy experts predict instability and violence as the necessary result of mass migrations forced by climate change. Antimigrant politicians speak of economic calamity and worse. The idea of migration as a disruptive force has fueled my own work as a journalist. For years I reported and wrote about the damage caused by biota on the move. I investigated how mosquitoes flitting across landscapes and nations infected societies with malaria parasites, shaping the rise and fall of empires, and how cholera bacteria traveling across continents in the bodies of traders and travelers triggered pandemics that reshaped the global economy.

Meanwhile, in the cavernous halls of the UN Security Council,10 where officials debated the use of armed forces to secure the international order from threats such as drug trafficking, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, attention turned instead to the dangers posed by climate-driven migrants. By 2011 officials at the council had held two open debates on the subject. At the time, the specter of mass migration had been an abstraction, like the hordes of zombies featured on hit television programs. Then political and geographical circumstances conspired to create a spectacle, one in which migrants materialized in conspicuous masses, just as Kaplan and the others had warned, on Europe’s southern shores.

In fact, countries such as Greece and Hungary had plenty17 of accommodations and jobs to offer newcomers. In Athens, three hundred thousand residential properties stood vacant. In Hungary, a critical labor shortage meant employers couldn’t find sufficient workers to fill vacant posts. But for many observers, the newly conspicuous spectacle of mass migration appeared ominous. They saw an army of robotic migrants, full of disruptive and destructive potential. By 2015 over a million people from Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere had found their way into Europe, primarily Germany but also Sweden and elsewhere.18 In their wake, a wave of politicians promising harsh new measures against migrants swept into power across Europe and the United States.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

While arrivals at Ellis Island were vetted to weed out those ‘liable to become a public charge’, only one in fifty was denied entry. The exodus from Europe was unprecedented. First Britons, then Irish and Germans moved. Soon they were joined by Scandinavians and others from north-western Europe. Later, Italians, Poles and other southern and eastern Europeans crossed the Atlantic too. At the peak of this mass migration in the first decade of the twentieth century, nearly 9 million Europeans moved to the US, nearly 2.5 million to Argentina and Brazil, more than 1.5 million to Australia and New Zealand and over 1 million to Canada.13 In 1907 alone 1.3 million Europeans moved to the US. Since the US population was only 76 million in 1900, the rate of new arrivals was far greater than today.

Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy, MIT, 1999. 18 Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History, 15:2, 2004, pp. 155–89. 19 Oriana Bandiera, Imran Rasul and Martina Viarengo, ‘The Making of Modern America: Migratory Flows in the Age of Mass Migration’, Journal of Development Economics, 102, 2013, pp. 23–47. 20 Quoted in John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, Cambridge, 2000. 3 Post-1945 Migration 1 Richard Cavendish, ‘Arrival of SS Empire Windrush’, History Today, 48:6, June 1998. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/arrival-ss-empire-windrush 2 David Olusoga, ‘The Windrush story was not a rosy one even before the ship arrived’, Guardian, 22 April 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/22/windrush-story-not-a-rosy-one-even-before-ship-arrived 3 Marc Wadsworth, ‘Sam King obituary’, Guardian, 30 June 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jun/30/sam-king-obituary 4 Rachel Sylvester, ‘Both sides now: inside the rise of Sajid Javid’, Prospect, 27 January 2019. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/both-sides-now-inside-the-rise-of-sajid-javid 5 Dave Hill, ‘Zac Versus Sadiq: The Fight to Become London Mayor’, Double Q, 2016. 6 Henry McDonald, ‘Leo Varadkar, gay son of Indian immigrant, to be next Irish PM’, Guardian, 2 June 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/02/leo-varadkar-becomes-irelands-prime-minister-elect 7 ONS, ‘Population of the UK by country of birth and nationality.

Since low-skilled migration to Denmark from those countries is almost impossible, the migrants are almost all refugees. 34 Sarit Cohen Goldner and Chang-Tai Hsieh, ‘Macroeconomic and Labor Market Impact of Russian Immigration in Israel’, May 2000. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228885737_Macroeconomic_and_Labor_Market_Impact_of_Russian_Immigration_in_Israel 35 The finding that post-Soviet migrants did not harm Israelis’ labour-market outcomes is confirmed by Rachel Friedberg, ‘The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXVI:4, 2001, pp. 1373–408. https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Rachel_Friedberg/Links/Friedberg%20QJE.pdf 36 Olivier Blanchard, Florence Jaumotte and Prakash Loungani, ‘Labor Market Policies and IMF Advice in Advanced Economies during the Great Recession’, IMF Staff Discussion Note 13/02, 2013. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2013/sdn1302.pdf 12 Demographic Dividend 1 Japan’s elderly accounted for 28.4 percent of its population in 2018, a proportion that is expected to reach 30 percent by 2025.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

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

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

Some of the Taiping program would later be adopted by Sun Yat-sen, who would overthrow the imperial regime, and then by Mao Tse-tung and the Communists.15 The Revolt against Mass Migration The contemporary versions of peasant rebellions, particularly in Europe and the United States, are in large part a reaction against globalization and the mass influx of migrants from poor countries with very different cultures. The numbers of international migrants worldwide swelled from 173 million in 2000 to 258 million in 2017; of these, 78 million were living in Europe and 50 million in the United States.16 Mass migration from poorer to wealthier countries seems all but unstoppable, given the great disparities between them.

Today a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level.20 This number will grow to 75 percent by 2050, according to the United Nations; many societies, including some in the developing world, can expect a rapidly aging population and a precipitous decline in workforce numbers.21 Overall world population growth could all but end by 2040, says Wolfgang Lutz, and be in decline by 2060.22 Shrinking populations in advanced countries will threaten economic growth by limiting the size of the labor force, and will undermine the fiscal viability of the welfare state.23 This is one reason for the receptiveness of Western governments to high levels of immigration from poorer countries, which continue to produce offspring more prodigiously than wealthier countries. Between now and 2050, half of all global population growth is expected to take place in Africa.24 A widening demographic imbalance between the poorer and wealthier countries could cause more disruption in both spheres, and lead to a reprise of the mass migrations that did much to undermine the ancient empires of Europe and Asia.25 Social conflict resulting from high levels of immigration from poorer countries is already a prominent feature of Western politics and seems likely to fester in the coming decades.26 The Technology Gap Technological advances once fueled growing prosperity for the many.

But as James Burnham noted, they generally share an ideology of “managerialism,” centered on efficiency in producing the results desired by managers themselves. As the managerial class grows in power, it becomes more self-referential. Its members are responsible not to the citizenry, but only to other managers and to those regarded as part of a qualified peer group.57 The complexity of problems facing our society—climate change, mass migration, or the effects of technology, for example—may often seem beyond the competency of elected representatives. If higher education made for better people with wiser judgment, it might be tolerable to hand great powers for controlling society to highly educated experts. But as Aldous Huxley observed, scientists and other experts do not own a monopoly on either virtue or political wisdom.58 There are clear dangers in ceding too much power to unelected and unaccountable elites who claim moral authority or expertise backed by higher education.


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

In 1889, the International Emigration Conference defended the freedom of movement as a natural right: “We affirm the right of the individual to the fundamental liberty accorded to him by every civilized nation to come and go and dispose of his person and his destinies as he pleases.”76 International migration may have been fiercely contested from some corners and for some people during the late nineteenth century—particularly the Chinese, and also southern Europeans and Slavs—but an ideology of economic openness and liberalism prevailed overall. Transatlantic Migration The period between 1840 and 1914 is commonly referred to as the “age of mass migration” because of the rapid increase in free mobility during this time.77 Mass migration raised the labor force of the United States and Australia by one-third, and reduced the labor force in Europe by about one-eighth. The average number of Europeans migrating to North America increased from about 300,000 per year in 1850 to around 600,000 per year in the 1870s, and then almost doubled again to over 1 million migrants annually at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The prevailing rationales for free movement and open borders were ethical—that people had the right to move—and economic—that the movement of people responded to similar economic forces (namely, supply and demand) as the movement of goods and capital. At times of major economic or social upheaval—such as the Irish famine, the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, or rapid industrialization—the result of open borders was mass migration. Two significant aspects of the nineteenth-century migration to the New World are less recognized than the fact of mass migration itself. First, a large number of migrants returned to their home countries after several years—half of those leaving Spain and Italy, for example. Second, sending countries went through life cycles of emigration. The volume of migrants remained high during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, but the sources of emigrants shifted over time.12 The flow of people rose to a peak as the demographic push factors and economic pull factors increased, and descended into a valley as they diminished.

“Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” The American Historical Review 108(2): 377–403. 84. Hatton and Williamson, 1998. 85. Harzig, Hoerder, and Gabaccia, 2009: 37. 86. Winder, 2004: 196. 87. Ibid.: 229. 88. Hatton and Williamson, 1998. 89. Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson. 1998. The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 90. Carl Solberg. 1978. “Mass Migrations in Argentina, 1870–1970,” in William H. McNeill and Ruth Adams (eds.), Human Migration: Patterns and Policies. London: Indiana University Press, p. 148. 91. Solberg, 1978: 151. 92. Hatton and Williamson, 1998. 93. Herbert S. Klein. 1995.


pages: 215 words: 64,460

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

As the British Empire declined in the twentieth century, this Anglo-world came to form the core of a new ‘Anglo-America’ – an economic, political, ideological and military constellation through which the USA first assumed, and then exercised, global hegemony (as we shall see, the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA is a central axis upon which debate about the Anglosphere would come to turn). The nineteenth century witnessed explosive population growth in the Anglo-world. From 1790 to 1930, the number of English speakers grew sixteenfold, from 12 million to 200 million, far outstripping population growth anywhere else in the world.9 This demographic surge was underpinned by mass migration from the British Isles to the USA and the settler societies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the course of little over a century after the end of the Napoleonic wars, 25 million people migrated from the United Kingdom to these countries and the smaller enclaves of the Empire.10 The USA was the most popular destination, particularly for Irish migrants, and drew two-thirds of people leaving the British Isles up until the end of the nineteenth century.

Migration to South Africa was smaller in scale, despite its late nineteenth-century mineral and gold booms, while Canada became the primary magnet at the turn of the twentieth century for British migrants, drawn to the rapid economic growth of its prairie towns. Although the USA remained the preferred destination for the Irish migrants, the dominions together took nearly 60 per cent of British emigrants in the years running up to the First World War. These were peak years for mass migration to the ‘Old Commonwealth’, as it would later become known.11 Migration on this scale was made possible by the revolutions in transport and communications that took place in the Victorian age. The growth in power and speed of steamships dramatically reduced the cost, in time and money, of long-distance travel.

Increasingly, it came to be seen as a portal through which various alien peoples could enter the country, and a reactive current of sentiment began to gather around a more tightly drawn, insular sense of the nation. Towards the end of his own career, Churchill was troubled by the emergence of immigration as a popular concern in Britain and expressed considerable scepticism about whether the indigenous population would tolerate mass immigration from the non-white peoples of the Commonwealth. In conversation in 1954 he remarked about the problems that ‘will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the UK?’32 Conclusions During the middle decades of the last century, the decline of the British Empire was widely viewed as irreversible, although politicians and political parties continued to argue, often sharply, over how quickly decolonisation should happen, how the British state should manage this process, and how its relationships with its former colonies should be arranged.


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

—Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone “Confused about how we got to this point? Harsha Walia explains clearly and concisely the multiple forces causing global poverty and displacement—and the resistance and organizing around the world. Walia provides a historical analysis of policies that have cut down people’s well-being and driven poverty, violence, terror, and mass migration, and highlights the myriad forms of resistance and organizing that are all too often invisibilized. An excellent explanation of borders, migration, and the exploitative systems that produce both.” —Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars “Harsha Walia’s decades of visionary leadership in border abolition and migrant justice work, along with her relentless intellectual rigor, is apparent in this immensely important book, arriving right when we need it most.

Language such as “migrant crisis,” and the often-corresponding “migrant invasion,” is a pretext to shore up further border securitization and repressive practices of detention and deportation. Such representations depict migrants and refugees as the cause of an imagined crisis at the border, when, in fact, mass migration is the outcome of the actual crises of capitalism, conquest, and climate change. The border crisis, as I argue in the first part, is more accurately described as crises of displacement and immobility, preventing both the freedom to stay and the freedom to move. American liberals may demand an end to excessive violence against Latinx migrants and refugees, exemplified in their opposition to concentration camps or family separation, but they rarely locate immigration and border policies within broader systemic forces.

In the middle of the coronavirus crisis, thousands of garment workers, left without wages for a month during a government-ordered shutdown, desperately returned to work for a pittance in overcrowded garment factories in the US-funded Caracol Industrial Park zone in northern Haiti.36 The long shadow of attempts to subjugate Haiti provides the context for Haitian mass migration and ensuing mass expulsion from the US in the 1980s. During the Cold War, Haitian refugees fleeing US destabilization were detained and deported, while Vietnamese refugees characterized as fleeing despotic communist People’s Army and Viet Cong forces were rescued and welcomed, thus revealing the geopolitics of the refugee order.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Instead, workers in South Korea and Vietnam are collaborating in ways that allow the former country to remain relatively egalitarian while making Vietnam far more productive and affluent than it would have been in the absence of South Korean investment. A devoted cosmopolitan might fault South Korea’s voters for not being enlightened enough to welcome the prospect of admitting lots of Vietnamese workers, but the deepening of economic ties between South Korea and Vietnam seems to be working out rather well for all concerned, even without mass migration. This example might strike you as counterintuitive. It often seems as though protectionism and immigration restriction are a package deal. And as a matter of cultural sensibilities, they do tend to go together. Simply put, the kind of people who celebrate free trade tend to be the kind of people who have a taste for change, which makes them more favorably disposed toward the free movement of people across borders.11 Similarly, on the other side of the political fence, immigration skeptics are often motivated by a sense of nostalgia, which inclines them to oppose offshoring, automation, and other forces that threaten to change the look and feel of society.

The book is a prescient case for alarm about the ways in which rapid demographic change is affecting America’s political psyche. The widening racial gap in party identification, in particular, bespeaks “a nation in danger of being driven apart.” But even in the face of this trend, the authors never consider paring back the mass immigration policies that brought it about. Instead they hope that diversity will eventually bury ethnic conflict and usher in a more liberal future—though they acknowledge an alternate possibility, where “the racial divide in US party politics expands to a racial chasm, and the prospects for racial conflict swell.”

This was Trump’s core issue during the primaries; the force that animated his base; the unifying theme of the populist explosion that has transformed politics throughout the Western world. Much academic and journalistic writing on immigration is defined by what might be called the Backlash Paradox. On the one hand, it is clear to most liberal scholars and journalists that mass immigration has contributed to racism and polarization. On the other, they view slowing the pace of immigration as a callow surrender to bigotry, so the only option is to double down on the status quo and hope that the storm passes—even if this approach risks triggering an “extinction-level event” for open societies.


pages: 649 words: 185,618

The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow by Gil Troy

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, demand response, different worldview, European colonialism, financial independence, ghettoisation, guns versus butter model, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, open immigration, Silicon Valley, union organizing, urban planning, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

After the war, Jabotinsky was the least hopeful of all the Zionists that the British would provide real support or smooth relations with the Arabs during the expected period of mass immigration. During the Arab riots of 1920, he organized a self-defense corps in Jerusalem. The British military administration sentenced him to fifteen years for illegal possession of arms—instigating a storm. He was soon pardoned and the conviction subsequently revoked. Jabotinsky’s reputation was now at its height. He was elected to the Zionist Executive in 1921, but he and Chaim Weizmann clashed. Jabotinsky believed in rapid mass immigration to Palestine and in mobilizing Jewish military and police units; Weizmann called for careful colonization and trusted the British.

Still, a new challenge emerged: surviving. The ongoing fight for Israel’s existence then entailed repeated restatements of the essential Zionist idea. As the state developed amid crushing conditions—facing wars, international repudiation, terrorism, hostile internal populations, and waves of mass migration—leaders kept updating the Zionist vision for war and peace, for democracy and prosperity. Underlying all this was the question Herzl never fully resolved: Should the Jewish state be a normal state or an exceptional light unto the nations? This first selection, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, captures the two sides of Zionism—a movement that is both particular and universal, tempering ethnic nationalism with essential civic and democratic dimensions.

The current borders of our state guarantee security and peace while expanding the horizons that once were missing, encouraging a thorough national renewal, physically and spiritually. Within these borders, all will enjoy freedom and equality: the fundamental rights the State of Israel provides all of its inhabitants, with no distinctions. Our future depends on the two principles of continuing aliyah, immigration, and settling the land. A mass migration from all over the Jewish Diaspora is an essential condition for fulfilling the Land of Israel’s full national destiny. The new missions and possibilities this era evokes will trigger a new awakening and focus for the People of Israel and the Land of Israel. . . . The Green Space: Without Zionism, It’ll Never Happen (1991) The Green Space is Eretz Yisra’el, the Land of Israel. . . .


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

If all movement were just a case of following the money, author and professor Arun Kundnani writes, ‘everyone in Greece would have moved to Luxembourg where they could instantly double their wages’.49 Many people can’t scrape together enough money to move, and many others might not want to move in the first place. The frenzied discussion about ‘mass migration’ ignores that the vast majority of people stay where they are or move within countries. In 2016, estimates suggested only 3.2 per cent of the world’s population were international migrants; in 1960 it was 3 per cent.50 The world’s population has grown substantially in this period, so although this amounts to more people moving, it’s not a significantly higher proportion than in the past.

Instead, most analysts focus on the hard statistics on immigration, arguing that it became such a big issue because New Labour relaxed the system too much and let too many people in. In 2009, Andrew Neather, former adviser to Tony Blair and the Home Office, gave succour to this line of argument when he wrote that Labour had an intentional policy to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’.10 An article treasured by the far right, this is taken as proof that Labour were part of an elite group colluding to change the country right under the noses of ‘ordinary’ people but without their consent. The facts seem to be on their side. Between 1993 and 2011 the number of people in the UK who were born abroad doubled from 3.8 million to over 7 million.

But these ideas about ‘difference’ and otherness, nurtured and disseminated by the New Right, still thrive in contemporary Britain, as people coming from different political traditions advocate for similar ideas. Journalist and commentator David Goodhart is one of those people. A self-described former liberal, he presents himself as a ‘straight-talker’ who is willing to challenge the left when, as he claims, it ignores peoples’ concerns about ‘mass immigration’ and the assumed threat it poses to social democracy and the welfare state. On TV, and in the pages of magazines, newspapers and two books, he’s argued that when there are too many new immigrants coming in the UK, the country’s bonds of solidarity are weakened because more diversity erodes common culture and undermines what’s needed for a cohesive society and welfare state.


pages: 177 words: 50,167

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

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

The EU had led, the platform said, to “open borders inducing relocation, unemployment, market dictatorship, destruction of public services, insecurity, poverty, and mass immigration.” The platform blamed Greece’s debt crisis on “the elites who want to feed the new Minotaur to save the Euro.” The FN demanded that France’s relationship to the EU be “renegotiated” and a referendum held on the Euro. The FN’s new program on economic nationalism became as integral to its appeal as its opposition to mass immigration. Its entire program was now subsumed under the concept of defending French sovereignty—in an echo of Chevenement and earlier de Gaulle, souveraniste was the new watchword.

Krarup’s crusade against Denmark’s immigration policies was sparked by the Danish parliament’s passage in 1983 of an Alien Act welcoming refugees who had begun pouring into Europe from the Iran-Iraq war, and who after the act began entering Denmark annually by the thousands rather than hundreds. Krarup denounced the act as “legal suicide” for allowing “the uncontrolled and unconstrained mass migration of Mohammedan and Oriental refugees [who] come through our borders.” In 1997, Krarup was invited to address the newly formed People’s Party’s convention, and in 2001, he was elected to parliament from the party and headed its immigration and naturalization committee. The People’s Party campaigns were incendiary.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

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

Until that bill comes due, immigration must be counted among a country’s “off-balance-sheet liabilities.” These liabilities are difficult to quantify. Mass immigration can help a confident, growing society undertake large projects—the settlement of the Great Plains, for instance, or the industrialization of America’s cities after the Civil War. But for a mature, settled society, mass immigration can be a poor choice, to the extent that it is a choice at all. Reagan was tasked by voters with undoing those post-1960s changes deemed unsustainable. Mass immigration was one of them, and it stands perhaps as his emblematic failure. Reagan flung open the gates to immigration while stirringly proclaiming a determination to slam them shut.

A nation too cavalier about who fit in and who didn’t was losing sight of what made it special, and would not be a nation much longer. An Alien Nation, to cite the title of Brimelow’s book, was a more likely outcome. Most historical experience would lead one to fear that the pessimists were correct. Yet the United States, faced with a comparable wave of mass migration between 1880 and 1920, had confounded similar predictions. “In fifteen of the largest cities of the United States,” the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger had warned in 1921, the foreign immigrants and their children outnumber the native whites; and by the same token alien racial elements are in the majority in thirteen of the states of the Union. . . .

Feminists wanted to integrate the Metropolitan Club, not the Elks. Steinem mocked “the house-bound matriarchs of Queens and the Bronx.” She complained that, “to top it all off, the problem of servants or child care often proves insurmountable after others are solved”—and this at a time well before mass immigration had reintroduced household servants into American upper-middle-class life. In the eyes of almost all men, women’s liberation was not just by but for such women as Steinem. It aimed at improving the position of women in white-collar work. The question of whether blue-collar work—plowing, lifting, grinding, getting dirty—was appropriate to women came up much less often than one might have anticipated.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Much has been written about China and India, in particular the sheer size of their populations, but the 60 million Chinese and 20 million Indians already living abroad who are subtly affecting their host nations are often overlooked. Instability in developing countries, brought on by environmental degradation, could send further waves of migration into Europe on a par with the movements that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The most likely areas to experience mass migration include Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, which are affected by water shortages, a decline in food production, rising sea levels and radical Islam. The impact would be seen first at the edges of these areas, but would become more problematic as borders disappear and large urban populations become ungovernable.

The key consequence of climate change — and one that politicians should worry about — is how higher temperatures, rising sea levels and increasingly severe and unpredictable weather will threaten the food security of millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of people. And remember, this isn’t just an altruistic point. If millions have their food or water supplies shut off, they will do what any sensible person would — they will move to the areas where supply is more certain. Such mass migrations would have profound implications for the stability of the entire world. Water in particular will become a serious problem over the next few years, although not in the way some people expect. It takes 11,000 liters of water to make a hamburger and 83,000 to make a medium-size family car, while the average person uses 135 liters every day (most of it wasted).

First, it means that animals are moved from one place to another more frequently. Second, people are traveling more often and faster. 234 FUTURE FILES The illness SARS (which was of animal origin) was spread by international travel. As we become more connected through cheap travel, the globalization of jobs and mass migration, we are more susceptible to new and old diseases alike. This brings us on to the issue of global pandemics. The 1918–19 flu pandemic killed somewhere in the region of 20 to 100 million people. Nobody knows for sure how many died, but the figure is almost certainly greater than the number killed during the First World War.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

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

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

In Western Europe this dominance went even further. Founded on a monoethnic basis, countries like Germany or Sweden did not recognize immigrants as true members of the nation. To an extent we often prefer to disregard, the functioning of democracy may have depended on that homogeneity. Decades of mass migration and social activism have radically transformed these societies. In North America, racial minorities are finally claiming an equal seat at the table. In Western Europe, the descendants of immigrants are starting to insist that somebody who is black or brown can be a real German or Swede. But while a part of the population accepts, or even welcomes, this change, another part feels threatened and resentful.

Its lively civil society featured critical media, strong NGOs, and one of the best universities in Central Europe. Hungarian democracy seemed to be consolidating.13 Then the trouble started. Many Hungarians felt that they were getting too small a share of the country’s economic growth. They saw their identity threatened by the prospect (though not the reality) of mass immigration. When a big corruption scandal enveloped the ruling center-left party, their discontent turned into outright disgust with the government. At parliamentary elections in 2010, Hungarian voters gave Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party a stomping majority.14 Once in office, Orbán systematically consolidated his rule.

As Alexander Hamilton and James Madison made clear in Federalist No. 63, the essence of the American Republic would consist—their emphasis—“IN THE TOTAL EXCLUSION OF THE PEOPLE, IN THEIR COLLECTIVE CAPACITY, from any share” in the government.5 It was only in the nineteenth century, as the material and political conditions of American society changed with mass immigration, westward expansion, civil war, and rapid industrialization, that a set of entrepreneurial thinkers began to dress up an ideologically self-conscious republic in the unaccustomed robes of a born-again democracy. The very same institutions that had once been designed to exclude the people from any share in the government were now commended for facilitating government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”6 But though America increasingly came to be seen as a democracy, reality lagged far behind.


pages: 427 words: 114,531

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

It is worth stressing that, in these first decades, Zionism’s critics were Jews, not gentiles. There could have been no clearer distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Emigration, settlement, regeneration The Zionist colonial project was part ideology, part movement. In its first three decades or so, the actual Zionist colonisation of Palestine was slight: the mass migration of Jews out of Europe went elsewhere. Nonetheless, by 1914 it was unwelcome enough for the resident Arab population – largely Muslim, but also Christian – to resist it and to inspire an incipient Palestinian national consciousness. The early 1880s had seen the first wave of Jewish emigrants.

He thus set out to gain approval and endorsement for Zionism, in the form of a charter, from one or more of the European powers of his day. A charter would recognise Jewish sovereignty over the designated territory and set in motion a centrally funded, irreversible, internationally sanctioned, mass migration.74 Herzl has been described as a man who combined ‘wild fantasies with an uncanny flair for practical action’.75 He was endowed with exceptional organisational talents. He had convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel. This in turn founded the World Zionist Organisation as a permanent institution that could speak for the movement.

He wrote: ‘The ultimate aim is to build up this land of Israel and restore to the Jews the political independence that has been taken from them… The Jews, with weapons in their hands if necessary, will announce with a loud voice that they are masters of their ancient homeland.’39 There is no mention here of indigenous inhabitants, Arab or otherwise; but there is no mistaking the colonial aspiration of conquest, by force if needed. Dubnow’s dramatic prophecy dates from 1882. However, only after Herzl founded the Zionist Organisation in 1897 did the prospect of a Jewish majority, through mass immigration, begin to be seriously envisaged. But not easily accomplished. Between 1882 and 1914 around 100,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine (where 20–30,000 Jews already dwelt). Over half of these, however, did not actually settle but left again.40 Jewish immigrants of the first and second aliyahs struggled, dependent on financial support from abroad.


pages: 852 words: 157,181

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

For comparison, they also used samples from Friesland and Norway ‘to look for evidence of male immigration from the continent’.20 Their British samples were carefully selected to represent stable populations from at least the time of the Domesday Book (1086).21 In his analysis, Weale wanted to explore three different population processes: simple splitting with subsequent divergence, single mass migration (analogous to the first model described above) and continuous background migration (analogous, but not identical, to the third model, since no other previous sources of migration are considered). Since none of the available mathematical methods allowed these three processes to be examined simultaneously, in their own words they ‘developed an alternative inference method that allowed [them] to explore more flexible models under a range of historical scenarios involving both background [migration] and mass migration in the presence of population splitting and growth’.

The short answer is that Herodotus, in his identification of the geographical location of the Keltoi, mistakenly thought that the Danube rose somewhere near the Pyrenees rather than in Germany (but more of that below). Celto-sceptics Some archaeologists have, over the last couple of decades, become quite red-faced about the whole issue of Celts. They warn against the dangers of racial migrationism and point to the lack of archaeological evidence for mass migrations into the British Isles during the Iron Age. They further question the relevance and meaning of Celtic ethnicity. Their reasoning is that whatever the term ‘Celt’ may have meant to the ancients, it was not based on a clearly defined language group and thus does not amount to an adequate ethnic description.3 Furthermore, they argue that classical Celts bear little relation to the modern imagined picture of the origins of Atlantic coastal Celts.

And he explains why: The use of cord decoration was well known among eastern communities extending to the steppes, while the stone battle axes were evidently copied from metal forms already well established among the copper-using communities of south-eastern Europe. In the past it was conventional to explain large-scale culture change in terms of invasions. Thus some archaeologists argued that the Corded Ware/Battle Axe ‘culture’ reflected a mass migration of warriors moving into northern Europe from the Russian steppes. Explanations of this kind are no longer in favour, and it is now generally accepted that the development is likely to have been largely indigenous, growing out of contacts between the local farming groups of the TRB (Funnel-necked Beaker) culture, the metal-using communities of the south, and pastoralists on the Pontic steppes where the domestication of the horse had taken place.120 Figure 5.11 A cult of heroes from the East.


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Immigration worldwide: policies, practices, and trends by Uma Anand Segal, Doreen Elliott, Nazneen S. Mayadas

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, centre right, conceptual framework, credit crunch, demographic transition, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Figure 1-1 presents a framework of the salient ingredients in immigration, regardless of the country of origin or destination, and presents a framework of these dimensions. Salient Factors in Home Country Conditions in Home Country When conditions in a home country are satisfactory and meet physical, social, and emotional needs, the likelihood of leaving is minimal. Economic, political, or religious turbulence can cause dissatisfaction and result in mass migrations. For example, poor economic conditions, low income, and overcrowding in the home country often force individuals to seek opportunities elsewhere. As an illustration, from 1996 and well into 2003, Indonesia evidenced a prolonged economic crisis that continued to deepen, while news reports indicated that political corruption precluded any possibility of rapid recovery.

In the Soviet period, the opposite—centripetal—trends also existed; however, the total negative migration balance between Russia and other Soviet republics in 1917–1992 was about 4 million persons. These former population movements, which were at that time internal migrations by nature, in many respects determined causes and the structure of the current mass migration exchange between Russia and so-called new foreign states (Iontsev & Magomedova, 1999; Kabuzan, 1998). ‘‘New Foreign States’’ Phenomenon The term ‘‘new foreign states’’ (blijnee zarubejie) appeared in Russia in 1992 to define the former Soviet republics that have become the newborn sovereign states (in contrast to ‘‘old foreign states’’ (dalnee zarubejie), i.e., all other countries outside the ex-USSR territory).

Slogans of ethnic superiority of indigenous populations popularized by new political leaders for their political self-establishment have resulted in the splash of ethnic intolerance and open nationalistic conflicts, as well as in ousting of ‘‘ethnically different’’ population from local labor markets, and finally in mass migration outflows to the places where these people hoped to find guaranties at least of ethnic security (Iontsev & Ivakhniouk, 2002:57). For ‘‘ethnic Russians’’ living in other ‘‘new foreign states,’’ their historical motherland, Russia, seemed a safe asylum. While some researchers use the term ‘‘repatriation’’ for return migration of Russians in the post-Soviet period, we prefer to put this term in quotes, as in fact persons who moved from their native places to other regions of the USSR during the Soviet or pre-Soviet periods were not emigrants as they participated in internal but not international migrations.


pages: 235 words: 73,873

Half In, Half Out: Prime Ministers on Europe by Andrew Adonis

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Dominic Cummings, eurozone crisis, imperial preference, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, oil shock, Suez crisis 1956

Merkel’s unilateral decision in August to open German borders to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees sparked a huge and bitter internal EU debate about burden sharing. That the UK had an opt-out from the compulsory mechanism the Commission proposed for allocating refugees to member states added to the sense that the British were semi-detached, and insulating themselves from yet another Continental crisis. For those whose crisis was one of uncontrolled mass migration of refugees from outside the EU, the British obsession with controlling free movement within it by EU citizens, felt like a sideshow. They objected even to the UK ‘migration’ nomenclature, which, for us, covered two issues that, for others, were completely different. So the appetite to spend leader time on the UK question was limited, and the mood fraught.

However, it is the third point which is perhaps most significant; there is a large ‘dog that didn’t bark’. Immigration barely featured in the 1975 referendum campaign or indeed in the entire controversy about British membership of Europe in the 1970s. Why? Partly because the ‘Europe of the Nine’ – unlike today’s ‘Europe of the Twenty-Eight’ – did not herald mass immigration. But, just as important, because there was, by the mid-1970s, little net immigration from the black Commonwealth, which might have confused the issue, as it did in 2016. And why was that? Because by 1975, black immigration into Britain had been practically halted – by none other than Harold Wilson, following Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech.

The referendum rules, OK? Not if you were Edmund Burke. Not if you were Margaret Thatcher. And why are we to do it? Because we believe that we ‘must take back control’ of our destiny, take back control in a world where most of the problems faced by individual member states, including let it be said mass immigration, can only be dealt with through international cooperation. How had we lost control of our ability to run our education system (not conspicuously well), or our health service, or our welfare service, or our steadily diminishing defence forces? The main area where we had allegedly lost control was in the creation of a genuine single market.


pages: 231 words: 71,299

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Chapter 2: The Jews 1 Adam Serwer, “The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying,” The Atlantic (May 8, 2020). https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/. 2 Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14. 3 “Pogroms,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Pogroms. 4 Bernard K. Johnpoll, “Why They Left: Russian-Jewish Mass Migration and Repressive Laws, 1881–1917,” American Jewish Archives (1995). http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1995_47_01_00_johnpoll.pdf. 5 “From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America: A Century of Immigration, 1820–1924,” The Century, New Series, vol. 88 (New York: The Century Co., 1914). https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html. 6 Michael Barkun.

Earnest also admitted that he’d “scorched a mosque in Escondido”—an arson attempt in a mosque had been reported in that city a week earlier—but it was Jews who were the focal point of his ire, in a tirade that encompassed grievances both ancient and modern. Earnest opened with the proud statement that he was a man of European ancestry, of Irish and Nordic stock. The anti-Semitism exhibited by Earnest echoes some popular white-supremacist and neo-Nazi fixations. He accused Jews of pushing mass immigration, sexual degeneracy, feminism, and race mixing. But Earnest cited his Christian faith as the justification for his alleged murderous act. He referenced Jewish persecution of Christians of old and Christians of the present—some accusations pulled from the pages of the New Testament, some from the web pages of fervent, extremist-Christian conspiracy sites.

Balliet prefaced his brief rampage with an anti-Semitic rant that echoed familiar themes. Angling his high-cheekboned face and wide green eyes toward the camera, Balliet said, “I think the Holocaust never happened. Feminism is the cause of the decline of the West which acts as a scapegoat for mass immigration. And the root of all these problems is the Jew.” Although he had trained in the German army, he did not have ready access to guns, thanks to the country’s strict gun-control laws. Instead, he had built weapons of his own, using open-source guides he’d found online; he’d constructed homemade explosives in the same fashion.


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The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

He is right: it was non-conformist denominations from the Methodists to the Salvation Army who tried to meet the challenge of urban life, while Irish immigrants brought their own Catholic faith with them. In the few areas where popular urban Toryism took root, the Church of England broadened its base. But, for the most part, those vast, echoing buildings built by the Anglicans on street corners throughout the great industrial cities as an instinctive response to mass migration from the countryside have never been filled, not even when originally built. Small wonder they look cold and uncared for over a century later, waiting to be bought up and turned into a Sikh temple or nightclub. The Reverend Lionel Espy and others like him are doing their best. But so long after the event, they have no chance at all of making up the ground lost.

I should still make the same judgements.1 The reasons for this unity are obvious enough – the country had just come though a terrible war, which had required shared sacrifice. The population of England was still relatively homogeneous, used to accepting the inconvenience of discipline and unaffected by mass immigration. It was still insular, not merely in a physical sense but because the mass media had yet to create the global village. It is the world of today’s grandparents. It is the world of Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. The young Princess Elizabeth married the naval lieutenant, Philip Mountbatten, in 1947.

Fashions in food, clothing, music and entertainment are no longer home-grown. Even those customs which remain authentically indigenous are the fruit of a greatly changed ‘English’ population. Within fifty years of the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury, disembarking 492 Jamaican immigrants, the racial complexion of the country had changed utterly. Mass immigration to Britain had been concentrated on England and most cities of any size contained areas where white people had become a rarity. In those places, talking about immigrants as ‘ethnic minorities’ was beginning to sound decidedly perverse. By 1998, it was white children who had become a minority at local-authority secondary schools in inner London and even in the suburbs they made up only 60 per cent of the secondary-school population.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

The Liberal Party was an anticommunist secession, engineered by Dubinsky, from East Harlem congressman Vito Marcantonio's American Labor Party, which, until its demise had an in 1954, excellent record of sponsoring Puerto Rican leadership. 195. See the conclusions in William Clark, "Mass Migration and Local Outcomes: International Migration to the United States Creating a New Is Urban Underclass," Urban Studies 35:3 (1998), p. 380. 196. Ramona Hernandez, Francisco Rivera-Batiz and Roberta Godini, Dominican New A Socioeconomic Profile, 1 990, Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Colum- Yorkers: bia University, New York 1995. 197.

(Activists in the Latino-majority east Valley have retaliated by threatening a subsecession of their own).^"*^ BROKEN RAINBOWS Exactly ment as some Reagan in the cities strategists had hoped, combined with Washington's unwillingness to bear a fair share of the social costs of not local government pockets the mass immigration (national fiscal comers) have exploded what remains of The old civil rights federal disinvest- coalition surplus generated by new- New Deal-era allegiances. between Blacks and Latinos, first built during the progressive campaigns of the 1940s and temporarily newed by Jesse Jackson during the 1990s.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

The free movement of people across international borders now provides the most widely available opportunity for liberating oneself and one’s family from an economically hopeless and politically oppressive environment. From this perspective, the twentieth-century revolt of the masses is therefore a thing of the past. Those who hope to defend the status quo now face a 21st-century upheaval caused not by an insurgent working class but by the mass migration into Europe of non-Westerners seeking a better life. Here is how Orbán has described the unfolding crisis: We must confront a flood of people pouring out of the countries of the Middle East, and meanwhile the depth of Africa has been set in motion. Millions of people are preparing to set out.

Millions of people are preparing to set out. Globally the desire, the urge and the pressure for people to continue their lives in some place other than where they began them is increasing. This is one of history’s largest tides of people, and it brings with it the danger of tragic consequences. It is a modern-day global mass migration, which we cannot see the end of: economic migrants hoping for a better life, refugees and drifting masses mixed up together. This is an uncontrolled and unregulated process, and . . . the most precise definition of this is ‘invasion’.28 Blown out of proportion by Orbán, the northward population flow is not being instigated or steered by organized revolutionary parties.

His most ardent supporters are intuitively sceptical of the Reagan-era picture of America as an imitation-worthy ‘shining city on a hill’, sensing correctly that Reagan used the image to reiterate that America was ‘still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom’, which for populists includes non-white immigrants from south of the border scrambling to displace and dispossess white Americans.76 Anti-immigrant politics is highly emotional because mass immigration, whether real or fictional, threatens to wash away the last remnants of an imagined community that, for historically contingent reasons, is already coming unstitched. This analysis assumes that identity is experienced most vividly in feelings aroused by perceptions of otherness and belonging.


pages: 877 words: 182,093

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism, pp. 49–50. 75. Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times, pp. 254–259. 76. Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), p. 170; Laura Randall, An Economic History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 116. 77. Mark Jefferson, Peopling the Argentine Pampa, p. 76. 78. Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), p. 178. 79.

Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism, p. 63. 96. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, translated by Richard Mayne (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 440. 97. Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), pp. 171–172. 98. Fred C. Koch, The Volga Germans, pp. 231–232; M.G. and E.T. Mulhall, Handbook of Brazil (Buenos Ayres, 1877), pp. 148–149. 99. See, for example, Gino Germani, “Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development, Volume 2, Issue 11 (November 1966), pp. 173–174; Eric N.

In Georgia that same year, no more than half the black adult population had reached the third grade.18 At that time, only 19 percent of black children of high school age in the South actually went to high school.19 It was 1924 before the first permanent public high school for black children in Atlanta was built,20 after years of campaigns for such a school by the local black community. As of 1940, 87 percent of black families in the United States lived below the poverty line. But this declined to 47 percent by 1960, as black education and urban job experience increased in the wake of the mass migrations of blacks out of the South. This 40 percentage point drop in the black poverty rate occurred prior to both the civil rights laws and the “war on poverty” social welfare programs of the 1960s. Over the next 20 years, from 1960 to 1980, the black poverty rate dropped an additional 18 points21— significant, but the continuation of a preexisting trend at a slower pace, rather than being a new result from new civil rights laws and welfare state policies, as so often claimed.


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Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Scapegoating foreigners for domestic problems real or imagined is something of an American tradition. Any student of history knows that the complaints and criticisms lodged against today’s Latinos were thrown at previous immigrant groups. But how easily some of us forget. Ireland was the source country of the first mass migration to the United States. The Irish flooded America in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly the cities. In 1850, more than a quarter of New York City’s residents were born in Ireland. Throughout the 1800s, the United States absorbed Irish newcomers at more than double the rate of current Mexican immigration.

An Urban Institute study of immigration’s impact on Southern California in the 1970s—a period of high unemployment nationwide, remember—reached a similar conclusion. “To what extent did the influx of immigrants entering Southern California in the 1970s reduce the jobs available to nonimmigrant workers?” wrote Thomas Muller, the study’s author. “The answer for the 1970s is little if at all,” he concluded. “Despite mass immigration to Southern California, unemployment rates rose less rapidly than in the remainder of the nation.” Muller also found that labor-force participation rates among natives seemed to be unaffected, and “the participation rate for both blacks and whites was higher in Southern California [where the bulk of immigrants settled] than elsewhere in the state and the nation.”


pages: 965 words: 267,053

A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, business cycle, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the market place, éminence grise

The Bilu members, who had set up a central office in Constantinople, waited therefore in vain for a firman (official permit) to establish a series of settlements in Palestine which would create the basis for mass immigration. The Turkish government put many obstacles in their way, and in 1893 banned altogether the immigration of Russian Jews into Palestine and the purchase of land. These orders were frequently circumvented by registering the land that was bought in the name of Jews from western Europe and by distributing baksheesh among the local administration. In this way a few settlements were established, but these were hardly the conditions envisaged by Pinsker for mass immigration, let alone the establishment of a Jewish state. Among the first agricultural settlements established during that period were Zikhron Ya’akov, south of Haifa, and Rosh Pina, built by new immigrants from Rumania.

For many years he continued to submit detailed programmes for mass immigration, all of them ignored by the experts or treated with disdain. In retrospect, however, Trietsch’s arguments seem weightier than most of his contemporaries were ready to acknowledge: he advocated intensive agriculture in contrast to the advice given by most other experts at the time. Moreover, in view of the lack of agricultural experience among the Jews as well as other obstacles, he insisted on the paramount importance of developing industry for the absorption of mass immigration. Whereas Ruppin and the other experts thought that an investment of £1,000-£1,500 was needed for the absorption of one family, Trietsch argued that since funds of such magnitude would never be available, they should develop cheaper methods of settlement.

Towards the end of his speech Ruppin made yet another point in justification of ‘practical Zionism’ which had never been made so clearly: ‘For a long time to come our progress in Palestine will depend entirely on the progress of our movement in the diaspora.’* This was a far cry from the early visions of Herzl and Nordau, the idea that there would be a wave of mass migration resulting in the establishment of a Jewish state, and that thereafter the state would be in a position to solve the Jewish question. Ruppin was not a great orator, but his case was forceful and convincing and he got a big ovation. Compared to other Zionist leaders his background was unconventional.


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

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

Islam is also a major theme of the American libertarian right, encompassing online commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Gavin McInnes and Mike Cernovich. Ethno-demographic change is becoming more openly discussed in mainstream right intellectual circles. Christopher Caldwell, a columnist for the Weekly Standard and Financial Times, argues that Europe would not be the same civilization without European people. Mass migration is altering its fundamental essence.99 Thilo Sarrazin, a German Social Democratic politician and ex-central banker, penned his Germany Does Away With Itself (2010), which became a runaway bestseller, notching up sales of 1.5 million in its first year. He argues that low German birth rates coupled with non-European immigration is leading to the decline of the ethnic German population.

Michael Lind, former editor of the neoconservative Public Interest and Harvard professor Samuel Huntington operated between the neocon and paleocon positions. Lind’s Next American Nation (1995) mounted a stinging critique of the American elite’s universalist individualism. In the book, Lind offered a groundbreaking attack on ‘mass immigration’ as a policy which both right- and left-wing American elites favoured but which was opposed by working-class Americans of all races. John Judis endorsed this view, accusing the neoconservative right of fetishizing a free-market ideology which appealed to few ordinary Americans.57 Huntington, in his final book, Who Are We?

The third individual was Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, who ran in the 2008 Republican primary on a hardline anti-immigration ticket, winning 5 per cent support before pledging his support to Mitt Romney. Tancredo founded and led from 1999 to 2007 the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, which worked closely with FAIR to advance the anti-immigration agenda. In 2001, he sponsored a proposed moratorium on immigration entitled the Mass Immigration Reduction Act which called for immigration to be restricted for a period of five years to the spouses and children of American citizens. Though unsuccessful, it signalled a new assertiveness within the restrictionist movement. FEDERAL IMMIGRATION BATTLES, 2005–2014 A chronically gridlocked Congress made it difficult for federal legislation on border enforcement or the fate of undocumented immigrants to pass – a vacuum increasingly filled by local and state IIROs.


pages: 241 words: 90,538

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945 by Pat Thane

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gender pay gap, longitudinal study, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, old-boy network, pensions crisis, Russell Brand, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Religious diversity was tolerated, 56 U N E Q UA L B R I TA I N alongside an understanding that Britain remained a Christian country with a dominant established church. The history of multi-faith Britain is inextricably connected with the history of immigration (see Chapter 2). Britain’s indigenous Catholic population was small in the 1830s and it was only mass migration from Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century that re-established Catholicism as a fixed presence on the British mainland. Similarly, the integration and acceptance of Anglo-Jewry is linked to the growth of Britain’s Jewish population. Between the 1880s and 1914, some 100,000 Jews escaping from persecution in Eastern Europe migrated chiefly to the East End of London, as well as establishing smaller communities in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Scotland.

The following comment from columnist Peregrine Worsthorne, published in the Sunday Telegraph in 1991, suggests: Islam, once a great civilization worthy of being argued with . . . has degenerated into a primitive enemy fit only to be sensitively subjugated . . . If they want jihad, let them have it . . . [Islam,] once a moral force, has long been corrupted by variations of the European heresies, fascism and communism – a poisonous concoction threatening seepage back into Europe through mass migration.18 The first Gulf War (1990–1) caused further problems for British Muslims, now defined by some as ‘the enemy within’. During the war, West Yorkshire police noted a 100 per cent rise in racist attacks in Bradford. The classifying of such attacks as ‘racist’ rather than ‘anti-religious’ further demonstrated an unwillingness by public institutions to recognize British Muslim identity.19 The introduction of a question concerning ethnic origin in the 1991 Census was further testimony to a lack of understanding within Whitehall of the predominance of religious identity over ethnic identity within the Muslim community.

Sixty-four per cent of these were offences against Catholics and 31 per cent were against Protestants, with many of them occurring at football matches where historic sectarian rivalry between Glasgow’s (Catholic) Celtic and (Protestant) Rangers remains strong.10 1950s AND 1960s: IMMIGRATION AND CHANGE Mass immigration from the former Empire during the 1950s and 1960s transformed Britain (in demographic terms) into a multi-faith society (see Chapter 2). Numbers are imprecise, as immigration statistics were not calculated on the basis of religion, but by 1980, Britain’s Hindu and Muslim populations are estimated to have more than doubled to 120,000 and 600,000 respectively (see Table 3.3).


pages: 869 words: 239,167

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

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

Mobility levels, already substantial in different parts of Eurasia in the early modern period, as we have seen in Chapter 5, doubled in the second half of the nineteenth century and even tripled by comparison in the first half of the twentieth century, only to drop substantially later.156 This may not come as a surprise if we think of the well-known mass migrations from Europe to the Americas, especially from the 1840s, once steamships diminished transportation costs and risks. However, equally important were the not-so-well-known migration flows of ‘coolies’ from South Asia and the colonization of Manchuria. In East Asia, mass migrations became possible after the opening-up of China, Japan and Korea. To these three waves of permanent mass migration and many more minor ones we must still add the temporal (at least for the survivors) multi-annual mass migrations of soldiers, mostly drafted since the French Revolution.

Farben settling in Auschwitz, or Siemens in Ravensbrück.55 In the aftermath of the Second World War and following their own civil war, the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. The Party faced similar problems to those experienced by its Russian sister party thirty years before. In China, however, there was an even shorter ‘honeymoon’ period, of no more than five years, after which the state rapidly introduced a rigid policy of labour allocation, ending the mass migrations of the previous century that had been based on individual or household-level decisions. This policy had two faces: the immobilization of the bulk of the population at the place where they lived; and, simultaneously, the forced reallocation of workers.56 In 1955, the well-known hukou (household registration) system was implemented, a combination of the centuries-old Chinese family registers and – through Russian advisors – of the Soviet workbook system.

The masters were the noble tribes of camel herders, also involved in the caravan trade and the slave trade; below them, vassal tribes of small stock herders; lower still, a semi-serf agricultural population; and, at the bottom of the pile, slaves used as herdsmen.42 In all these cases, the question for the millennia and centuries that we are discussing here is not whether systematic violence was involved in mass immigrations of pastoral herdsmen – that was unequivocal – but whether the labour relations of the vast majority of the population of, so far, reasonably independent farming households – whether or not they were specialists in arable farming or livestock breeding – had already changed substantially by then.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

But a secondary purpose is to consider the global ‘scattering’ and impact of Scottish religious and secular ideas, borne to several overseas countries by the emigrants and leaving a deep mark there, as well as commodities and funding exported from Scotland itself. Scottish overseas investment and capital goods production were often basic to the economic transformation of the new lands in the Victorian era and without which mass migration and settlement there would have been much diminished. These factors are therefore seen as an integral part of the history of diaspora as a whole. Viewed from this perspective, the Scots, in the same way as the Jews, the Irish, Chinese, Palestinians and others, can be rightly considered a diasporic people.

They come to see the battlefields and ‘clanscapes’ associated with Jacobitism and Jacobite-induced exile. For such pilgrims the Field of Culloden is above all else a sacred place, where the destruction of clanship is seen to have led directly to the displacement of the Clearances and then, inevitably, to the mass migrations of which they are the descendants.43 Key sources for this understanding of the Scottish past are the books of John Prebble, who is still by far the most influential and widely read writer on Scottish history among the Scottish-American diaspora, closely followed by the historical novelist Nigel Tranter and, more recently, the American fantasy writer Diana Gabaldon, whose Outlander series of books recounts time travel between the 1940s and the era of the Jacobite Risings.

The depression of the 1920s hit Scotland hard. 14. Emigrants waiting for transport across the Atlantic at the Broomielaw, Clydeside. In the 1920s Scotland topped the league table of European emigration. 15. On boat to New Zealand. The development of New Zealand, like that of Canada, was profoundly influenced by mass immigration from Scotland. 16. The Hercules carried several hundred destitute emigrants from the Hebrides to Australia in 1852. The voyage was notorious for the large numbers of deaths on board caused by typhus and smallpox. 17. The ruins of Shiaba township, Isle of Mull. The people were mainly cleared in 1847 and ‘emigrated’ by the Duke of Argyll to Canada. 18.


pages: 318 words: 82,452

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

In fact, in many ways it strengthened it, giving rise to new economic sectors, revitalizing long-abandoned urban neighborhoods, and better integrating the US into the global economy. When the EU lowered its internal borders, there were fears that organized crime would benefit, local cultures would be undermined, that mass migration would create economic chaos as poorer southern Europeans moved north. None of this happened. In fact, migration decreased as the EU began developing poorer areas within Europe as a way of producing greater economic and social stability. We could do the same thing in North America, but instead have largely done the opposite.

Small informal units were mobilized to limit unauthorized entry of Chinese immigrants, mostly along California’s border with Mexico. The only restrictions on white immigration during this period banned those who were criminals, infirm, or politically radical. Anarchists were specifically banned in 1903, with Italians targeted for particular scrutiny. With the rise of mass immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came growing nativist resentment. Throughout this period, groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Party organized around ideas of racial purity, cultural superiority, and religious prejudice to demand an end to open immigration.


pages: 279 words: 90,888

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Events touching on foreign affairs came and went without eliciting more than transient attention with respect to their causes and contexts in the Middle East or Africa – or, indeed, the rest of Europe. As Brexit fever raged, a posse of ex-diplomats spoke up about the UK’s ‘weakened standing in the world [and] threats to national security and loss of influence’. They were preaching to deaf ears. The very possibility of Brexit sprang from a retreat from the world and its problems – mass migration across the Mediterranean, Russian pressure, Isis, Chinese hacking. Reaction to the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury was oddly muted in both right-wing media and among the public. Even aggression in a cathedral city in the heartlands failed to provoke an outwards-directed, adult response – which might, among other things, have raised questions about the capacity of the UK to deal with Russia alone.

It was the interplay of belief and ideas with the practical conditions of life (often comfortable and moneyed) that made the phenomenon. Substantial numbers of leavers were well enough off, reasonably well educated and lived in the south of England. Resentment, unease and frustration at changed local and social circumstances had swirled through the interviews we did in 2009 and 2010. Mass immigration had been mishandled (by successive governments) and was an electoral accident waiting to happen. ‘Well, it’s not quite as simple as that,’ said Ken Clarke, the Tory remainer, when asked what he would say to leavers. Brexit ‘isn’t going to make the faintest difference to most of the things that so annoy you.


pages: 282 words: 89,266

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

Or would our liberty, security and prosperity be better assured by submitting to an elected Bullingdon bureaucracy here at home, accepting the will of demonstrably unaccountable politicians and linking our destiny with that of a sclerotic Eurosceptic camp that tries to achieve the impossible by uniting personalities as diverse as Theresa May, former UKIP hat-wearer Winston McKenzie and Michael Caine? Whom wilst spakey for England? Who for England wilst spakey? Were we to be a self-governing nation, free in this age of mass migration to opt out of the attempts of the wider European community to co-operate to solve the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, strike trade agreements with tyrannical dictatorships whenever we choose and dismiss codes of practice regarding environmental safeguards, pollution and human rights if they displease us, like some pusillanimous ostrich, sticking its stupid head into the rapidly dissipating sands of time?

The below-the-line comments on my piece in the Observer were the usual litany of false victimhood: “You don’t have to do much to incur the wrath of SL and the other guardian’s of the new etiquette of the middle classes, namely ‘PC’. Expressing any nationalist sentiments whatsoever and opposing on-going mass immigration will more than suffice. The unfairness and imbalance that the guardians insist on with their enforced privileges for their chosen minorities is clear to see. Likening the humble UKIP members to ‘apes’ is presented here as clever, satirical and amusing. Suggesting that certain other chosen privileged minorities are like ‘monkeys’ on the football pitch will land you in jail.”


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

‘It is traditional that British subjects, whether of Dominion or Colonial origin (and of whatever race or colour), should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom,’ Attlee continued. ‘That tradition is not, in my view, to be lightly discarded, particularly at a time when we are importing foreign labour in large numbers.’ The arrival of the Empire Windrush became the symbolic starting point for mass migration of Commonwealth citizens to the United Kingdom, but it also fundamentally changed the politics of immigration. From the moment those nervous but eager Jamaicans stepped ashore, the alien threat – privately at least – became less about economics and more about the colour of people’s skin. Front of house, post-war Britain was anxious to appear honourable, generous and loyal.

Labour had been so timid about discussing immigration that it almost forgot to mention how its open door policy had seen the number of foreigners coming to live in the UK more than double since it took office: from 224,000 in 1996 to 494,000 in 2004. Later, government insider Andrew Neather would claim that there had been a political purpose in using mass immigration to make the UK multicultural. An advisor to the Prime Minister and Home Secretary, Neather let slip how ministers understood the conservatism of their core voters and, while they might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, ‘it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.’


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Fogarty examined 141 communities that arose between 1860 and 1914, including mystical Shalam in New Mexico, free-love Spirit Fruit in Ohio and Illinois, all-female Women’s Commonwealth in Texas, and socialist, then anarchist, Equality in Washington state. To varying degrees all were inspired by the Book of Revelations’ injunction to “make all things new” and were self-conscious about their need for journeying elsewhere in America or abroad (usually Palestine) to do so. As such they both reflected and took to extremes the mass migrations and frontier extensions of other, non-utopian Americans of their day. Contrary to stereotypes, some of these 141 utopias were conservative, not radical—for example, rejecting the growing calls for class action in favor of older ideals of the common good. Certain communities were even “anti-modernist” in various respects.

The identification between America as a distinctive social collection and its idyllic crusade for nationwide coherence and homogeneity collapsed in the decade following the Civil War. Obviously the war undermined national unity for decades to come. But the growing nation was becoming fractionalized in other ways and for other reasons. Mass immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, more than any other factor, resulted in an increasingly diverse The American Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics 77 America that, unlike in contemporary times, was lamented more than celebrated. Unlike their mid-nineteenth-century counterparts, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans routinely made firm, fixed, and critical distinctions between peoples, places, and things.


pages: 632 words: 171,827

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

In the middle of a great square was the splendid Peace Palace, where international congresses of peace-lovers and scientists were held, for Jerusalem was now a home for all the best strivings of the human spirit: for Faith, Love, Knowledge.40 Nor was it only Jerusalem that had been repaired. The creation of a Jewish homeland had solved the problem of Jews in Europe, no less: Dr. Walter . . . launched on a description of the effects of Jewish mass migration upon the Jews who had remained in Europe. He was bound to say for himself, it had always been clear to him that Zionism was bound to be as salutary for the Jews who remained in Europe as for those who emigrated.41 IT WAS A BOLD DREAM, and a fanciful one in many ways. But it quickly became exceedingly practical, as well.

Yosef, Rabbi Ovadia—A legal genius and popular rabbi to Israel’s Mizrachim, Rabbi Ovadia, upon completing his tenure as the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, formed the Shas Party, the first political party representing Mizrachim. Zangwill, Israel—A novelist and playwright, Zangwill was a Zionist thinker who described Palestine as a “land without a people, waiting for a people without a land.” Zangwill, like Herzl, believed that a mass migration of Jews from Europe to Palestine would serve both Jews and Palestine. Appendix B GLOSSARY OF NON-ENGLISH TERMS aliyah—From the Hebrew verb “to go up,” aliyah is used to refer to people moving to Israel. It is also used to describe a wave of immigration to Palestine or Israel, as in the First Aliyah or the Russian Aliyah.

So, too, did protests and demonstrations, and no small number of intrepid American Jews who applied for and received visas to visit Russia and used their visits there to take books, music, and other educational and religious items to bolster the spirits and deepen the education of the repressed community. Slowly, the gates opened. In 1970, 992 immigrants to Israel came from the Soviet Union. By 1980, that number was 7,570. In 1990, it was 185,227. By the time the mass immigration had subsided, shortly after 2000, some one million Soviet Jews had made their way to the Jewish state, changing its character dramatically. Like many who had come before them, Soviet immigrants often arrived with little money and needed significant support upon arrival. Many who had been highly trained in the Soviet Union had to settle for menial jobs in the competitive Israeli job market.


pages: 372 words: 110,208

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, carbon credits, Easter island, European colonialism, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, mass immigration, meta-analysis, new economy, out of africa, phenotype, Scientific racism, sparse data, supervolcano, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade

Chapter 5, “The Making of Modern Europe,” explains how Europeans today descend from three highly divergent populations, which came together over the last nine thousand years in a way that archaeologists never anticipated before ancient DNA became available. Chapter 6, “The Collision That Formed India,” explains how the formation of South Asian populations parallels that of Europeans. In both cases, a mass migration of farmers from the Near East after nine thousand years ago mixed with previously established hunter-gatherers, and then a second mass migration from the Eurasian steppe after five thousand years ago brought a different kind of ancestry and probably Indo-European languages as well. Chapter 7, “In Search of Native American Ancestors,” shows how the analysis of modern and ancient DNA has demonstrated that Native American populations prior to the arrival of Europeans derive ancestry from multiple major pulses of migration from Asia.

The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-European-speaking Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture, has been shattered by the finding that the people who used these artifacts came from a mass migration from the Russian steppe, a place that German nationalists would have despised as a source.49 The Hindutva ideology that there was no major contribution to Indian culture from migrants from outside South Asia is undermined by the fact that approximately half of the ancestry of Indians today is derived from multiple waves of mass migration from Iran and the Eurasian steppe within the last five thousand years.50 Similarly, the idea that the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi have ancestry from West Eurasian farmers that Hutus do not—an idea that has been incorporated into arguments for genocide51—is nonsense.

With such data, it is possible to reconstruct population changes in exquisite detail, transforming our understanding of the past. By the end of 2015, my ancient DNA laboratory at Harvard had published more than half of the world’s genome-wide human ancient DNA. We discovered that the population of northern Europe was largely replaced by a mass migration from the eastern European steppe after five thousand years ago18; that farming developed in the Near East more than ten thousand years ago among multiple highly differentiated human populations that then expanded in all directions and mixed with each other along with the spread of agriculture19; and that the first human migrants into the remote Pacific islands beginning around three thousand years ago were not the sole ancestors of the present-day inhabitants.20 In parallel, I initiated a project to survey the diversity of the world’s present-day populations, using a microchip for analyzing human variation that my collaborators and I designed specifically for the purpose of studying the human past.


pages: 105 words: 18,832

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

Moreover, the scientists who best understood the problem were ham-strung by their own cultural practices, which demanded an excessively stringent standard for accepting claims of any x i n t r o d u C t i o n kind—even those involving imminent threats. Here, our future historian, living in the Second People’s Republic of China, recounts the events of the Period of the Penumbra (1988–2093) that led to the Great Collapse and Mass Migration (2073–2093). The Collapse of WesTern CivilizaTion The nation formerly known as the Netherlands Once referred to as the “Low Countries” of Europe, much of the land area of this nation had been reclaimed from the sea by extensive human effort from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Stil , sea level had risen only 9 to 15 centimeters around the globe, and coastal populations were mainly intact. Then, in the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heat waves scorched the planet, destroying food crops around the globe. Panic ensued, with food riots in virtually every major city. Mass migration of undernourished and dehydrated individuals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never before seen. Surging insect populations also destroyed huge swaths of forests in Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil.

While governments were straining to maintain order and provide for their people, leaders in Switzerland and India—two countries that were rapidly losing substantial portions of their glacially-sourced water resources— convened the First International Emergency Summit on Climate Change, organized under the rubric of Unified Mass migration of undernour- Nations for Climate Pro- ished and dehydrated indi- tection (the former United viduals, coupled with explosive increases in insect populations, Nations having been disled to widespread outbreaks credited and disbanded over of typhus, cholera, dengue the failure of the UNFCCC).


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

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

Indeed much of what I call the ‘great liberalisation’ of the past forty years in attitudes to race, gender and sexuality (see the next chapter) has been absorbed and accepted by the majority of Somewheres. But compared with Anywheres the acceptance has been more selective and tentative and has not extended to enthusiasm for mass immigration or European integration. Somewheres are seldom anti-immigrant but invariably anti-mass immigration. They still believe that there is such a thing as Society. The 1960s were not just about challenging traditional ideas and hierarchies—they also marked a further dismantling of the stable, ordered society in which roles were clearly ordained.

It is true that the effect on jobs and wages, even at the bottom end, is less negative than many people assume—and employment rates in 2016 were at an all time high for the British born. But mass immigration is still somewhat regressive (and would have been more so in recent years without the minimum wage) and there is not a strikingly positive economic story for the existing population on wages, employment or growth per capita either. On fiscal contribution, EU immigrants are mainly slightly positive because the vast majority are of working age and have come to work, but taking immigration as a whole in recent decades the fiscal contribution of newcomers is slightly negative.10 (Economists are overwhelmingly pro-mass immigration but are far better at combating negative assumptions than providing a positive case, see the more detailed discussion of the economics of immigration in my book The British Dream.)11 It is a different story for employers who have been able to sharply cut their training bills in recent years, and replace the sulky, poorly educated local teenager with, say, a keen-as-mustard Latvian graduate who speaks excellent English.

The Immigration Story How, then, with no strong economic rationale and the opposition of a clear majority of the country did we become a country of mass immigration in the last twenty years? Having absorbed, not without friction, the post-colonial wave in the decades after the 1950s, Britain in the mid-1990s had become a multiracial society with an immigrant and settled minority population of around 4 million, or about 7 per cent. Britain was not at that stage a mass immigration society with persistently large inflows. Today it is. About 18 per cent of today’s working age population was born abroad and in the past generation Britain’s immigrant and minority population (including the white non-British) has trebled to about 12 million, or over 20 per cent (25 per cent in England).15 Some of this is an open society success story—consider the increasingly successful minority middle class.16 But to many people the change is simply too rapid, symbolised by the fact that many of our largest towns, including London, Birmingham and Manchester—where more than half the minority population live—are now at or close to majority–minority status.


pages: 484 words: 120,507

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

Africa and Brazil saw some take-up of Portuguese creoles, mostly among slaves. But the spread of Portuguese to Brazil—by now far the most populous speech community that it has—only began in earnest in the late seventeenth century, when discoveries of gold and precious metals, and the opening up of the interior to economic development, caused mass migration from Portugal itself. Once it was known that there were fortunes to be made in Brazil, European settlement, and hence the spread of Portuguese, took off . In general, then, these world languages with less than 40 percent lingua-franca use are languages that have grown through gradual immigration, a process which acts mainly to create larger mother tongue communities rather than lingua-francas, although inevitably in a multilingual environment some bilingualism and recruitment of speakers of other languages will occur.

This has applied not just to the major western empires of France and Great Britain, but also to smaller (or older) colonial powers such as the Netherlands and Spain, and even (since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991) from the states of Central Asia to Russia. Moreover, this is not just an effect of the twilight of Empire. Similar trends have affected powers that did not have relevant ex-imperial territories: these notably include the mass immigration of Turks into Germany (long characterized as Gastarbeiter ‘guest-workers’, though large numbers have eventually taken up residence), and of Latin Americans into the USA (much of the latter clandestine—hence the term mojados ‘wetbacks’, suggesting informal crossing of the Rio Grande). Most recently (especially in the last decade) additional flows of “asylum seekers” have left the war-troubled countries of the Balkans, Middle East, Africa, and South Asia for quieter and richer lands, usually in Europe or North America.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

The Guardian in the United Kingdom reported in March 2019 on an online survey of nearly 40,000 students that found very high levels of anxiety and thoughts of self-harm, with fully one-third saying they had experienced a serious psychological issue for which they needed help.52 Every autumn 1.5 million British teenagers take part in a mass migration—leaving home to go to university—dividing the country into a residential university class of mobile, professional people and a more rooted nongraduate group. This has surely exacerbated the country’s value and social divisions—and anti-London feeling—revealed in the Brexit vote. Mass residential higher education remains a very British phenomenon, and even more so in England than in Scotland; it is less common in continental Europe and the United States, although the trend is for it to decrease somewhat in Britain—partly because of more students from less mobile low-income and ethnic minority backgrounds—and increase in the rest of the rich world.

(See Chapter Eight.) There is some potential for the use of smart technologies in elderly care, with more remote monitoring and so on (and this could draw more men into the sector). But most caring jobs cannot easily be automated or performed by machines. Even in aging Japan, with its antipathy to mass immigration, Filipino caregivers are preferred to robots and are gradually being welcomed in larger numbers. The rise of cognitive-analytical ability—Head work—as a measure of economic and social success, combined with the hegemony of cognitive-class political interests, has led to the current great unbalancing of Western politics.


The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

As the petroleum age winds down, many nations with large populations, limited resources and strong maritime traditions will have few options other than mass migration by sea. Consider the situation of Japan: close to 150 million Japanese now live on a crowded skein of islands with little arable land and no fossil fuels at all, supported by trade links made possible only by abundant energy resources elsewhere. As fossil fuel production declines, industrial agriculture and food imports both will become problematic, and over the long term the Japanese population will have to contract to something like the small fraction of today’s figures the Japanese islands supported in the past. Mass migration is nearly the only option for the rest of the population.

The possibility that twenty million Japanese “boat people” could follow the Pacific currents to the west coast of North America by 2075 or so, or that millions of Indonesians might head for the northern shores of Australia for the same reason, has not yet become a part of our collective discourse about the future. Our unwillingness to grapple with the likelihood of mass migrations in the wake of the industrial age, however, will do nothing to make the impacts of population shifts easier to face. culture death The political and social landscape of the industrial world may not need mass migration to face dramatic change, however. The industrial age has also been the age of the nation-state. In a cascade of change that began a century before the industrial revolution, ­nation-​ A Short History of the Future states defined themselves on two fronts: against both local loyalties and the transnational community of Christendom.

Sprawling Sun Belt cities with little water and no resources will shrivel and die as the energy that keeps them going sputters and goes out, and tourist communities across the continent will pop like bubbles and become ghost towns once travel becomes a luxury, while Rust Belt towns struggling for survival today will likely find a new lease on life when adequate rain, workable soil and access to waterborne transport become the keys to prosperity, as they were in the early 19th century. völkerwanderung What is less certain is whether it will be the descendants of today’s Americans or some other peoples who will populate the renewed Rust Belt towns and salvage valuable metal scrap from the crumbling ruins of today’s Sun Belt cities. Mass migration is already a fact of life throughout the contemporary world, and the twilight of cheap energy promises to shift this into overdrive. It’s common today to think of nations as a fixed reality with which historical changes have to deal, but this is far from true. Even in periods of relative stability, populations move, cultures relocate and nations flow, fuse and break apart like grease on a hot skillet.


Immigration and Ethnic Formation in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of the 1990s Immigrants From the Former Soviet Union in Israel by Majid Al Haj

demographic transition, ghettoisation, job satisfaction, mass immigration, phenotype, profit motive, zero-sum game

This debate was spearheaded by the religious parties, in the wake of the considerable number of such cases in the first wave of mass immigration from Europe (ibid.). These parties also demanded a definition of “who is a Jew” before the Law of Return could be enacted. In the end, however, a compromise was 40   reached and the law was passed without reference to what remains a controversial issue to the present day (Hacohen 1998: 85). The movement’s attitude toward large-scale immigration by nonEuropean Jews has been always ambivalent and to some extent even projectionist (Gilbar 1998). This was very obvious in the discussions of mass immigration from Arab and Islamic countries toward the end of the Second World War.

These issues are analyzed in light of the economic, political, and ideological changes that have taken place in Israel during the past decade, including developments in the peace process and the deterioration in Israeli-Palestinian relations since October 2000. The following questions are addressed: What are the implications of mass immigration for a deeply divided society that is coping with both internal conflicts (the result of internal cleavages) and external (territorial-national) conflict? What are the main factors affecting ethnic formation, ethnic identity, and ethnic cohesiveness among these immigrants? What forms of political organization and behavior exist among immigrants?

What are the attitudes and social relationships between “Russian” immigrants and the various groups in Israeli society? What are the implications of this wave for the social and ethnonational structure of Israel? Will this influx of immigrants from the FSU enhance multiculturalism and civil society in Israel or deepen its ethno-national character? The study was conducted ten years after the start of the mass immigration from the FSU. As such, it provides an outstanding opportunity for a comparative analysis and re-evaluation of the conclusions in the existing literature about Russian immigrants (for example, the widespread conclusion that the manifestation of Russian-ethnic identity among immigrants is only a transitional phenomenon that may be expected to diminish and disappear after the immigrants master the Hebrew language and overcome the immediate difficulties of settlement and adjustment).


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

If you change “asteroid” to “rising sea levels,” “year-round wildfires,” or “extreme heat incompatible with human life,” you can increase the probability of this scenario from one in twenty thousand to closer to one in two. Yet even with this much higher degree of scientific certainty, humanity is not acting very quickly to plan for a safe, peaceful, and equitable mass migration. This is a topic we’ll return to later in this book, because there is an urgent need for creative thinking around how to handle large-scale climate relocation. The United Nations currently estimates that between 150 million people and 1 billion people will be faced with the question of whether to stay in their homes and continue trying to defend their land from climate threats or become climate migrants.5 Low-lying cities like Miami, New Orleans, Copenhagen, and Shanghai could disappear as sea levels rise.

Large portions of northern Africa, the Middle East, northern South America, South Asia, and parts of Australia would be so hot as to be “incompatible with human life,” according to a 2020 study prepared by an international research team of archaeologists, ecologists, and climate scientists. We all should start to pre-feel and pre-experience a mass migration event in our own communities, so we can start to prepare for an event exponentially bigger than the migration and refugee crises we are already experiencing today. You may have noticed that the asteroid scenario sounds more like the premise for a Hollywood blockbuster than a long-term climate forecast.

Try to have a bit of balance in your list—at least one of the forces you pick should feel like a risk to you, and at least one should feel like an opportunity: the climate crisis post-pandemic trauma social justice movements increasing economic inequality social and political tensions caused by refugee crises and mass migration automation of work decreasing birthrates in Western countries and a “youth boom” in Africa shifting religious majorities and increasing theological diversity the global switch to renewable energy sources alternatives to capitalism and market-based economies social media–driven misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories rise of authoritarianism and loss of faith in democracy widespread adoption of facial recognition and surveillance technologies digital currencies, cryptocurrency, and programmable money universal basic income and direct cash transfers internet shutdowns mandated by government or law enforcement the “right to disconnect” movement and four-day workweeks lifelong learning and “reskilling” at the workplace job guarantees regenerative design and the circular economy genomic research and CRISPR genetic modification the Internet of Things augmented and virtual reality satellite networks and space internet If there’s something on the institute’s list above that you don’t know anything about at all, this is the perfect opportunity to go find your first clue.


pages: 502 words: 128,126

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

The chapter ends with an image of Britain’s contribution to the EU Border Force on the Greek island of Lesbos and asks: how did it come to this? How did we come to think that sending a warship to the tiny Greek island of Lesbos was an appropriate response to families fleeing Syria to seek asylum? Who might have wanted such a picture to be broadcast? In whose interests was it to make it appear as if the UK was under threat from mass migration of people with darker skins or different religions? CHAPTER 3: FROM EMPIRE TO COMMONWEALTH Chapter 3 looks at some of the beliefs and myths underlying British imperialism, which from the mid-nineteenth century onwards were bound up with social Darwinism – beliefs that the white Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ was superior to all other races and peoples, and that hierarchies could be constructed of inherently superior and inferior groups of people.

The men who came from the colonies to fight in the First World War were firmly told after the war to go home like good little children. Attitudes changed during the 1920s and 1930s. To accommodate Poles unwilling to return to Poland, Great Britain enacted the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, the UK’s first mass immigration law for people not from the empire. It offered citizenship to around 200,000. The Second World War was only won due to the intervention of others: not only the Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, and (especially) the Russians, but also the Poles, people from the Caribbean, those from British colonies in Africa, Indians, and especially the Gurkhas, who were later denied rights of settlement and pensions, until the actor Joanna Lumley took up their case with her cry of ‘Ayo Gorkhali!’


pages: 458 words: 132,912

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

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

Numbers were critical. When yearly immigrants came in the tens, rather than the hundreds, of thousands, integration proved far easier. The surrounded immigrant accommodated to the majority culture and language rather than vice versa. In contrast, wave immigration made rapid assimilation far more problematic. Mass migrations of eastern Europeans, Jews, and Italians during the “Great Wave” between 1880 and 1924, in the manner of the earlier massive influx of 1.5 million Irish between 1845 and 1855, cast doubts on the efficacy of the melting pot. Eventually frantic calls arose for immigration restrictions—reflecting nativist fears that nonwestern, non-Protestant, and non–northern European newcomers would not integrate and might establish foreign customs, religions, and ideas contrary to the values and traditions of the majority of Americans.

And they did so for a variety of reasons, ranging from eliminating internal dissidents, discriminating against indigenous people, and reducing social welfare and health care costs to envisioning expatriates as sources of generous remittances and valuable lobbying and diplomatic levers. There is currently much concern about both Russian and Chinese interference in US election campaigns. Yet, by any fair standard, one could argue that the Mexican government’s policy of deliberately encouraging mass immigration to the United States, under illegal auspices, has been far more influential in its long-term effects of changing the electorate and swaying elections.23 A few in the American establishment originally assumed that an open American border might provide a needed safety valve and thereby ward off communist revolutions in Mexico and Central America.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

The Pew Research Center reports that in the US, immigrants make up nearly half of all household servants, who are employed by a relatively small number of affluent households.12 As Lynn Stuart Parramore writes for the left-leaning AlterNet, “In the US, nearly half of maids and housekeepers are not native-born, with Latin Americans dominating. (A big chunk of the wealthy is happy to support mass immigration of cheap labor so that these workers can continue to be underpaid.)”13 The adoption by many US hub cities of seemingly idealistic “sanctuary city” laws, which forbid local law enforcement officers from collaborating with federal officials in identifying and deporting illegal immigrants, saves money for managers and professionals by maintaining their access to local pools of low-wage, untaxed, unregulated, off-the-books nannies, as well as other luxury service labor that allows college-educated professionals to maintain their privileged lifestyles.

For the last two generations, in different decades, and in different Western countries, the occasions of populist protest have been different—the white backlash against the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the traditionalist backlash against the sexual and censorship revolution of the 1970s, populist resistance to the Japanese import shocks of the 1980s, and then, more recently, mass immigration, globalization, deindustrialization, and the Great Recession. All of these different issues resulted in similar alignments of large portions of the non-college-educated working class against managerial and professional elites. Long before Brexit and Trump, their lack of voice and influence made alienated native working-class voters—mostly but not exclusively white—a destabilizing force in politics.

The business Republicans, whose preferences Republican politicians promote, on average make $69,711 a year, around $30,000 more than the Republican populists, whose preferences most Republican politicians ignore.2 The second-largest group of voters in the American electorate, those whom Drutman calls “liberals,” that is, the moderate left, shares liberal cultural views and support of mass immigration with the free market libertarian right. But on economic policy issues, leftists, agreeing with populists on issues like Social Security spending, find their policy preferences neglected by the much smaller but more influential neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party. One way to understand these results is to recognize that in the United States and similar Western democracies there are two political spectrums, one for the college-educated managerial-professional overclass minority and one for the non-college-educated working-class majority of all races.


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

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

Who knows, perhaps bioengineering and communications technology will one day combine to reproduce cybercognitively, at a distance of thousands of miles, the incomparable richness of that experience. In the meantime, what characterises our transformed world is external combinations of the virtual and the physical, as a result of developments that I summarise as ‘mass migration and the internet’. COSMOPOLIS In a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, the media guru Marshall McLuhan declared that ‘the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village’.37 This was an extraordinary seerlike insight, well ahead of its time, but McLuhan’s simile of ‘global village’ is inadequate, both as description and prescription.

In doing so, they draw on documents such as the authoritative General Comment of the UN Human Rights Committee on Article 19, the judgements of various courts, and philosophical, political and psychological arguments of the kind I have explored. Their work has traditionally been concentrated on states and international organisations, laws and the executive actions of governments. I have argued that in the cosmopolis created by mass migration and the internet, we must also look at other levels of the multidimensional struggle for word power, especially the role of private powers and that of self-shaping, networked communities, both online and offline. (‘Offline’ is a strange term, almost implying that ‘online’ is the richer, fuller human condition.

It is something that those inhabiting the territories we now call India and Pakistan have wrestled with for millennia. The emperors Ashoka and Akbar were promoting peaceful coexistence between communities and sects long before Europeans discovered the virtue of ‘toleration’. Yet the combination of mass migration and the internet has produced a staggering growth in visible diversity on the physical streets of a global city and the online pages of the virtual one. Unsurprisingly, some of the most intense free speech controversies of our time have concerned how people express themselves about such differences.


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The Little Book of Hedge Funds by Anthony Scaramucci

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business process, carried interest, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, follow your passion, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, managed futures, margin call, mass immigration, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the new new thing, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Manager Selection The Screening Process The Never-Ending Process Filling in the Data Portfolio Construction Stay Alert . . . It’s Your Money Chapter Nine: The Men Behind the Curtains A Quick History Lesson More than Just a Middleman The Specifics Your Dream Team The Pluses . . . . . . and the Minuses Chapter Ten: From Wall Street to Park Avenue Wall Street’s Mass Migration Only the Strongest Survive Inside the Mind of a Super Capitalist A Quick Pop Quiz Scoring a Job at a Hedge Fund A Final Few Words: 15 Things I Would Do If I Were you Conclusion Appendix Acknowledgments Little Book Big Profits Series In the Little Book Big Profits series, the brightest icons in the financial world write on topics that range from tried-and-true investment strategies to tomorrow’s new trends.

If you are looking to chase money, fortune, or fame and don’t think you have the stomach for managing money or being a part of an asset management organization, then hopefully you will go back to your art or poetry class when you are done reading this chapter. As I tell any young person I advise or mentor: follow your passions and do want you really want to do. Don’t chase what you think you should do; it will only delay your journey to job and life fulfillment. Wall Street’s Mass Migration Growing up, it was fairly simple. Whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always the same: I wanted a job that would give me and my family financial security. At the time, I had no idea what a hedge fund was and if someone asked me I probably would have said it had to do with landscaping (as in hedges) and nothing to do with money management.

From seasoned money managers to up-and-coming MBAs to college students working out of their dorms, everywhere you turned some whiz kid (and in some cases, some not so whiz kid) was starting his own fund. During that time, I, too, caught the hedge fund fever. Seven years out of law school I began my journey and entered the industry by cofounding Oscar Capital with Andrew K. Boszhardt Jr. So, what was the cause of this mass migration? Earnings Potential: Just as insects are attracted to light, money managers are attracted to lucrative fee structures. Take that and throw in the fact that the money manager is joining an exclusive secret club and it’s easy to see why the industry boomed. In the last decade, the top hedge fund managers earned “more money than God in a couple of years of trading,” amassing more wealth than the mightiest masters of the universe at prominent investment banks and private equity firms.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Places such as central India are becoming increasingly challenging to inhabit. For a while people tried to carry on, but when you can’t work outside, when you can fall asleep only at four a.m. for a couple of hours because that’s the coolest part of the day, there’s not much you can do but leave. Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest, and bloodshed over diminished water availability.16 Inland glaciers around the world are quickly disappearing. The millions who depended on the Himalayan, Alpine, and Andean glaciers to regulate water availability throughout the year are in a state of constant emergency: there is little snow turning to ice atop mountains in the winter, so there is no more gradual melting for the spring and summer.

The millions who depended on the Himalayan, Alpine, and Andean glaciers to regulate water availability throughout the year are in a state of constant emergency: there is little snow turning to ice atop mountains in the winter, so there is no more gradual melting for the spring and summer. Now there are either torrential rains leading to flooding or prolonged droughts. The most vulnerable communities with the least resources have already seen what can ensue when water is scarce: sectarian violence, mass migration, and death. Even in some parts of the United States, there are fiery conflicts over water, battles between the rich who are willing to pay for as much water as they want and everyone else demanding equal access to the life-enabling resource. The taps in nearly all public facilities are locked, and those in restrooms are coin-operated.

Scientists tried to develop varieties of staples that could stand up to drought, temperature fluctuations, and salt, but there was only so much we could do. Now there simply aren’t enough resilient varieties to feed the population. As a result, food riots, coups, and civil wars are throwing the world’s most vulnerable from the frying pan into the fire. As developed countries seek to seal their borders from mass migration, they too feel the consequences. Stock markets are crashing, currencies are wildly fluctuating, and the European Union has disbanded.20 As committed as nations are to keeping wealth and resources within their borders, they’re determined to keep people out. Most countries’ armies are now just highly militarized border patrols.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

See: https://www.climatecentral.org/news/american-icons-threatened-by-sea-level-rise-in-pictures-19547#mapping-choices-us-cities-we-could-lose-to-sea-level-rise-19542. Ellie Mae O’Hagan wrote in the Guardian: Ellie Mae O’Hagan, “Mass Migration Is No ‘Crisis’: It’s the New Normal as the Climate Changes,” Guardian, August 18, 2015. See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/18/mass-migration-crisis-refugees-climate-change. the 1947 partitioning of India and Pakistan: “History’s Greatest Migration,” Guardian, September 25, 1947. See: https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,105131,00.html.

It was an exodus-driven influx of innovation. While we left the old and sought the new, we brought our ideas, technologies, and cultures along for the ride. And this process is not just how the Harlem Shake got to Hong Kong, it’s how we—all of us—got to now. This has not been an easy journey. A great many of our mass migrations began with people fleeing from danger, disaster, and all the unspeakable horrors we now know as “history.” Yet, despite originating in strife and tragedy, in the long run, migration has a positive impact on culture. In their book Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future, Oxford’s Ian Goldin and Geoffrey Cameron explain it this way: The history of human communities and world development highlights the extent to which migration has been an engine of social progress.

To implement those ideas, we’ll also need greater global collaboration and cooperation, and a deep empathy that crosses borders, cultures, and continents. And thanks to five of the greatest migrations the world has yet seen, we’ll soon see all of this and more. In this chapter, as we widen our view from the next decade to the century that follows, we’re about to witness mass migration on a massive scale. In some cases, we’re moving for familiar reasons—to avoid environmental disaster and chase economic opportunity—but in shorter time frames and greater numbers than anything yet seen. In others, we’re crossing borders we’ve never crossed before. Moving off world and into outer space; moving out of regular reality and into virtual reality; moving, if the cutting-edge of brain-computer-interface development continues apace, out of individual consciousness and into collective consciousness, a technologically enabled hive mind, or, for those who speak “Trekkie,” a kinder, gentler Borg.


pages: 358 words: 93,969

Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

In 2008, Thomas Fingar, then “the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst,” estimates that it will happen by the mid-2020s, as “droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.” This “will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world.” The UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a scenario similar in a 2009 speech. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,” as the UK’s Guardian put it. What is the plausible best-case scenario for climate change this century?

The editorial warned that “Climate change poses an immediate and grave threat, driving ill health and increasing the risk of conflict, such that each feeds on the other.” The threat posed by climate change to regional security “will limit access to food, safe water, power, sanitation, and health services and drive mass migration and competition for remaining resources.” There will be a rise in starvation, diarrhea, and infectious diseases as well as in the death rate of children and adults. The authors note that “in 2004, seven of the 10 countries with the highest mortality rates in children under 5 were conflict or immediate post-conflict societies.”

The study, “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that global warming made Syria’s 2006 to 2010 drought two to three times more likely. “While we’re not saying the drought caused the war,” lead author Dr. Colin Kelley explained, “We are saying that it certainly contributed to other factors—agricultural collapse and mass migration among them—that caused the uprising.” “It’s a pretty convincing climate fingerprint,” Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley has said. Titley, also a meteorologist, said, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.” In particular, the study finds that climate change is already drying the region out in two ways: “First, weakening wind patterns that bring rain-laden air from the Mediterranean reduced precipitation during the usual November-to-April wet season.


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

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

Now it’s generally right-wing parties that claim the right of prosperous European communities to defend their way of life and to resist those refugees who aspire to live in Europe as they have lived in their own countries. The Left is struggling with how to respond to this new reality. The European center-left is also facing its own identity crisis, as it has been gravely weakened electorally in these years of mass migration. Social democratic parties throughout the continent are themselves in free fall as the worker’s vote flees to the Far Right. In Austria, almost 90 percent of blue-collar workers voted for the far-right candidate in the second round of the May 2016 presidential elections. In the German regional elections, more than 30 percent of that same group supported the reactionary Alternative for Germany.

The reaction of eastern Europeans to globalization is not so different, frankly, than that of Trump’s white working-class supporters. They both view themselves as forgotten losers. Eastern Europeans’ hostile reaction to refugees and migrants is also rooted in a sense of betrayal that many feel when they hear European leaders describe mass migration as a win-win proposition. In his book Exodus, Oxford economist Paul Collier makes clear that while the migration of people from poor countries to the West is beneficial to the migrants and as a whole benefits host societies, it can negatively affect the lower classes of these same host societies and particularly the chance that their children will have better lives.28 The resistance of liberals to conceding any negative effects of migration has triggered the antiestablishment (and particularly anti-mainstream-media) reaction that is convulsing political life in democracies in so many places today.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Migration from abroad, as well as from the rural hinterland, made sure that New York did not stagnate, bringing new economic forces and entrepreneurs into the city and keeping Gotham in what he called “a state of effervescence.”38 A city’s appeal to newcomers has remained critical in modern times. One notable example was the mass migration of skilled migrants and entrepreneurs from Hitler’s Europe, which flooded London as well as New York and Los Angeles. These people brought with them their skills, connections, and creative input. This critical migration has continued to the modern day, although the countries that people come from are now more diverse and less European in origin.

It is not too late to adopt more children, but they won’t look like her.”142 Germany, with its ultra-low birth rate and rapidly aging population, epitomizes the stakes of migration arbitrage. By 2025, Germany’s economy will need 6 million additional workers, or an annual 200,000 new migrants, to keep its economic engine humming, according to government estimates.143 The rationale for mass migration seems inexorable. Germany is unlikely to meet this demand internally due to a shrinking workforce.144 Additionally, many migrants to Germany do not have the skills to participate in that country’s high-end economy. They also threaten to inject many of their homelands’ maladies, ranging from jihadism to street crime, into what have been fairly prosperous and peaceful places.

“Germany’s Big Firms Pay Price for Small-Town Ties,” Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-big-firms-pay-price-for-small-town-ties-1419305459. GERMAN, Erik and PYNE, Solana. (2010). “Dhaka: fastest growing megacity in the world,” GlobalPost, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/100831/bangladesh-megacities-part-one. ——— (2010, September 10). “Disasters drive mass migration to Dhaka,” GlobalPost, http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/asia/100831/bangladesh-megacities-part-three-migrant. GILBERT, Alan and GUGLER, Josef. (1991). Cities, Poverty and Development: Urbanization in the Third World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. GIROUARD, Mark. (1985). Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History, New Haven: Yale University Press.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

The science is clear: we are in the sixth mass extinction event and we will face catastrophe if we do not act swiftly and robustly. Biodiversity is being annihilated around the world. Our seas are poisoned, acidic and rising. Flooding and desertification will render vast tracts of land uninhabitable and lead to mass migration. Our air is so toxic the United Kingdom is breaking the law. It harms the unborn while causing tens of thousands to die. The breakdown of our climate has begun. There will be more wildfires, unpredictable super-storms, increasing famine and untold drought as food supplies and fresh water disappear.

Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape. There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else.


pages: 349 words: 86,224

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

Instead of the population of the alluvium having to shift camp from one ecological zone to another, it could stay in the same place while, as it were, the different habitats came to them.14 A subsistence niche in the southern Mesopotamian wetlands was, compared with the risks of agriculture, more stable, more resilient, and renewable with little annual labor. A propitious location and a sense of timing are crucial to hunter-gatherers in another way. The “harvest” of hunters and gatherers is less a daily hit-or-miss proposition than a carefully calculated effort to intercept the roughly predictable (late-April and May) mass migration of game such as the huge herds of gazelle and wild asses in the alluvium. The hunt was carefully prepared in advance. Long, narrowing lanes were prepared to funnel the herds onto a killing ground, where they could be dispatched and preserved by drying and salting. For the hunters, as for hunting folk elsewhere, a crucial part of their yearly animal protein supply came from a week or so of intense round-the-clock efforts to take as much migrating prey as practicable.

In many cases the factor limiting the “protein harvest” was not the scarcity of prey but the scarcity of labor to process it before it spoiled. The point is that the rhythm of most hunters is governed by the natural pulse of migrations that represent much of their most prized food supply. Some of these mass migrations of prey may well be a response to human predation, as Herman Melville suggested for the sperm whale, but there is no doubt that it gives a radically different tempo to the lives of hunting and fishing peoples in contrast to agriculturalists—a rhythm that farmers often read as indolence. The most common route for a great many of these migrations has been via the wetlands, estuaries, and river valleys of major waterways, owing to the density of nutritional resources they offer.

Quoted in Maria Golia, “After Tahrir,” Times Literary Supplement, February 12, 2016, p. 14. 29. The account immediately below owes much to Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires; Keightley, The Origins of Chinese Civilization; and Yates, “Slavery in Early China.” 30. See, for example, Yates, “Slavery in Early China.” 31. Readers will perhaps have noted that mass migration to northern Europe and North America, though largely voluntary, accomplishes much the same thing in terms of making the productive life of people raised and trained elsewhere available to the country where they settle. 32. Taylor, “Believing the Ancients.” For a dissent from this position, see Scheidel, “Quantifying the Sources of Slaves.” 33.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

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

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

Second, telecom breakthroughs—like telepresence and augmented reality—are making remote workers seem less remote. Widespread shifts in work practices (toward flexible teams) and adoption of innovative collaborative software platforms (like Slack, Asana, and Microsoft 365), are helping to turn telemigration into tele-mass-migration. And there is more. This new competition from “remote intelligence” (RI) is being piled on to service-sector workers at the same time as they are facing new competition from artificial intelligence (AI). In short, RI and AI are coming for the same jobs, at the same time, and driven by the same digital technologies.

Just as in England, the dynamic duo of trade and mechanization was creating millions of new jobs in industry, and rising incomes were creating millions of service sector jobs. The introduction of railroads, acquisition of new land, and the construction of inland waterways had the effect of grandly expanding the amount of arable land. That, plus mass migration from Europe, resulted in booming farm-sector employment. The shares shown in the right panel of Figure 2.4 display the classic structural transformation of an agrarian/rural economy into an urban/industrial one. Agriculture’s share plummeted, while services and manufacturing shares soared. The number of US jobs in manufacturing rose for much longer than in the UK—even though the two nations’ share figures fell from about 1965.

The radical transformations that came with the industrial revolution and the shift from feudalism to capitalism destroyed the social fabric that had, for centuries, been based on reciprocity and ancient hierarchical relationships. As Karl Polanyi wrote in his 1942 book, The Great Transformation, the commoditization of labor and mass migration to urban and industrial areas disturbed traditional values to such an extent that the people pushed back by embracing communism or fascism. Back then, however, the push and pushback both took many decades. The industrial and societal revolutions started accelerating around 1820, but communism and fascism took off only in the 1920s.


pages: 317 words: 101,475

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

The white working class had become another marginalized ethnic minority, and this meant that all their concerns were understood solely through the prism of race. They became presented as a lost tribe On the wrong side of history, disorientated by multiculturalism and obsessed with defending their identity from the cultural ravages of mass immigration. The rise of the idea of a 'white working class' fuelled a new liberal bigotry. It was OK to hate the white working class, because they were themselves a bunch of racist bigots. One defence of the term' chav' points out that 'Chavs themselves use the word, so what's the problem?' They have a point: some young working-class people have even embraced the word as a cultural identity.

In reality, it simply boostedthe image of white working-class people as a race-obsessed, BNP- voting rump. Their problems were not portrayed as economic-thingslike housing and jobs that affect working-class people of all colours did not get a look-in. They were simply portrayed as a minority culture under threat from mass immigration. 'The White season examines why some feel increasingly marginalised and explores possible reasons behind the rise in popularity of far-right politics in some sections of this community,' the BBC announced. But the trailer for the series said it all: a white man's face being scrib- bled over by dark-skinned hands with a black marker pen until he disappeared into the background.

But two years ago, they virtually got no votes-just a couple of per cent. So I think you tend to get a problem of racism in an area undergoing transition.' Hackney is one of the most mixed areas in the country, and as a result the far right has died out there. But it flourishes in areas such as Barking and Dagenham, where mass immigration is a new phenomenon and where the BNP has done well; or, conversely, where there is very little immigration but a tremendous fear of it. The demonization of the working class has also had a real role to play in the BNP's success story. Although ruling elites have made itclear that there is nothing of worth in working-class culture, we have been (rightly) urged to celebrate the identities of minority groups.


pages: 510 words: 163,449

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

—Sir Charles Napier One afternoon Robert Louis Stevenson noted a story in an Edinburgh newspaper about an apartment house in the Old Town that had suddenly collapsed, burying the residents in plaster and rubble. “All over the world,” he mused to himself, “in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth, ‘The house that I was born in fell down last night!’ ” The Scottish mass migration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Stevenson himself was born in Edinburgh and died in Samoa) was as momentous as any in history. In sheer numbers, it hardly stands out: perhaps 3 million all told, compared to the 8 million Italians who left their native land between 1820 and World War I.

In Bernard Aspinwall’s phrase, they were “the shock troops of modernization, ” the first echelon of skilled immigrant labor to reach America’s shores and make it a productive nation. They transformed the new republic from an agricultural community of “agrarian yeoman” into an industrial powerhouse, the quintessential modern nation. The Scots who came to the United States in the nineteenth century reveal once again why the Scottish diaspora was so different from other mass immigrations in history. Despite their relatively small numbers (less than three-quarters of a million, compared with 5 million Irish), the vast majority of Scottish immigrants could read and write English. Most knew some trade other than farming. Almost half of the Scottish males who came to America between 1815 and 1914 qualified as either skilled or semiskilled workers.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

Clerics were hired to preach apposite sermons: John Donne gave one for the Virginia Company.32 By the mid eighteenth century, the promotional literature included plausible maps: the one for Halifax carefully thinned out the forests, omitted wild animals and excluded the Indians.33 In the nineteenth century, there were huge numbers of ‘emigrant guides’, warning, cajoling, steering, misinforming. The migrants had to make the best sense they could: hence, perhaps their reliance on the letters sent home – although even these could be doctored by a vigilant company. But perhaps most important of all was the fact that by the time the era of mass migration arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, the British at home were already a nation of movers and settlers: from region to region, from village to town, from all over Britain to the metropolis in London. Migration, like charity, began at home. ARRIVING For most emigrant families, it was the arrival not the journey that mattered.

There exclusion (by wipe out) was practised against the San (or Bushmen) hunter-gatherers. But against the Xhosa, the Zulus and other pastoralist peoples (who also grew foodgrains), these tactics were useless. They were too numerous, too rooted, and in white eyes too useful, to be driven away. In a country too poor (before the finding of gold) to attract mass immigration from Europe (the British were always fewer in number than the local-born ‘Dutch’), black land and black labour were equally valuable. So the mode of exclusion was varied. South Africa’s blacks were (largely) dispossessed of their land and transformed into serfs. Penned into ‘locations’ and forced to earn their living by labour, they were excluded by rule from the white man’s South Africa.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

More broadly, governments from Latin America to East Asia believed that modern genetics might bring about dramatic improvements in human health, particularly through a better understanding of inherited diseases. There was also an interest in the use of modern genetics to answer questions concerning national and ethnic identity, another major concern during a period of state formation and mass migration. Today, we know that race is not a meaningful biological category. Indeed, as early as 1950 the United Nations had issued a statement describing race as a ‘social myth’ rather than a ‘biological fact’. Nonetheless, throughout the Cold War, governments around the world organized countless genetic surveys, hoping to distinguish different ethnic groups, such as ‘Turks’ and ‘Arabs’, by their genetic make-up, even if this ultimately proved impossible.14 As all this suggests, the development of modern genetics was inseparable from Cold War politics.

Hugh Slotten, Ronald Numbers, and David Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 424, 434–5, and 438–43. 73Rabkin, ‘Middle East’, 424–43, Arnold Reisman, ‘Comparative Technology Transfer: A Tale of Development in Neighboring Countries, Israel and Turkey’, Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 3 (2005): 331, Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 107–13, 138–50, and 232–9, and Murat Ergin, ‘Is the Turk a White Man?’: Race and Modernity in the Making of Turkish Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 74Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 641, Shifra Shvarts, Nadav Davidovitch, Rhona Seidelman, and Avishay Goldberg, ‘Medical Selection and the Debate over Mass Immigration in the New State of Israel (1948–1951)’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 22 (2005), and Roselle Tekiner, ‘Race and the Issue of National Identity in Israel’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991). 75Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 108 and 146, El-Haj, The Genealogical Science, 63, Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 635, and Joyce Donegani, Karima Ibrahim, Elizabeth Ikin, and Arthur Mourant, ‘The Blood Groups of the People of Egypt’, Heredity 4 (1950). 76Nurit Kirsh, ‘Geneticist Elisabeth Goldschmidt: A Two-Fold Pioneering Story’, Israel Studies 9 (2004). 77Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 157–9, Batsheva Bonné, ‘Chaim Sheba (1908–1971)’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 36 (1972), Raphael Falk, Zionism and the Biology of Jews (Cham: Springer, 2017), 145–8, and Elisabeth Goldschmidt, ed., The Genetics of Migrant and Isolate Populations (New York: The Williams and Wilkins Company, 1973), v. 78Goldschmidt, The Genetics of Migrant and Isolate Populations, Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 161–3, El-Haj, The Genealogical Science, 63–5 and 99, Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 653, and Kirsh, ‘Geneticist Elisabeth Goldschmidt’, 90. 79Burton, Genetic Crossroads, 161–3, El-Haj, The Genealogical Science, 63–5 and 99, Kirsh, ‘Population Genetics’, 653, Kirsh, ‘Geneticist Elisabeth Goldschmidt’, 90, Newton Freire-Maia, ‘The Effect of the Load of Mutations on the Mortality Rate in Brazilian Populations’, in The Genetics of Migrant and Isolate Populations, ed.


pages: 148 words: 45,249

Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich

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

The proximate cause will be not the warming itself—we won’t burst in flame and crumble all to ashes—but its secondary effects. The Red Cross estimates that already more refugees flee environmental crises than violent conflict. Starvation, drought, the inundation of the coasts, and the smothering expansion of deserts will force hundreds of millions of people to run for their lives. The mass migrations will stagger delicate regional truces, hastening battles over natural resources, acts of terrorism, and declarations of war. Beyond a certain point, the two great existential threats to our civilization, global warming and nuclear weapons, will loose their chains and join to rebel against their creators.

In “How to Wreck the Environment,” an essay published in 1968, while he was a science adviser to Lyndon Johnson, MacDonald predicted a near future in which “nuclear weapons were effectively banned and the weapons of mass destruction were those of environmental catastrophe.” The world’s most advanced militaries, he warned, would soon be able to weaponize weather. By accelerating industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, they could alter weather patterns, forcing mass migration, starvation, drought, and economic collapse. In the decade since, MacDonald had grown alarmed to see humankind accelerate its pursuit of this particular weapon of mass destruction, not maliciously, but unwittingly. President Carter’s initiative to develop high-carbon synthetic fuels—gas and liquid fuel extracted from shale and tar sands—was a frightening blunder, the equivalent of building a new generation of thermonuclear bombs.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The poor, the waste, the rubbish, as they are variously labeled, have stood front and center during America’s most formative political contests. During colonial settlement, they were useful pawns as well as rebellious troublemakers, a pattern that persisted amid mass migrations of landless squatters westward across the continent. Southern poor whites figured prominently in the rise of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, and in the atmosphere of distrust that caused bad blood to percolate among the poorer classes within the Confederacy during the Civil War. White trash were dangerous outliers in efforts to rebuild the Union during Reconstruction; and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement flourished, they were the class of degenerates targeted for sterilization.

The small, struggling band lost half their number to starvation and disease during the first year. The wife of one of the leaders, William Bradford, mysteriously disappeared over the side of the Mayflower. It would be a full decade before the English settlers in Massachusetts made significant inroads in attracting new settlers to the region.39 When the mass migration of 1630 did take place, it was the well-organized John Winthrop who led a fleet of eleven ships, loaded with seven hundred passengers and livestock, and bearing a clear objective to plant a permanent community. Far more intact families migrated to the colony than had to Virginia, and a core of the settlers were Puritans who did not need the threat of a death sentence to attend church services on the Sabbath—one of the many examples of heavy-handedness practiced in the early days of Jamestown.

The glorious title of cultivator would remain beyond the reach of most backcountry settlers.48 CHAPTER FIVE Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country The Squatter as Common Man Obsquatulate, To mosey, or to abscond. —“Cracker Dictionary,” Salem Gazette (1830) By 1800, one-fifth of the American population had resettled on its “frontier,” the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi. Effective regulation of this mass migration was well beyond the limited powers of the federal government. Even so, officials understood that the country’s future depended on controlling this vast territory. Financial matters were involved too. Government sale of these lands was needed to reduce the nation’s war debts. Besides, the lands were hardly empty, and the potential for violent conflicts with Native Americans was ever present, as white migrants settled on lands they did not own.


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

Many of them are attracted to London by jobs – London has been the only place in Europe creating jobs for young people at Western rates of pay on a significant scale over the past ten years. And the virtual collapse of employment opportunities for young people in most of the Eurozone has stimulated mass migration into London. But the people aren’t only attracted by the jobs. Often they come to London to look for fun. Once they are in London, of course, they then look for work to pay for the fun. This creates the supply of skills that support either the Flat White Economy itself with high-tech skills knowhow or the support industries that rely on more prosaic abilities like making coffee or mending bikes.

Its unique geopolitical situation also seems to foster a necessary culture of innovation in the face of daunting opposition – much of the reasons for Israel’s strength in telecommunications technology, security and encryption stems from substantial funding by the government for military purposes. It also has an exceptional, multicultural and multilingual talent base and Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe in the past quarter century has massively expanded its skills base.18 Despite the geopolitical problems of the Middle East, the Israeli tech sector has such momentum that it is highly unlikely to stumble unless Israel gets involved in a war on so large a scale that it makes it impossible for the industry to operate.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

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

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

The inability to stabilize failing states could see countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan slipping further into violent anarchy, with dangerous consequences for the rest of the world. Over the longer term, a failure to deal with climate change could provoke the most serious international crises of all—leading to flooding, famine, mass migration, and even war. Crises such as these ultimately threaten the future of the whole world. Yet the world’s major powers are unable to deal with them cooperatively. That is because a damaged and dysfunctional world economy and the growth of new international rivalries—in particular between the United States and China—are increasingly trapping the world in a zero-sum logic, in which one country’s gain looks like another’s loss.

The president chose to highlight terrorism, war, genocide, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, global warming, global poverty, and the threat of pandemics. To that list could be added global economic tensions; shortages of food, water, and energy; failed states; international crime; and uncontrolled mass migration. All of these issues are problems of globalization. Some have been created or worsened by the process of global economic integration that has defined international politics since 1978. None of them can be solved without a significant degree of international cooperation. And yet the world lacks the international political structures needed to fix global problems.

A spate of terrorist attacks inside India is also increasing the dangers of war between Pakistan and India, two nuclear-armed neighbors. The dangers of climate change have been amply rehearsed. If the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change is correct, there is a serious risk in the coming decades of desertification, crop failures, the flooding of coastal cities, and mass migration by displaced people—with war and conflict following in the wake of environmental disaster. Even many of those who are skeptical about the UN-endorsed science on climate change accept the need for international action to curb greenhouse gases, even if only as an insurance policy against catastrophe.


pages: 225 words: 189

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

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

The 20 / THE COMING ANARCHY political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pol­ lution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group con­ flicts—will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States.

Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artifi- 42 / THE COMING ANARCHY cial frontiers, fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent. Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970—youths with lit­ tle historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts at nation-building, or any of the ArabIsraeli wars. The most distant recollection of these youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991.


pages: 169 words: 54,002

A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa

colonial rule, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration

In the early days of the so-called repatriation, some seventy thousand people left Japan and crossed the sea to North Korea. With the exception of a brief three-and-a-half-year hiatus, the process continued until 1984. During this period, some one hundred thousand Koreans and two thousand Japanese wives crossed over to North Korea. That’s one hell of a mass migration. In fact, it was the first (and only) time in history that so many people from a capitalist country had moved to a socialist country. The Japanese government actively promoted the repatriation, supposedly on humanitarian grounds. But in my opinion, what they were actually pursuing was opportunism of the most vile and cynical kind.

I’m a Japanese citizen. My father was Korean. My mother Japanese. Way back in 1960, my father was conned into taking us to North Korea. We were promised a new life in a paradise on earth. The Japanese government was all for it. The United Nations knew all about it. Your charity was happy to supervise the greatest mass migration in the history of the world. Have you any idea what you did to us? You consigned us to a living hell. I’ve finally escaped. No one else has. I’m the first. The rest of us are dying or dead. It would be nice if you could help me get home.” It all came pouring out of me. Silence. I’ve gone too far, I thought.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Borjas, “Still More on Mariel: The Role of Race,” NBER Working Paper 23504, 2017. 24 Jennifer Hunt, “The Impact of the 1962 Repatriates from Algeria on the French Labor Market,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 45, no. 3 (April 1992): 556–72. 25 Rachel M. Friedberg, “The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4 (November 2001): 1373–1408. 26 Marco Tabellini, “Gifts of the Immigrants, Woes of the Natives: Lessons from the Age of Mass Migration,” HBS Working Paper 19-005, 2018. 27 Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri, “Immigrants’ Effect on Native Workers: New Analysis on Longitudinal Data,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 8, no. 2 (2016): 1–34. 28 The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.17226/23550. 29 Christian Dustmann, Uta Schönberg, and Jan Stuhler, “Labor Supply Shocks, Native Wages, and the Adjustment of Local Employment, “Quarterly Journal of Economics 132, no. 1 (February 2017): 435–83. 30 Michael A.

When President Trump compared the migrants from “shithole countries” to the good ones coming from Norway, he most probably did not know that a long time ago Norwegian immigrants were part of the “huddled masses” Emma Lazarus talked about.34 There is actually a case study of Norwegian migrants to the United States during the age of mass migration, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.35 At the time, there was nothing to stop migration, other than the price of passage. The study compared the families of migrants to the families where nobody migrated. It found migrants tended to come from among the poorest families; their fathers were substantially poorer than average.

Postel, “Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion,” American Economic Review 108, no. 6 (June 2018): 1468–87. 31 Foged and Peri, “Immigrants’ Effect on Native Workers.” 32 Patricia Cortés, “The Effect of Low-Skilled Immigration on US Prices: Evidence from CPI Data,” Journal of Political Economy 116, no. 3 (2008): 381–422. 33 Patricia Cortés and José Tessada, “Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Skilled Women,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3, no. 3 (July 2011): 88–123. 34 Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” in Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems, ed. John Hollander (New York: Library of America, 2005), 58. 35 Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson, “Europe’s Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration,” American Economic Review 102, no. 5 (2012): 1832–56. 36 “Immigrant Founders of the 2017 Fortune 500,” Center for American Entrepreneurship, 2017, http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/. 37 Nakamura, Sigurdsson, and Steinsson, “The Gift of Moving.” 38 Jie Bai, “Melons as Lemons: Asymmetric Information, Consumer Learning, and Quality Provision,” working paper, 2018, accessed June 19, 2019, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B52sohAPtnAWYVhBYm11cDBrSm M/view. 39 “For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power.”


pages: 31 words: 7,670

Why America Must Not Follow Europe by Daniel Hannan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, carbon tax, mass immigration, obamacare, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Upton Sinclair

Between 1945 and 1974, Western Europe did indeed outperform the U.S. And in retrospect, we can see why. Europe happened to enjoy perfect conditions for rapid growth. Infrastructure had been destroyed during the war, but an educated, industrious, and disciplined workforce remained. There was also, for the first time in Europe’s history, mass migration. Within individual nations, people moved in unprecedented numbers from the countryside to the growing cities. Within Europe, they journeyed from the Mediterranean littoral to the coalfields and steelworks of northern Europe. And millions more came from beyond Europe – from North Africa, Turkey, and the former British, French, and Dutch colonies.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Second, while most gig economy firms are focused on the provision of local services (for example, cleaning or food delivery), some gig economy firms have been able to set up global-scale platforms for services like data entry, graphic design or transcription that have fewer geographic limitations on where they need to be delivered from (see chapter 2 for more on this). These global platforms set up what you might think of as ‘planetary labour markets’ (Graham and Anwar, 2019). In the words of Guy Standing (2016), they enable a mass migration of labour, but not of people. Clients suddenly have a world of workers to choose from, and workers from around the global are placed into competition with one another – all made possible because the majority of humanity has now been connected to the global network. Consumer attitudes and preferences New economic activity requires consumer demand.

When you email customer support or report an image as inappropriate on your favourite social platform, the workers handling those tasks could either be in your city or on the other side of the globe. The untethering of work from place that this has allowed has meant that, for the first time, we potentially have a mass migration of labour without the migration of workers (Standing, 2016). In order to adequately discuss why our expectations and visions about the relationships between work and economic development may have changed, it is useful to first outline what is and isn’t new about digital work. Long, complicated global production networks have always existed.


Sustainable Minimalism: Embrace Zero Waste, Build Sustainability Habits That Last, and Become a Minimalist Without Sacrificing the Planet (Green Housecleaning, Zero Waste Living) by Stephanie Marie Seferian

8-hour work day, Airbnb, big-box store, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, do what you love, emotional labour, food desert, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lifestyle creep, Mason jar, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, ride hailing / ride sharing

Climate scientists warn that floods, droughts, heat waves, and powerful storms will increase in both frequency and intensity in the coming decades.127 Melting glaciers and rising sea levels will flood coastal towns, and they may remain under water for good. Powerful storms may wipe out our power grids for extended periods of time, and mass migrations of entire nations attempting to escape the consequences of climate change will likely strain communities that are unprepared for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Droughts, too, may significantly impact the industrial food system we rely on so heavily.128 These days, you and I are a generation or two removed from a crisis.

Science informs us that by 2050, intense droughts will significantly disrupt both global agriculture and water supply.154 Other extreme weather events—including massive hurricanes and crippling snow storms—will become commonplace. I wonder what such a constant, day-to-day barrage will do to societies around the globe. The very rich, within their fortified and air-conditioned homes, will be able to weather extreme heat, lack of essential resources, and conflicts stemming from mass migrations. The rest of humanity, however, will likely be left to duke it out. As is often the case, the poorest will likely suffer the most, despite having contributed to climate change the least. It has never been more important for you and I to step up as change-makers. Change-makers do all that they can as sustainable minimalists within their homes, yes, but they also work tirelessly outside of their homes to both educate and inspire others about the benefits of simpler, reduction-based lifestyles.


pages: 228 words: 68,880

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

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

Concerns about immigration in the UK today generally have little in common with old-fashioned send-them-back racism. Instead mass immigration to the UK, especially from Eastern Europe, has become a symbol of the way that many people feel their world has been changed without anybody asking them. They have woken up to find that their communities are disintegrating, their traditional values trashed from on high. Some of their new neighbours may have their own native tongues, but the ones who really seem to speak a foreign language are the UK elites ignoring the UK’s own ‘ghastly people’. In particular since the New Labour government of the late 1990s, mass immigration to the UK has been encouraged and organised from the top down, but without any public debate about its benefits or costs to society.

Think of Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, unknowingly recorded dismissing a lifelong Labour voter as ‘some bigoted woman’ because she asked him about Romanian immigration on camera in the 2010 general election campaign. Britain’s borders have effectively been opened by the state, not as a consequence of governments or experts winning an argument for mass immigration, but instead by avoiding one and going ahead without public consent. In this context the immigration issue has become another symbol of the yawning gap between millions of people and the political establishment, of the absence of democracy and open public debate. You did not need to be a racist to revolt against that state of affairs.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

If there was indeed a great diaspora of settled peoples as a result of the breakdown of irrigation and society in the South, as the stories claim, the dispersal would have happened long before that last, late pre-Islamic damburst. The folk histories, as we shall see, go on to speak of the migration from Marib of the great tribe of Azd and its important sub-tribe, Ghassan, which must have taken place a few centuries earlier. Whether there was in fact a single mass migration is not known; a gradual ebbing away of settled populations is much more likely. But in either case it would have far-reaching effects: it may not have been a cataclysm, but the setting in motion of settled people in large numbers would be a catalyst for change across the Arabian subcontinent.

Now, hijrah became a form of super-migration, a severance not just from one’s birthplace, but altogether from one’s Arabian roots. The severance enabled far conquest, or super-raids. It was Muhammad’s move to Medina, writ large. In fact, very large. The idea of hijrah has some similarities with the modern Zionist idea of mass-migration to a physical Promised Land. But it is that idea blown wide open: all lands are promised. The Wandering Zionist eventually settles in what he looks on as the land of his ancestors; the Wandering Arab forsakes the land of his ancestors and is potentially always on the move. As the Qur’an puts it in one of many passages encouraging travel, And Allah has made the earth for you as a carpet spread out, That you may go about therein on broad roads.

In theory – at least in later theory – Muhammad’s revolution had shifted the whole foundation and focus of Arab society from tribal to theocratic. Din had shifted in meaning from honouring ancestors and tribal deities to worshipping the One God, and sunnah from emulating tribal heroes to emulating God’s prophet. The revolution had set off mass migrations and great victories. It had brought the peoples of South Arabia under its aegis, and made Persians and Egyptians members of the family of Islam. It had made these peoples equal with Arabs, and Arabs with each other. Superiority, nobility could only come from piety, not parentage. And yet here were two members of the same small tribe arguing about whose immediate family was posher.


Global Financial Crisis by Noah Berlatsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, centre right, circulation of elites, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, social contagion, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, working poor

Ban said it is important that governments protect the rights of foreign workers in order to prevent mass migrations of angry, unemployed, and impoverished workers. 131 The Global Financial Crisis “I would also urge those countries who accommodate many migrants—they should ensure, through their domestic legislation and political and social framework—to protect and promote the human rights of migrant workers,” he said. But there are signs that the opposite is taking place in some countries. [UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon] said it is important that governments protect the rights of foreign workers in order to prevent mass migrations of angry, unemployed, and impoverished workers.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us. These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

Instead of just lording over us forever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making. 1 The Insulation Equation BILLIONAIRE BUNKER STRATEGIES B y the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implication of The Mindset.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

And, while social mobility remained a visible and concrete goal for most migrants, rural–urban migration was by no means always an ascent to better living standards. A significant number of the thousands of abandoned children who roamed the streets of London, according to the Victorian reformer Thomas Barnardo, were “victims of the family dislocation involved in mass migration to London.”19 At least half of all prostitutes at any time were born outside London. As everywhere, the move to a city almost always meant an improvement in livelihood—but one that was not without risk. London in the latter half of the nineteenth century became famous for the wide range of public-housing schemes developed by philanthropic and government bodies.

Rushdie, facing the fatwa, defended his novel The Satanic Verses by describing it as an arrival city, like the arrival cities that fill its pages, like the arrival cities throughout the world: a place that “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it.”22 This is the way of the world. The functioning arrival city slowly colonizes the established city (just as the failed arrival city is likely, after festering and simmering, to invade it violently). The city discovers, confronts, and, in fortunate circumstances, embraces the arrival city.

., 23–34. 24 David Mitch, “Literacy and Occupational Mobility in Rural Versus Urban Victorian England,” Historical Methods 38, no. 1 (2005); Jason Long, “Social Mobility within and across Generations in Britain since 1851,” in Economic History Society Conference (Oxford: 2007). 25 Aside from the previously cited works by Andrew Miles and Jason Long, see Sara Horrell, Jane Humphries, and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Destined for Deprivation: Human Capital Formation and Intergenerational Poverty in Nineteenth-Century England,” Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001); Kenneth Prandy and Wendy Bottero, “Social Reproduction and Mobility in Britain and Ireland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Sociology 34, no. 2 (2000); Paul Lambert, Kenneth Prandy, and Wendy Bottero, “By Slow Degrees: Two Centuries of Social Reproduction and Mobility in Britain,” Sociological Research Online 12, no. 1 (2007), www.socresonline.org.uk/12/1/prandy.html. 26 Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie, “A Tale of Two Labor Markets: Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Britain and the U.S. since 1850,” ed. National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA: 2005). 27 Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 149. 28 Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G Williamson, “What Drove the Mass Migrations from Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century?” ed. National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, MA: 1992); Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 29 Cited in Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 111–25. 30 Ibid., 200–232; David G.


Transatlantic Liners by J. Layton

Great Leap Forward, mass immigration

There was also no small amount of national pride over who had the world’s largest, fastest or most luxurious ocean liners, and this further drove competition between the great steamship lines. Despite the hazards involved, there were many reasons why people travelled across the Atlantic. Some travelled for business, some for pleasure, and others formed part of the mass migration from the Old World to the New. These passengers were divided into different categories, or classes, based on their financial and social status. Immigrants formed a large proportion of ocean-going clientele. Steamship lines provided them with simple, relatively inexpensive accommodation in the less desirable areas of their ships, and found great profits in doing so.


pages: 421 words: 125,417

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

In the twenty-first century our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them. The pressures of scarce energy resources, growing environmental stresses, a rising global population, legal and illegal mass migration, shifting economic power, and vast inequalities of income are too great to be left to naked market forces and untrammeled geopolitical competition among nations. A clash of civilizations could well result from the rising tensions, and it could truly be our last and utterly devastating clash. To find our way peacefully through these difficulties, we will have to learn, on a global scale, the same core lessons that successful societies have gradually and grudgingly learned within their own national borders.

These problems can still be overcome by helping impoverished farmers to adopt improved technologies and diversified income strategies, but such gains will not be sufficient to keep ahead of a doubling of population every generation! Figure 7.7: Average Farm Size by Continent front 1930 to 1990 Source: Estimates from Eastwood et al. (2004) Note: Vertical axis on logarithmic scale Fourth, and finally, there are the threats to the rest of the world. Rapid population growth raises the pressures for mass migration and local conflict. Today’s conflicts in Africa mainly reflect a breakdown of order among hungry and impoverished communities. Violence is not just a matter of poverty but also of the age-population structure. Higher fertility rates, we’ve seen, lead to age-population pyramids with a wide base and a narrow apex: too few elders per adolescent.

Many of these migrants were unemployed or working at very low productivity in their home villages. Second, part of that increased income has been sent back to the villages to support local consumption, business formation, and investments in homes and farms. The costs, however, are high, since the mass migration has very often meant separated families, and even mothers and children left behind in the villages, with the husbands not seen again. THE BENEFITS AND LIMITS OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION One solution for desperate regions is out-migration. The solution for China’s poor interior is clearly a combination of out-migration and investment and remittances in.


pages: 608 words: 184,703

Moon Oregon Trail Road Trip: Historic Sites, Small Towns, and Scenic Landscapes Along the Legendary Westward Route by Katrina Emery, Moon Travel Guides

Airbnb, bike sharing, California gold rush, car-free, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donner party, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mason jar, mass immigration, pez dispenser, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, trade route, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Works Progress Administration

The luxury hotel boasts 100 spacious rooms, many with balconies and some with fireplaces or an outdoor fire pit. Suites offer access to a private cocktail lounge for guests only, but all guests can enjoy the impeccable room service and elegant accommodations. History Mass Migration The Rise of the Railroad The Trail Today Mass Migration The Oregon Trail is one of the largest voluntary mass migrations in world history—an entire nation shifted westward in the wagons, changing the face of the continent forever. Numbers are hard to pinpoint, but historians estimate 350,000 to 500,000 people traveled the trail when it was most active, 1843-1869.

In 1.6 miles (2.6 km), veer right to remain on the road, and continue 0.6 mile (1 km) to South Pass City. South Pass City and Vicinity South Pass was the key to the entire overland trek. Without its gentle slope, which allowed wagons to gradually climb and cross the Continental Divide, it’s entirely possible that mass migration to Oregon wouldn’t have happened. While emigrants knew it as a landmark place, many may not have grasped the importance of the pass as they rolled through. Nearby, the mining town of South Pass City boomed in the mid-1800s—near the end of the Oregon and California Trails’ popularity—when gold and coal were discovered in the hills.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

As populations flooded into early industrial cities such as Manchester, they quickly became crowded and unsanitary. With the invention of the railway, it became possible to move many more goods and heavier loads over longer distances far more quickly. That in turn allowed industrial activity to take root in a greater number of cities, but the dispersal was not quick enough to outpace the continued mass migration into urban areas. As a result, cities continued to grow ever larger, with lower mortality rates thanks to the advancing state of medicine and public health adding to this growth. Ebenezer Howard was one of the many who had grown appalled by the living conditions of the poor in industrial cities.

In the US, the inhumane working conditions and unsanitary practices of Chicago’s meatpacking district, known as the Union Stock Yards, were brought to the public’s awareness by Upton Sinclair’s fictionalized 1906 account The Jungle. Of Chicago’s working poor, Sinclair wrote: ‘They are penned up in filthy houses and left to rot and stew in misery, and the conditions of their life make them ill faster than all the doctors in the world could heal them.’9 As industrialization led to the mass migration of the poor from the countryside, it profoundly altered the structure of cities. Marketplaces and merchant’s houses were replaced by factories and warehouses, surrounded by slum-like housing for workers who lacked any mode of transportation. As the merchant class evolved into an increasingly prosperous bourgeoisie, those with the financial means escaped the pollution and visible destitution of the inner ring of the city, aided by the development of the streetcar and intra-city rail systems.10 In 1922, the sociologist Ernest Burgess developed his Concentric Zone Model to describe the typical shape of the city emerging from industrialization.11 In it, a central business district is surrounded by a factory zone, around which the working class lives in low-quality housing, followed by a ring of middle-income neighbourhoods, and lastly a commuter zone for the wealthy.


pages: 281 words: 86,657

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

There are partially inhabited or partially complete condominium towers awaiting the return of an economy in which more people who find them attractive will be able to afford them. But this state of affairs will not last forever. It is important to reiterate that demographic inversion and mass migration are not the same thing. Mass migration means, to me, at least, a reversal in which a much greater proportion of the residents of a large metropolitan area will live near the center of the city than have lived there for the past thirty or forty years. Robert Fishman, one of America’s most respected urban historians, believes that a “fifth great migration” is taking place.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival by Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan

asset-backed security, banks create money, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, deglobalization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, job automation, Kickstarter, long term incentive plan, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, middle-income trap, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, rent control, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, special economic zone, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Just as the production of goods was shifted from the West into China over the last three decades, could a similar shift lead to the production of goods moving to the Indian subcontinent and, particularly, to Africa, where the rate of growth of the working population in countries like Nigeria and the Congo will be quite remarkable over the next few decades? There is also, of course, the possibility of further waves of migration from these poor countries into the richer countries in America, Europe and Asia. But the political, social and economic problems caused by mass migration are so severe, that the only viable alternative would be to take capital and management to the workers in these poor countries, rather than having them migrate to the rich countries. We shall argue that while such a new direction for globalisation is possible, we nevertheless think it somewhat unlikely.

Middle cycle, of population growth Middle East ‘Middle-income trap’ Migration Migration, fear of enhanced Migration, internal Migration, inward into AEs, declining Migration, needed, but politically unpopular Migration, outward from EMEs, declining Migration, problems of mass Migration, within USA, reduced Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) Milanovic, B. Mill, John Stuart Minimum wage laws Minimum wage rates Ministers Ministers of Finance Ministers of Finance, naturally cautious Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Ministry of Finance Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) Mirrlees Review Mishkin, F.S.


pages: 173 words: 52,725

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

There’s scant evidence [from the Bank of England in 2015] that immigration effected some wage compression in the completely unskilled labour market but there’s actually a shortage of qualified plumbers in this country, which is probably why you’ve gone self-employed. So it’s not that, is it? So, just in terms of Andy in Nottingham and the damage that uncontrolled mass immigration has done to your life, just give me the headline. Andy: Um. Walking through the city centre and seeing mobs of, um, of immigrants not willing to integrate. James: And how do you think leaving the European Union is going to disperse those mobs, Andy? Andy: I think we’ll have more control— James: They’re already here, mate.

They are, in most cases, paying more in rent than they would be required to pay towards a mortgage. But because they cannot raise the hefty deposit now needed to secure a mortgage they are, in fact, ‘buying’ the home in which they live for their landlords. For all the talk of ‘Polski Skleps’, ‘uncontrolled mass immigration’ and changing demographics, this is surely the most profound alteration British society has undergone in the last 18 years. Many people also on the ‘winning’ side of this generational divide are, however, remarkably reluctant to acknowledge it. I’m not sure why. Exchanges like the following are commonplace whenever the subject of housing costs comes up on the programme.


pages: 92

The Liberal Moment by Nick Clegg, Demos (organization : London, England)

banking crisis, credit crunch, failed state, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Right to Buy, smart grid, too big to fail, Winter of Discontent

The best predictions science offers suggest that, if the planet warms by more than 2 degrees centigrade, it will tip us into a nightmare scenario that will lead to climate chaos we cannot control. It will affect not only the world’s prosperity, but also our very ability to feed ourselves, threatening resource wars and mass migration on an unprecedented scale. While Labour has done more than previous administrations to tackle carbon emissions, that is largely because the need is more apparent now than it had been in the past. Just doing more is not sufficient: only doing enough to stop the 2 degrees temperature rise will be good enough.


pages: 286 words: 94,017

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

They want desperately to be "where the action is." (Indeed, some hardly care what the action is, so long as it occurs at a suitably rapid clip.) James A. Wilson has found, for example, that the attraction for a fast pace of life is one of the hidden motivating forces behind the much publicized "brain-drain"—the mass migration of European scientists to the United States and Canada. After studying 517 English scientists and engineers who migrated, Wilson concluded that it was not higher salaries or better research facilities alone, but also the quicker tempo that lured them. The migrants, he writes, "are not put off by what they indicate as the 'faster pace' of North America; if anything, they appear to prefer this pace to others."

In France, a continuing housing shortage contrives to slow down internal mobility, but even there a study by demographer Guy Pourcher suggests that each year 8 to 10 percent of all Frenchmen shift homes. In Sweden, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, the rate of domestic migration appears to be on the rise. And Europe is experiencing a wave of international mass migration unlike anything since the disruptions of World War II. Economic prosperity in Northern Europe has created widespread labor shortages (except in England) and has attracted masses of unemployed agricultural workers from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries. They come by the thousands from Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia and Turkey.

The earth's weather system is an integrated whole; a minute change at one point can touch off massive consequences elsewhere. Even without aggressive intent, there is danger that attempts to control a drought on one continent could trigger a tornado on another. Moreover, the unknown socio-psychological consequences of weather manipulation could be enormous. Millions of us, for example, hunger for sunshine, as our mass migrations to Florida, California or the Mediterranean coast indicate. We may well be able to produce sunshine—or a facsimile of it—at will. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is studying the concept of a giant orbiting space mirror capable of reflecting the sun's light downward on night-shrouded parts of the earth.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Yet today many scholars still hold political boundaries to be the most fundamental man-made lines on the map out of a bias toward territory as the basis of power, the state as the unit of political organization, an assumption that only governments can order life within those states, and a belief that national identity is the primary source of people’s loyalty. The march of connectivity will bring all these beliefs to collapse. Forces such as devolution (the fragmentation of authority toward provinces), urbanization (the growing size and power of cities), dilution (the genetic blending of populations through mass migration), mega-infrastructures (new pipelines, railways, and canals that morph geography), and digital connectivity (enabling new forms of community) will demand that we produce maps far more complex. SUPPLY CHAIN WORLD It’s time to reimagine how human life is organized on earth. There is one—and only one—law that has been with us since we were hunter-gatherers, outlasted all rival theories, transcended empires and nations, and serves as our best guide to the future: supply and demand.

— BY 2100, THE BROADER Persian Gulf geography is projected to be too excruciatingly hot and humid for humans to safely spend more than a few hours outside.10 The twentieth century witnessed the population of the global south eclipsing that of the north, but the twenty-first century may require mass migrations from south to north as equatorial and southern populations stricken by the triple whammy of increasing temperatures, drought, and rising sea levels flock toward more temperate and agriculturally productive regions. As Canada and Russia become massive agricultural breadbaskets that could produce most of the world’s subsistence crops, their almost completely depopulated geographies will need workers to run the agribusiness industries.

Mid-twentieth-century concerns over world population growth and food shortages led some legal scholars to argue that a few million Australians could not justify possessing an entire continent while billions were deprived basic nourishment. As the earth’s overpopulated equatorial latitudes experience drought, crop failure, and desertification while the depopulated far northern latitudes experience thaw, warming, and abundance, will mass migrations to Canada and Russia turn them into internationally governed agribusiness colonies? Because neither country would suddenly accept the burden of massive numbers of new citizens, there are initial financial and administrative costs that would need to be managed by international agencies and investors.


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Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

The party were now polling around 14 per cent, although they had lost the support of Britain’s twenty-three or so libertarians, and had just won their first seats in Parliament. It seemed like a rising force, and being part of Breitbart would make me part of the insurgency. On the big issues I basically agreed, in particular that mass migration to the West was a bad idea that would, at best, turn us into a sort of America or Brazil. I’d written a book about it, copies of which I kept hidden in a drawer at home in case any of my SWPL neighbours saw it. But the issue always left me feeling troubled; what worried me about ‘diversity’ was that it would make us less civil, more bitterly divided, even bring about religious violence, a fear that I suppose was influenced by my Irish background.

That’s the true definition of decadence, knowing we’re all going to hell and yet feeling so fatalistic about it that you just want to enjoy the ride. As the Yiddish proverb goes: ‘Money lost, nothing lost; courage lost, everything lost’. But I could probably handle being a social leper; I couldn’t the thought of hating myself. I personally feel some weary hostility towards the people who support and enable mass migration, because they are causing unnecessary problems out of motivated naivety or narcissism, or perhaps personal gain. But not towards the immigrants themselves. Many are indeed unwelcome, and I certainly shared the widespread dismay that so many unsavoury individuals are allowed to swan around because our rulers consider immigration controls a bit déclassé.

In today’s culture, the nonconformists are conservatives.’8 There is a certain truth in this, but then nonconformists and rebels don’t have to be James Dean or Marlon Brando in The Wild One – they can also be very uncool. ‘If there is hope it lies in the proles’ – George Orwell’s quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four has often been cited by conservatives who argue that opposition to mass migration and other forms of social engineering will come from the working class. Perhaps that is true, but the system also seems to be breeding a hardcore of highly educated ultra-conservatives. So while the proportion of American students identifying as consistently liberal has rapidly increased, the percentage of postgrad and college graduates with ‘consistently conservative’ views also went up between 2004 to 2014, from 4 to 11 per cent.9 Perhaps this is inevitable intra-elite conflict, or maybe also that Anglophone societies are becoming more isolated and atomised, and since liberalism is associated with higher sociability and social trust, it’s now producing more conservatives, too.


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Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

These transitions have affected all aspects of civilization as they transformed traditional arrangements into modern societies by changing population dynamics; agricultural practices and food production; choice of energy resources and the scale and efficiency of their conversions; the extent and pace of industrial production and, more recently, of the service sector; intensity of trade; distribution of wealth; and the state of the environment. The premodern world—with the divide between traditional and early modern societies conventionally set in 1500—witnessed change on many levels, ranging from recurrent violent conflicts (progressing from close fights with edge weapons to powerful artillery), invasions, mass migrations, and empire-building enterprises to admirable advances in technical skills in metallurgy and in arts as diverse as monumental architecture and oil painting, the latter craft advancing from the formally stiff figurative religiosity of early Byzantine altars to the supple allegorical delights of Botticelli’s canvases.

Yet another way to illustrate this concentration and specialization is by comparing the shares of US farms with domestic animals: in 1900 90% of all farms had chicken, and close to 80% had cattle, milk cows, and hogs; a century later about half of the farms had cattle, but fewer than 10% had other animals (USCO 1902; USDA 2018). Productivity gains made most of the agricultural labor force redundant and allowed its mass migration to industrializing cities. Rising productivities meant that even as the agricultural labor force kept on declining—in the United States from 74% in 1800 to 40% in 1900 and to just 1.7% by the year 2000 (Lebergott 1966; FRED 2018)—and even as populations were increasing, per capita availability of plant foods has been rising.

Ayres, R. 2017. Gaps in mainstream economics: Energy, growth, and sustainability. In: S. Shmelev, ed., Green Economy Reader: Lectures in Ecological Economics and Sustainability, Berlin: Springer, pp. 39–54. Bandiera, O. et al. 2010. The Making of Modern America: Migratory Flows in the Age of Mass Migration. https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Development/rasul-110502.pdf Bank for International Settlements. 2019. Total credit to households (core debt). https://stats.bis.org/statx/srs/table/f3.1 Bar-On, Y. et al. 2018. The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115:6506–6511.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

As the dramatic drop in transport costs—especially the construction of railroads and canals—opened U.S. frontier areas to staple production, the United States experienced a sequence of fifteen-to twenty-year booms driven by migration and capital flows that were responding to the newly opened land. TABLE 3 Nineteenth-century mass migration from Europe to the New World. % of own population 1880s 1890s 1900s Senders: U.K. −3.1 −5.2 −2.0 Italy −1.7 −3.4 −4.9 Spain −1.5 −6.0 −5.2 Sweden −2.9 −7.2 −3.5 Portugal −3.5 −4.2 −5.9 Receivers: U.S. 5.7 8.9 4.0 Canada 2.3 4.9 3.7 Europe in the nineteenth century was overpopulated while the New World was underpopulated.

The resulting U.S. growth and higher exports, however, were of a very different nature than would have been expected from Ricardo’s framework. First, the migration changed (strengthened) U.S. comparative advantage in the sense that wheat exports rocketed. Second, unlike lower trade costs, the impact was not global. It was geographically limited to the nations that got the mass migration (United States, Canada, Argentina, etc.). This is how I suggest we think about the second unbundling. The ICT revolution is like the open-migration policy of the United States in that it allows the G7’s source of comparative advantage (know-how) to move to the I6’s source of comparative advantage (labor).


Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

See, for example, Ruud Koopmans, ‘How to Make Europe’s Immigration Policies More Efficient and More Humane’, Migration and Citizenship: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association, 4/2 (2016): 55–9; and for debate on the empirical legacy of ‘Wir schaffen das’, see also Cathryn Costello, ‘Europe’s Refugee and Immigration Policies – Obligation, Discretion, Cooperation and Freeriding’, Migration and Citizenship: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association, 4/2 (2016): 59–66, and Georg Menz, ‘Europe’s Odd Migration Policy Choices’, Migration and Citizenship: Newsletter of the American Political Science Association, 4/2 (2016): 51–5. See, for example, Clár Ní Chonghaile, ‘People Smuggling: How It Works, Who Benefits and How It Can be Stopped’, Guardian, 31 July 2015. For an alternative view, see Thomas Spijkerboer, ‘Fact Check: Did “Wir Schaffen Das” Lead to Uncontrolled Mass Migration?’, Guest Blog, 28 September 2016, Oxford University Faculty of Law, https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centrecriminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2016/09/fact-check-did-. See, for example, Save the Children, ‘Children on the Move in Europe: Save the Children’s Response to the Deepening Child Refugee and Migrant Crisis in Europe’, 26 July 2016, https://savethechildreninternational.exposure.co/children-on-the-move-ineurope.

For an analysis of the role of business in relation to refugees, see, for example, Alexander Betts et al., Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development (Oxford, 2017: Oxford University Press), Chapter 9. For analysis of the manipulation of refugee sending for foreign-policy purposes, see, for example, Kelly Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, 2010: Cornell University Press). See, for example, Will Jones and Alex Teytelboym, ‘The Refugee Match’, presentation at the CMS conference on ‘Rethinking the Global Refugee System Protection’, New York, 6 July 2016. Hein de Haas, ‘Turning the Tide?


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Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

The disruptions of the early third millennium cascade and intersect. Human civilization’s exhaust has caused extreme weather events to grow in frequency and force, together with the long, slow devastation of droughts. These combine with a whack-a-mole world war on terrorism to set off waves of mass migration. Globalized markets let capital flow freely but stop the desperate migrants at the borders. The liberal-democratic consensus that some expected to spread everywhere has buckled as voters around the world elect autocrats. We’ve also been living through a disruption of networks. For Silicon Valley, the internet has created the favorite case in point of disruptive innovation.

We know there are benefits to staying as nomadic as we can manage. This is a sort-of-chosen kind of nomadism. Others come by their nomadism less voluntarily. Following the 2008 financial crisis, giant holding companies started buying homes once owned by resident families, turning more residents into tenants. We live in a time, meanwhile, of mass migrations due to the linked causes of war, climate change, and famine. Stateless insurgents sow terror through spectacle. Spells of automation and other disruptions keep workers on the run, changing occupations more during their lifetimes than in times past. We’re living through a shift of population from rural areas to cities, a shift far more drastic and sudden than anything in Ibn Khaldun’s historical data set.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Mariel brought over one hundred thousand people to the city in less than a year and increased its labor force by 7 percent, yet Card found “virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier.”28 Economist Rachel Friedberg reached virtually the same conclusion about mass migration from Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union into Israel.29 Despite increasing the country’s population by 12 percent between 1990 and 1994, this immigration had no discernible adverse effect on Israeli workers. Despite this and other evidence, concerns persist in America that large-scale immigration of unskilled workers, particularly from Mexico and other Latin American countries and particularly by illegal means, will harm the economic prospects of the native-born labor force.

Measuring the Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform,” Cato Institute, August 13, 2009, http://www.cato.org/publications/trade-policy-analysis/restriction-or-legalization-measuring-economic-benefits-immigration-reform (accessed December 14, 2012); Robert Lynch and Patrick Oakford, “The Economic Effects of Granting Legal Status and Citizenship to Undocumented Immigrants,” Center for American Progress, March 20, 2013, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/report/2013/03/20/57351/the-economic-effects-of-granting-legal-status-and-citizenship-to-undocumented-immigrants/ (accessed August 12, 2013). 28. David Card, “The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market,” Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, August 1989), http://www.nber.org/papers/w3069. 29. Rachel M. Friedberg, “The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4 (2001): 1373–1408, doi:10.1162/003355301753265606. 30. Amy Sherman, “Jeb Bush Says Illegal Immigration Is ‘Net Zero,’ ” Miami Herald, September 3, 2012, http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/01/2980208/jeb-bush-says-illegal-immigration.html. 31.


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When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

Argentina was a major outperformer between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, thanks largely to the free-trade instincts of the late nineteenth-century British Empire, new scientific advances and the mass migration of people in the late nineteenth century. It may have been a long way away from Europe and the US but Argentina was able to take full advantage of the Royal Navy's commitment to keep international sea lanes open. New refrigerator technologies – and faster ships – meant its beef could be exported to destinations many thousands of miles away. Its working age population grew rapidly, a reflection of the Belle Époque mass migration from Europe – particularly from southern Europe – that led to equally dramatic demographic changes in the US, Canada and Australia.


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The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

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

Earlier generations of social scientists would have called them semi-proletarian. But there is no reason to think they are becoming proletarians. First, stable jobs would have to come and stay. That is unlikely and surely will not come before social tensions turn ugly. Already, while the authorities are organising mass migration, the floating labour force has posed a threat to locals, creating ethnic tensions. An example was the government-organised transportation of Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs 3,000 miles to labour for the Xuri toy factory in Guangdong. The Uighurs, housed near the Han majority, were paid much less than the Hans they displaced.

But the scale of the movement was bound to raise tensions. As one Han worker told a journalist, ‘The more of them there were, the worse relations became’. In those riots, the Uighurs claimed their death toll was understated and that the police did not protect them. Whatever the truth, the violence was an almost inevitable outcome of mass migration of temporary workers across unfamiliar cultures. The internal migration in China is the largest migratory process the world has ever known. It is part of the development of a global labour market system. Those migrants are having an effect on how labour is being organised and compensated in every part of the world.


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Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization by Paul Kindstedt

agricultural Revolution, classic study, cotton gin, Kickstarter, mass immigration, New Urbanism, trade route

Pastoralism enabled peoples who were threatened by crop failures and hunger to take advantage of surrounding unused marginal land that was unsuitable for crop cultivation but could support sheep and goat grazing (Zarins 1990). This in turn encouraged the movement of pastoral populations in search of new land, which soon erupted into mass migrations that led to the settlement of northwest Anatolia around this time. There, along the fertile shores of the Sea of Marmara, the settlers shifted their pastoral emphasis from small ruminants to cattle, and the production of cow’s milk commenced probably for the first time (Evershed et al. 2008).

Layered on top of these developments were dramatic social and demographic changes that accompanied the bubonic plague outbreak of 1348 through 1350, during which between 30 and 45 percent of the general population of England perished. The scarcity of labor that resulted dealt a fatal blow to the labor-intensive manor demesnes and catalyzed a progressive shift away from demesne agriculture in favor of capitalistic yeomanry. In the process, mass migrations of peasants who became dislocated from the rural countryside as the manors broke up streamed into London and other population centers in search of work, creating large urban centers for the first time in England and new markets for cheese. The London market would profoundly influence the next chapter in English cheese history, that of the yeoman cheeses.


pages: 86 words: 26,489

This America: The Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore

Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, desegregation, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, immigration reform, liberal world order, mass immigration, Steve Bannon

Illiberal nationalism is often thought of as what happens when a nation-state demands extraordinary sacrifices from its people—especially by participation in wars of aggression—and, requiring their consent, asks for that sacrifice in the name of the nation. The more outrageous the war, the harder it is to gain that consent, the more grotesque the depiction of the nation’s enemies. But illiberal nationalism is an outgrowth of other late nineteenth-century developments as well, including mass politics, mass communication, and mass migration. More than twenty million Europeans emigrated to the United States between 1880 and 1920. The smaller and more fluid the world became, the flimsier were stories of ancient nations made of a single people, united by a shared line of descent, and the more eagerly people keen for political power searched for rationales for exclusion, discrimination, and aggression.


pages: 736 words: 210,277

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris

Albert Einstein, British Empire, family office, friendly fire, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Suez crisis 1956

Herzl reached a dismal conclusion: There was no hope and no future for the Jews in Europe; it could not and would not assimilate them. And in the large, multiethnic Continental empires, Jews would eventually face the hostility of the various minorities bent on selfdetermination. Ultimately, the Jews of Europe faced destruction. The solution was a separate, independent Jewish state to be established after a mass migration of Jews out of Europe. Herzl dashed off a political manifesto, The Jews' State (1896), and spent his remaining years organizing the "Zionist" movement. He unsuccessfully canvassed Europe's potentates, including Sultan Abdulhamid II of Turkey, to grant the Jews a state. But the sultan, unwilling to relinquish any part of his steadily diminishing empire, rebuffed Herzl, a master bluffer, who had promised the Ottomans billions (which he did not have and probably could not have raised).

The AAC's recommendations were unanimous. But the AAC had done nothing to heal the basic Anglo-American rift. Truman once again endorsed the passage of a hundred thousand DPs to Palestine and approved the scrapping of the white paper's land sale provisions, which the AAC had deemed discriminatory; Attlee ruled out mass immigration until the Yishuv was disarmed (which he knew was a nonstarter). The Jewish Agency endorsed the report's immigration recommendation but rejected all the rest. The Arabs rejected everything. They demanded immediate independence for an Arab-ruled Palestine, not "binationalism," whatever that might mean, and called for an immediate cessation of immigration.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Skill-biased technological change, for instance, means that information technology serves as a valuable complement for skilled “knowledge workers” while substituting for less-skilled manual and clerical workers. The slowdown in the growth of workers’ average years of schooling completed means that the relative supply of skilled workers lags behind relative demand. Mass immigration expands the ranks of low-skill workers even as demand for them has flagged. People increasingly marry within their social class, reducing the marital pathway to social mobility. The factors contributing to outsized gains at the very top are similarly diverse. They include the rise of “winner-take-all” markets produced by information technology’s network effects as well as globalization’s expansion of relevant market size; a huge run-up in stock prices; continuing growth in the size of big corporations (which has helped to fuel rising CEO pay); and a big drop in the top income tax rate (which has facilitated the use of high compensation as a strategy for attracting top managers, professionals, and executives).

With the rise of policies that suppress and distort competition in key sectors, productivity growth has been hampered instead of encouraged; consequently, the country’s growth outlook is now even cloudier. At the same time, increasing inequality was powered by a number of different factors, including the rise of IT, women’s increasing labor market opportunities, and the return of mass immigration. A large-scale political project to siphon off further resources and funnel them to the rich was the opposite of what was needed, yet that is what we got. In short, our case studies show the rise of policies that deliver the maximum benefit for a favored few while inflicting maximum harm on everybody else.


pages: 225 words: 64,595

Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War by Micah Goodman

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, European colonialism, mass immigration, one-state solution, public intellectual, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As the Nazis were gaining power in Germany in the 1930s, Jabotinsky warned repeatedly of a terrible catastrophe that would soon befall the Jews of Europe: “We are living on the brink of the abyss, the eve of a final disaster in the global ghetto.”2 He tried to shake the Zionist movement out of its complacency, and urged the Zionists to push for the migration of the Jews of Europe to Palestine. The man who correctly predicted the Jews’ betrayal at the hands of the British also correctly predicted their annihilation at the hands of the Germans.3 Jabotinsky was also right about the Arabs. Contrary to widespread opinion among Zionists, Jabotinsky foresaw that mass immigration to Palestine by the Jews would provoke mass resistance in Palestine from the Arabs. Jabotinsky wrote that the anti-Jewish Jaffa riots of 1921 were not an exception to the norm but were now the norm.4 The Zionist movement was unwittingly marching toward a violent confrontation with the Arab national movement.

Millions of Jews lived in Europe; if most of them had immigrated, Palestine would have had a massive Jewish majority. But the extermination of European Jewry changed Jewish demographics forever, making it impossible for them to dream any longer of realizing all three ambitions. The way to create a Jewish majority in Jabotinsky’s day was to encourage mass immigration—and some Israelis still believe that a majority can be achieved thus, without territorial compromise. But when the princes relinquished the objective of a land united in favor of safeguarding the Jewish majority on a land divided, they compromised on one goal of Jabotinsky’s philosophy. They did so, however, in order to realize a different, no less important, goal of that philosophy.


pages: 1,015 words: 170,908

Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, late capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois

Obviously they will come into view and consolidate themselves only after tremendous socialist crises.’’8 We cannot say exactly what Nietzsche foresaw in his lucid delirium, but indeed what recent event could be a stronger example ofthe power ofdesertion and exodus, the power ofthe nomad horde, 214 I N T E R M E Z Z O than the fall ofthe Berlin Wall and the collapse ofthe entire Soviet bloc? In the desertion from ‘‘socialist discipline,’’ savage mobility and mass migration contributed substantially to the collapse ofthe system. In fact, the desertion of productive cadres disorganized and struck at the heart ofthe disciplinary system ofthe bureaucratic Soviet world. The mass exodus ofhighly trained workers from Eastern Europe played a central role in provoking the collapse of the Wall.9 Even though it refers to the particularities of the socialist state system, this example demonstrates that the mobility ofthe labor force can indeed express an open political conflict and contribute to the destruction ofthe regime.

Network Production The first geographical consequence ofthe passage from an industrial to an informational economy is a dramatic decentralization of pro- duction. The processes ofmodernization and the passage to the industrial paradigm provoked the intense aggregation ofproductive forces and mass migrations of labor power toward centers that became factory cities, such as Manchester, Osaka, and Detroit. Ef- ficiency ofmass industrial production depended on the concentra- tion and proximity ofelements in order to create the factory site and facilitate transportation and communication. The informatization of industry and the rising dominance ofservice production, however, have made such concentration ofproduction no longer necessary.

Moreover, where would the great innovative sectors of immaterial production, from design to fashion, and from electron- ics to science in Europe, the United States, and Asia, be without the ‘‘illegal labor’’ ofthe great masses, mobilized toward the radiant 398 T H E D E C L I N E A N D F A L L O F E M P I R E horizons ofcapitalist wealth and freedom? Mass migrations have become necessary for production. Every path is forged, mapped, and traveled. It seems that the more intensely each is traveled and the more suffering is deposited there, the more each path becomes productive. These paths are what brings the ‘‘earthly city’’ out of the cloud and confusion that Empire casts over it.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

EU populist parties and “extremist” U.S. presidential candidates reflect the explosive anger of globalization’s losers, who are now lobbying for radical change in greater numbers. Protectionism and isolationism are resurging, manifesting themselves in the opposition to trade agreements, and in separatist movements in the U.K. with regard to Europe, in Scotland with regard to the U.K., and in Catalonia with regard to Spain. Global inequality has also driven mass migration, which in turn polarizes politics even further. According to the WEF’s Global Risk Report, we are currently seeing the highest level of protests since the 1980s, because through access to information on the Internet, people realize the extent of inequality and their own powerlessness.19 Several years ago, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned of the impending “global political awakening.”

Perhaps—as Einstein said—we don’t need to think more, but think differently. Traditionally, we have been trained to think analytically and deal with parts of problems separately. However, today’s multidimensional, complex world is not linear, but is the result of dynamic, simultaneously interacting phenomena. Brexit, unpredictable monetary policies, mass migration and terrorism are but a few examples. We can attain a deeper understanding of these problems by employing a different approach called “systems thinking” and focusing more on the relationship of individual parts than on the parts themselves, which alone say nothing about the system’s behavior.39 According to organizational theorist Stephen Haines, “major change fails 75 percent of the time because of a piecemeal and analytical approach to a systems problem that tries to cure one problem at a time.”40 And in the opinion of world systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein, part of the problem is that “we have studied . . . phenomena in separate boxes to which we have given special names—politics, economics, the social structure, culture—without seeing that these boxes are constructs more of our imagination than of reality.”41 The postcrisis banking regulation exemplifies the analytical, one-dimensional approach to problem solving.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Farmlands that had produced the same strains of grain or grapes for centuries or more will adapt, if they are lucky, to entirely new crops; in Sicily, the breadbasket of the ancient world, farmers are already turning to tropical fruits. Arctic ice that formed over millions of years will be unleashed as water, literally changing the face of the planet and remodeling shipping routes responsible for the very idea of globalization. And mass migrations will sever communities numbering in the millions—even tens of millions—from their ancestral homelands, which will disappear forever. Just how long the ecosystems of Earth will be thrown into flux and disarray from anthropogenic climate change also depends on how much more of that change we choose to engineer—and perhaps how much we can manage to undo.

For Rushkoff, these are all facets of the same impulse, broadly shared by the class of visionaries and power brokers and venture capitalists whose dreams for the future are received as blueprints, especially by the armies of engineers they command like impetuous fiefdoms—investing in new forms of space travel, life extension, and technology-aided life after death. “They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion,” he writes. “For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.” “An Account of My Hut”: Christina Nichol, “An Account of My Hut,” n+1, Spring 2018. Nichol explains the title this way: I once read a story called “An Account of My Hut,” by Kamo no Chōmei, a 12th-century Japanese hermit.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The earth’s climate is already 0.85°C warmer than in 1880; only a rapid reduction in atmospheric greenhouse gases would avoid a rise to potentially catastrophic levels over the twenty-first century. Even the upper limits of warming aimed for by the Paris climate accord (c. 1.5–2°C above pre-industrial levels) could have an impact on sea levels and agriculture that would produce mass migrations, famines, and resource wars. Cities such as New York, with its 520-mile coastline, are severely imperiled by rising seas. Increased global temperature levels have already had a measurable impact on public health, from the impact of extreme heat on the elderly and the greater prevalence of dengue fever.6 If this weren’t frightening enough, resistance of diseases to drugs is rising steadily.

The central claim of Black Lives Matter is brutally simple: the American Leviathan does not deliver on its function of protecting all lives equally. It is almost certain that the number and scope of such political demands is going to multiply in the coming years, especially as climate-related mass migration increases. Threats to life do not need to be as direct as those publicized by Black Lives Matter in order to be politicized. The Missing Migrants Project has sought to count the number of migrants who have died or gone missing while migrating, initially in response to the mounting humanitarian crisis of boats sinking in the Mediterranean.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

These are all relatively slow-moving crises that are unlikely to generate the massive, coordinated response of an asteroid-like threat. International cooperation is vital yet elusive, if not hopeless. Think global climate change, pandemics, cyberwarfare, global financial crises, conflict between the United States and China and Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Deglobalization, global financial crises, mass migration, and ethical uses of artificial intelligence sound very different to authorities in rich and poor countries, or even among leading economic and geopolitical rivals. Perils hide in plain sight. A widening gulf between haves and have-nots signals the proximity and severity of megathreats. Trade and globalization produce economic winners and losers in advanced economies and emerging markets.

Wait for a much more severe crisis and political backlash when dozens of millions of refugees want to flee desperate conditions. Increasingly, war and conflict—on top of climate change and failed states—will create waves of millions of refugees, as the war in Ukraine and the civil war in Syria tragically showed us. National and regional disorder and clashes will multiply in size and frequency, leading to incipient mass migration that will face closing borders. Inequality and climate change are systemic. What about our looming financial crises? Innovation can solve many problems, but it won’t erase unsustainable debt. We have borrowed our way to prosperity with no exit strategy. Loans secured with home equity and other assets lifted consumption in the 2000s as income growth slowed.


pages: 276 words: 78,061

Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags by Tim Marshall

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, colonial rule, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, It's morning again in America, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, trade route, white picket fence

Then it began to fall out of fashion, and the English flag was almost a no-go area for those nervous of being associated with the Far Right. There was an unspoken assumption in England that prominent displays of either flag, outside state events, might symbolize an aggressive mindset supporting a pre-mass-immigration white culture. To some it undoubtedly did. In the mid 1980s I took a bus from Oxford train station bound for Oxford United football club, which was due to play Leeds United. The bus, packed with Leeds supporters, passed a group of young black men in their late teens. From the top deck came the chant ‘There’s no black in the Union Jack!

However, back home they are also aware that nationalist parties, such as the Swedish Democrats, are increasingly displaying it and a Far Right magazine is called Blue-Yellow Questions, so it is again becoming . . . problematic. The popular view of Sweden is that it is a haven of cultural ultra-liberalism and third-way economic policies. This view is at least two decades out of date and belongs to the Sweden of Abba, not the Sweden of mass immigration. Since the 1990s the market has been slowly allowed into the state. Welfare and education spending are significantly down, and some schools have even been privatized. Strict police and intelligence surveillance laws have been passed by several successive governments. Ethnic enclaves are common in the urban areas and unemployment is high, especially among non-white Swedes.


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

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

In August 2019, Patrick Crusius opened fire upon a predominantly Hispanic crowd in El Paso, Texas. Crusius killed twenty-two and wounded many more. His manifesto cited the New Zealand shooting, half a world away, as his inspiration. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” he wrote. He blamed politicians “of both parties” for enabling mass immigration and insisted, “My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president.” Yet among Crusius’s complaints about Hispanic immigration into Texas was that it could shift the state’s politics from Republican to Democrat—not a complaint you’d expect to hear from a person wholly alienated from the political system and equally hostile to both parties.

But more important than the number of immigrants should be the composition of immigration: more people who come to meet a gap in the US labor market; fewer who come because a relative got here first. The United States runs an immigration policy as if it were a country facing a desperate labor shortage. In fact, the United States faces a desperate social cohesion shortage. Immigration done right can tighten the bonds of nationhood. Done wrong, as the United States is doing it, mass immigration only intensifies the mutual suspicions of American society—and impedes any effort to rewrite the social contract to offer a better deal to the average American. There are extreme fringes in the immigration debate for sure, and no moderate policy will appease them. As in the 1950s, so it is today, the goal is not to convert convinced extremists, but to render them harmless by denying them followers.


pages: 128 words: 35,958

Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People by Dean Baker, Jared Bernstein

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, collective bargaining, declining real wages, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, low interest rates, mass immigration, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Phillips curve, price stability, publication bias, quantitative easing, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, selection bias, War on Poverty

Workers in the state experienced substantial pay increases – the average weekly wage rose 16 percentage points more than the national average from 2007 to 2011.[9] Clearly more workers could have been employed if they had opted to move from areas of high unemployment to North Dakota. However, the economy-wide impact of a mass migration to North Dakota would have been minimal. In 2011 there were 380,000 people employed in North Dakota. Boosting that number by a massive 25 percent would reduce the national unemployment rate by less than 0.1 percentage point. To make a serious case that a mismatch between the location of unemployed workers and the location of the available jobs is a major cause of unemployment would require identifying dozens of North Dakotas.


pages: 471 words: 109,267

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, call centre, central bank independence, congestion charging, Corn Laws, Credit Default Swap, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Etonian, failed state, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, market bubble, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, moral panic, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Right to Buy, shareholder value, Skype, smart meter, social distancing, stem cell, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, working-age population, Y2K

If the UK had a formula it was still Thatcher’s: the costs of employing people remained lower in the UK than elsewhere in Europe – workers were more ‘flexible’. During the recession, unemployment remained relatively low, at 8 per cent. But the social costs of a low-wage economy are also destabilizing, putting extreme pressure on households and communities, helping explain idiosyncratic British worries about crime and disorder. Socially disruptive mass migration pegged down low wages. The British model was only one of the ways to trade off inequality, social disruption, job creation and prosperity. The Germans had higher unemployment, but treated those out of work more generously because, right and left, they valued ‘social solidarity’. The UK formula started with consumption.

Because employment law was flexible – a coy way of saying in the UK it was easier to hire and fire staff – French, German, Spanish and other job-seekers came and often stayed. Brits of course also worked in Paris, Madrid and Frankfurt am Main but on the Paseo del Prado your waiter was not going to be a UK migrant. British plumbers did not fix the blocked drains of Wroclaw. The UK was far from unique; mass migration affected the Netherlands and Sweden and 13 per cent of Germany’s population was foreign-born. Getting into Britain to work legally had become easier. By 2009, 14 per cent of the population of working age had been born abroad, compared with 8 per cent in 1995, 6.8 million people, up from 2.9 million.


Lonely Planet Ireland's Best Trips by Lonely Planet

Kickstarter, mass immigration, reserve currency, urban renewal

Shortly after Muff take the small left turn, signed Iskaheen, up the hill. Park beside Iskaheen church (11km). Tower Museum, Derry STEPHEN SAKS/GETTY IMAGES © Top of Chapter 8 Iskaheen It’s completely off the tourist trail, but Iskaheen church’s tiny graveyard offers evidence of two of Ireland’s most significant historical themes: the poverty that led to mass migration and the consequences of sectarian violence. One gravestone among many is that of the McKinney family, recording a string of children dying young: at 13 years, 11 months, nine months, and six weeks. It also bears the name of 34-year-old James Gerard McKinney, one of 13 unarmed civilians shot dead when British troops opened fire on demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, 1972.

BEST DRIVE The white-knuckle ascent up mountainous Mamore’s Gap. Malin Head Ireland’s most northerly point DESIGN PICS/THE IRISH IMAGE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES © Inishowen Peninsula This trip isn’t about skimming Ireland’s surface through big-name sights. Instead it’s a route to the heart of the country’s compelling narratives: faith, poverty, mass migration, territorial disputes, the Troubles. With unsigned, cliffside roads that look more like farm tracks, you’ll probably get a little lost. But locals are helpful if you do – and asking for directions is a great conversation starter. Top of Chapter 1 Derry Kick-start your Inishowen trip by exploring the story of one of the coast’s most famous victims: La Trinidad Valenciera.


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

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

The Us-versus-Them frame is used to stir up fears that provide a support base almost impervious to criticisms of Trump’s actual policy performance.65 Similarly, the Brexit Leave campaign and UKIP Eurosceptic rhetoric also harks back nostalgically to a time before Britain joined the EU, decades ago, when Westminster was sovereign, society was predominately white Anglo-­Saxon, manufacturing and extracting industries – producing steel, coal, cars – still provided well-­paid and secure jobs for unionized workers, and, despite the end of empire, Britain remained a major economic and military world power leading the Commonwealth. UKIP rhetoric blends criticism of the European Union with concern about mass immigrations and hostility toward political elites in Westminster and Brussels.66 Similar nostalgic messages echo in the rhetoric of other Authoritarian-­ Populist leaders. This appeal resonates among traditionalists for whom rapid social change and long-­term demographic shifts have eroded the world they once knew.67 How these value appeals translate into votes – and thus seats and ministerial offices – is conditioned by the institutional rules of the game, especially the electoral system, the strategic response to rivals from mainstream parties, and the campaign communication process through leadership appeals and the media.

These parties share a deeply Euro­sceptic philosophy, seeking to restore national sovereignty, to roll back Brussels bureaucracy, and to control immigration. As the ENL website proclaims: ‘Our European cultures, our values and our freedom are under attack. They are threatened by the crushing and dictatorial powers of the European Union. They are threatened by mass immigration, by open borders and by a single European currency: one size does not fit all.’35 Across the Atlantic, Trump has repeatedly advocated tightening America’s borders against illegal aliens and limiting legal immigration. In addition to his campaign pledge to build a wall on the US–Mexican border, his administration’s actions include employing more immigration officials to round up illegal aliens, barring Muslims from entering the country, limiting the number of refugees and asylum seekers, rescinding the rights of undocumented ‘Dreamers,’ brought into the country illegally as children – which had been recognized by the Obama administration – strengthening vetting of asylum seekers, and cracking down on ‘sanctuary’ cities.36 As the official White House website summarizes these policies: ‘The United States must adopt an immigration system that serves the national interest.

This provides a loose alliance for the Austrian Freedom Party, the Flemish Vlaams Belang (FB), the French National Front (FN), the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Italian Lega Nord, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), and some individual MEPs from other countries. In the words of Marcel de Graff, the ENF’s co-­president: ‘Our European cultures, our values and our freedom are under attack. They are threatened by the crushing and dictatorial powers of the European Union. They are threatened by mass immigration, by open borders and by a single European currency: one size does not fit all.’18 However, the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFD) provides another rival group in the European Parliament, linking UKIP, the Alternative for Germany, the Five Star Movement, the Lithuanian Order and Justice Party, the Swedish Democrats, and other members.


pages: 137 words: 37,066

Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds

mass immigration, phenotype

But it’s only a temporary lull, before it starts hurting us as well. Crops fail. Soils start to turn sterile. Decomposition processes falter, triggering a second public health emergency beyond the initial famine. Within a decade, the effects are global and climatic. Dust storms, aridification, mass migration. A gradual collapse of social order. We had to give a name to the whole thing so we called it the Scouring: an environmental and biological cascade. Not much comes through the other side; certainly not enough for anyone to live on. All animal and plant life gone, except for a few laboratory specimens.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

And it gives an inkling of the nature of the human resource that Israel received when the Soviet floodgates were opened in 1990. It was a challenge to figure out what to do with an immigrant influx that, although talented, faced significant language and cultural barriers. Plus, the educated elite of a country the size of the Soviet Union would not easily fit into a country as small as Israel. Before this mass immigration, Israel already had among the highest number of doctors per capita in the world. Even if there had not been a glut, the Soviet doctors would have had a difficult adjustment to a new medical system, a new language, and an entirely new culture. The same was true in many other professions. Though the Israeli government struggled to find jobs and build housing for the new arrivals, the Russians could not have arrived at a more opportune time.

The Center for Absorption in Science helps match arriving scientists with Israeli employers, and the absorption ministry runs entrepreneurship centers, which provide assistance with obtaining start-up capital.16 There are also absorption programs supported by the government but launched by independent Israeli citizens. Asher Elias, for example, believes there is a future for Ethiopians in the vaunted high-tech industry in Israel. Elias’s parents came to Israel in the 1960s from Ethiopia, nearly twenty years before the mass immigration of Ethiopian Jews. Asher’s older sister, Rina, was the first Ethiopian-Israeli born in Israel. After completing a degree in business administration at the College of Management in Jerusalem, Elias took a marketing job at a high-tech company and attended Selah University, then in Jerusalem, to study software engineering—he had always been a computer junkie.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Chapter 11: A Place Called Home 1. Jackson, A., London’s Metroland, Capital Transport Publishing, 2006, p. 59. 2. www.citypopulation.de/world/Agglomerations.html 3. Williams, A. and Donald, A., 2011, p. 59. 4. Ehrlich, P., Population Bomb, Ballentine Books, 1968, p. 1. 5. Pearce, F., Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash, Eden Project Books, 2010, Introduction. 6. Williams, A. and Donald, A., 2011, p. 63. 7. Ibid., p. 39. 8. UNFPA Youth Supplement, 2007, p. 7. 9. Florida, R., Gulden, T. and Mellender, C., The Rise of the Mega-Region, Martin Prosperity Institute, October 2007, p. 2. 10. superflex.net/tools/superkilen 11. vimeo.com/14679640 12.

., ‘Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) – Foundations to Treetops’, Environment and Urbanisation, 2001 Patel, S., Arputham, J., Burra, S. and Savchuk, K., ‘Getting the Information Base for Dharavi’s Redevelopment’, Environment and Urbanisation, 2009 Patel, S. and Mitlin, D., ‘Gender Issues and Slum/Shack Dweller Foundation’, IIED, Gender and Urban Federations, 2007 Pearce, F., Peoplequake: Mass Migration, Ageing Nations and the Coming Population Crash, Eden Project Books, 2010 Pereira, F., Vaccari, A., Glardin, F., Chiu, C. and Ratti, C., ‘Crowd Sensing in the Web: Analysing the Citizen Experience in the Urban Space’, senseable.mit.edu/papers/publications.html Perlman, J., Favela: Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, OUP, 2012 Peter, P.


pages: 385 words: 119,859

This Is London: Life and Death in the World City by Ben Judah

British Empire, deindustrialization, eurozone crisis, gentrification, high net worth, illegal immigration, mass immigration, multicultural london english, out of africa, period drama, plutocrats, Skype, white flight, young professional

They hang up immediately: police. This is why I have been driving around with the Interpreter, a Romanian friend, from Enfield Chase. He is making the calls. His lie: he’s looking for work. My lie: I’m Russian. We find the doss house the way everyone else does: online. Romanians, Poles, Lithuanians – every mass migration has huge web portals where the migrant can find all the numbers he needs. These are some of the busiest classified sites in London. There are mobiles for forklift-truck lessons. There are mobiles for bosses after tilers. And there are numbers for shared rooms. These are almost all in the decaying working-class suburbs: and in the East this means Newham, then out into Ilford, Beckton and Barking.

The man driving the white van is an eighties political refugee. His very first job on site was wall painting, in a building trade then run by Irish wide boys. Pawel is one of the old Poles. Today he swerves the corners between his sites. Pawel is one of the winners: one of the make-it-up-as-you-go-along building bosses who enlisted the mass migration in 2000s. Pawel knew London wanted those bathroom refits for cheap. And he has been rewarded for it. As we hit red lights, he reminisces: how he walked this street when he owned nothing, only a small ripped suitcase, when he slept in that mite-infested bedsit. Today he owns a house in Balham, a chalet in France and an apartment in Warsaw.


The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

Population concerns remained robust and intimately connected to foundational policy questions surrounding slavery and westward expansion in the decades before the Civil War. Apprehension of enlargement did not, as is often supposed, develop merely in response to the “closing of the frontier” at the end of the nineteenth century. True, the closing of the frontier led many white Americans to worry that their nation had “filled up”—and, given the era’s mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, filled up with the wrong kinds of people. It also fueled the popular culture’s nostalgia for an imagined untamed West. Among economists, however, Malthusians were on the defensive at the turn of the twentieth century. Conservatives theorists, following the classical economists (and breaking with their Federalist forbearers), suggested that steady population expansion threatened the economy and supply of natural resources.

So wise a man as John Stuart Mill allowed his economic philosophy to be overshadowed by this idea.”86 Warner conceded that there was something to the theory of overpopulation-induced poverty, just as there was something to Marx’s insistence on capitalists’ appropriation of surplus, Henry George’s theory of land monopoly, and the conservative position that personal vice causes poverty. Yet no single theory could explicate the poverty that accompanied modern industrialization; according to Warner, “the causes of destitution must be indefinitely numerous and complicated.”87 Many American economists and poverty experts did assume (correctly) that mass immigration to the United States, which picked up steam in the 1880s, stunted the wages of the working class.88 As the antiimmigrant movement strengthened in the early twentieth century, however, it was guided less by pure Malthusianism and more by a new idea used to explain poverty and justify harsh treatment of the poor: genetic deficiency.

And in the United States, where the population increased from 112 million when Keynes made these comments to 281 million at the century’s end, fractious discussions surrounding population-related issues as diverse as eugenics, declining birthrates, the “population explosion,” and the return of mass immigration roiled both culture and politics. And yet, the population question remained, at root, an economist’s one—it was the great shift in prevailing economic expertise from moderate Malthusianism to veneration of population growth that determined answers to the (non-) Problem of Population most of all.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

It was easy in the investment business to see everything as just a series of prices on a Bloomberg screen, but these were increasingly symbols of something that represented a profound change for Asia. Market forces brought expansion and they also brought contraction, and large economic contractions can bring socio-political turmoil. The social fabric, particularly of Southeast Asia, was fragile, a legacy of generations of mass immigration and colonial era use of indentured labour; and that fragility would be tested by what was to come. By 1998 there were riots and associated deaths in both Malaysia and Indonesia. Badgers, skunks and killer whales 7 August 1996, Regional The black and white consequences of mispricing for the shareholder depend upon whether they are involved with a badger, a killer whale or a skunk.

It became clear to me then that if I was right on the economic consequences of the creation of a single currency, then the political beneficiaries of those consequences were likely to be Europe’s political extremists. Since then, the attempt to create a single currency has caused untold economic, financial and social damage across Europe. It has stripped millions of people of opportunities through high unemployment, created mass immigration of the young and materially depleted the power of local democracy. The extreme political parties have indeed benefited from the powerful eradication of inefficiencies that a French politician so accurately predicted would be reduced by the iron fist of a single currency. What a tragedy that this man of such high and noble ideals had chosen a mechanism to enact them that continues to act to destroy them.

The policies designed to do that would not necessarily promote the interests of the portfolio investor. In Mexico, the combined US and IMF bailout of 1995 had in effect bailed out portfolio investors, particularly those holding fixed interest securities. That the United States had contributed in scale to that programme was probably because the key policy risk then was mass immigration to the United States from Mexico should the local economy have collapsed. There was no such risk to US borders from the economic collapse in Asia and it was thus not clear that portfolio investors could expect the same scale of actions in 1997 that had bailed out portfolio investors in Mexico in 1995.


pages: 91 words: 24,469

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

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

Democracies without democrats do not last. They decay, into oligarchy, theocracy, ethnic nationalism, tribalism, authoritarian one-party rule, or some combination of these. For most of its history the United States has been lucky enough to evade these classic forces of entropy, even after a devastating Civil War and mass immigration. What’s extraordinary—and appalling—about the past four decades of our history is that our politics have been dominated by two ideologies that encourage and even celebrate the unmaking of citizens. On the right, an ideology that questions the existence of a common good and denies our obligation to help fellow citizens, through government action if necessary.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

This would further increase social tensions and conflicts, and create a less cohesive, more volatile world, particularly given that people are today much more aware of and sensitive to social injustices and the discrepancies in living conditions between different countries. Unless public- and private-sector leaders assure citizens that they are executing credible strategies to improve peoples’ lives, social unrest, mass migration, and violent extremism could intensify, thus creating risks for countries at all stages of development. It is crucial that people are secure in the belief that they can engage in meaningful work to support themselves and their families, but what happens if there is insufficient demand for labour, or if the skills available no longer match the demand?


pages: 131 words: 41,052

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century by Mark Leonard

Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, global reserve currency, Global Witness, invisible hand, knowledge economy, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension reform, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, shareholder value, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

The institutions of the American order were designed to prevent the biggest threat to our security: stopping other countries from using their armies to interfere in our internal affairs. But in the twenty-first century, many of the most important threats are neither caused by nor aimed at states: they are about mobile individuals in an era of globalization. Today, we fear invading armies less than terrorism, global warming, the spread of diseases like Aids, or mass migrations caused by ethnic cleansing. With the spread of democracy and human rights around the world, cheap travel, and the telescopic vision of a global media and campaigning organizations that bring suffering into our living rooms, the public is no longer insulated from disasters in distant parts of the globe.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

The category was ‘Society and Diversity Commentator of the Year’ and on the shortlist were also my Guardian colleague Gary Younge and three Times writers. One was Melanie Phillips, a columnist who had over the years made statements about immigrants and Muslims that, in my view, were incendiary. Her inclusion made a mockery of an award category celebrating ‘society and diversity’. Among many other offences, she wrote that ‘mass immigration’ is ‘convulsing Europe’ and that since it is mostly ‘composed of Muslims, it is therefore hardly surprising that anti-immigrant feeling is largely anti-Muslim feeling’. ‘The sheer weight of numbers’, she stated, ‘plus the refusal to assimilate to Western values, makes this an unprecedented crisis for Western liberalism.’

The NY Times top 10 bestsellers list’ (The Open Book Blog, 10 December 2013), https://blog.leeandlow.com/2013/12/10/wheres-the-diversity-the-ny-times-top-10-bestsellers-list/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 223 ‘… the Sunday Times top ten bestselling hardback non-fiction chart’: ‘The Sunday Times Bestsellers of the Year 2017’ (Sunday Times, 24 December 2017), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-sunday-times-bestsellers-of-the-year-2017-ldqr8lt9n?ni-statuscode=acsaz-307 [accessed on 25 July 2019] 224 ‘new company-wide goal’: Lionel Shriver, ‘Great writers are found with an open mind’ (Spectator, 9 June 2018), https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/when-diversity-means-uniformity/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 225 ‘“mass immigration” is “convulsing Europe”’: Melanie Phillips, ‘How the West Was Lost’ (Spectator, 11 May 2002), http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/11th-may-2002/14/how-the-west-was-lost [accessed on 25 July 2019] 226 ‘one of the very few inside the church’: Melanie Phillips, ‘When a bishop has to leave the Church of England to stand up for Christians, what hope is left for Britain?’


pages: 307 words: 88,745

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, school choice, side project, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

A coping strategy. That made it easier for him to converse with the other guests, and with me. * * * “IT BECAME SO THIN,” Steve says. “There was no resonance to the debate, it was—it didn’t mean anything. The Republicans never addressed trade, they never addressed jobs, they never addressed mass immigration, illegal immigration as taking away people’s sovereignty and taking away their jobs. They never discussed it. They had this very thin thing on tax cuts. It was, it’s what I call thin, with no human substance, no lifeblood. That’s what Trump provided. Trump provided a non-politically correct vernacular that hit the working class right in their . . .”

It implores us to consider how the liberal project of progress might have been degrading our lives under the guise of social advance; to view artificial intelligence as a late stage of secularization and the removal of spirit from the world; to regard the emancipation of women as a step toward loneliness and confusion born of the death of given social roles; to view support for mass immigration as an outgrowth of an instinct to view people as mere quantifiable material; to envision the loss of community, diversity, and sovereignty when we hear talk of universal democracy. It can inspire racism as well, though one can make few assumptions about how Traditionalists today—including those I studied—deal with that legacy.


pages: 353 words: 355

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

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

THEEurope, with a slight stutter step, is going through many of the same changes that Americans went through in the early to middle 1990s. European businesses and households have been quickly adopting new computer technologies and getting wired up to the Internet. They have been incorporating many of the same financial innovations: starting a mass migration of individuals to stocks and mutual funds, taking to initial public offerings, and nurturing new venture capital practices. The fundamental restructuring of the economy is proceeding more slowly but still steadily in the right direction. By the late 1990s, Europeans were finally pushing through with privatizations (e.g., of their public telecommunications companies), 92 Iks LONQ BOOM going through with corporate restructuring, and deregulating the economy so that smaller entrepreneurial firms could begin creating growth and jobs.

In the twentieth century alone, we appear to have raised the world temperature one and a quarter degrees, and for most of that century, most of the world was not industrializing. If the temperature continues to rise at the projected rate—let alone accelerate—we could be heading into a wild ride of rising sea levels, shifting climatic zones, mass migration away from coastal areas, and a lot more of that weird weather. William Calvin, a professor at the University of Washington who has researched the linkage between evolution and climate change, speculates that global warming will actually quickly boomerang back into a far more catastrophic global cooling, which will bring on another Ice Age.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

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

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

The unusual thing about this country has been the stubborn and quite strong connection between religious belief and political party—a cultural peculiarity that, in the post-materialist politics of values, has allowed computer technicians in Orange County to find common cause with West Virginia coal miners and truck drivers.73 6. THE ECONOMICS OF THE BIG SORT Culture and Growth in the 1990s Opportunity, not necessity, is the mother of invention. —JANE JACOBS "An Inexplicable Sort of Mass Migration" THE Baton Rouge Advocate ran a series of stories in 2002 titled "Leaving Louisiana"—and people were. They were hoofing it from Louisiana by the hundreds of thousands long before Hurricane Katrina washed, rinsed, and tumbled out those who remained. In the flow of people back and forth across the state line, Texas cities alone had a net gain of 121,000 Louisianans between 1992 and 2000.

Portland (I'm talking about Oregon throughout this chapter), Seattle, Dallas, and Austin gained at the same time the Cleveland Plain Dealer described the depopulation of its city as a "quiet crisis" and the Baton Rouge Advocate published its series. Dave Eggers, in his 2000 autobiographical book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, called the movement of his educated and young midwestern friends to San Francisco "an inexplicable sort of mass migration."1 Actually, it was perfectly explicable. Eggers and his heartland buddies weren't the only ones switching addresses. As many as 100 million Americans resettled across a county border in the 1990s. People didn't scatter like ants from a kicked-over hill. There was an order and a flow to the movement—more like the migration of different species of birds.


pages: 381 words: 120,361

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

Sarah knew only too well that it was largely thanks to the efforts of the IPCC over the past forty years that the worst effects of climate change had been averted. And the same was true for the panel on antimicrobial resistance. The controversy these days was with the Intergovernmental Panel on Population Displacement, which had its work cut out and was hugely unpopular. But then the mass migrations forced by sea-level rises were still going on. ‘Well, anyway, I hope I’m not the only scientist on this panel and it’s not just a bunch of megalomaniac politicians with their own vested interests. I mean, how do these things work?’ ‘I’m happy that you think I’m the fount of all knowledge and wisdom.

Everyone seemed to know everyone else, Sarah noted, and some exchanges were warmer than others. She looked round the table at each person in turn, scanning the rudimentary information provided on her AR feed. Several of them were not politicians but CEOs of multinational companies. She reflected on how world politics had been transformed during her lifetime. Even before the mass migrations forced by rising sea levels in the early thirties, physical country borders had been getting increasingly blurred. The world was now more noticeably split along economic rather than geographical boundaries and was defined as much by online firewalls set up by multinational companies operating in the Cloud and the movement of cryptocurrencies between them as it was by the old national borders.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

American hegemony was threatened but not decisively shaken by the Soviet empire (which had collapsed by 1991), and it is now facing further, and apparently more intractable, challenges arising from the economic and military ascent of China (a modern reincarnation of the world’s oldest existing empire that fits all the key requirements to be defined as such), from militant Islam, and from internal discord. Some notable exceptions aside, nation-states, now the dominant form of political organization, are of relatively recent origin and their foundations are being weakened by new trends ranging from supranational allegiances to mass migration. Unlike many empires, many states reached their maximum extent relatively early in their history as they encountered physical barriers (mountain ranges, major rivers, sea coasts) that, although certainly not insurmountable, were formidable enough to restrict further expansion. On the other hand, many modern states were created by the partition of formerly larger entities and hence they are products of diminution rather than of any organic growth.

This means that China’s average urban living space is now roughly the same as in the UK and marginally above the Japanese mean. And it also means that the post-1978 growth of Chinese housing provides a rare example of a temporary exponential increase in housing construction, sustaining roughly 3% annual growth for 35 years. Even so, given the mass immigration to China’s rapidly expanding cities, urban overcrowding continues, and the new rules for rental apartments (where many temporary workers often share a single room) now specify a minimum of 5 m2/capita. Despite China’s rapidly aging population, a combination of this urban overcrowding and continued migration from the countryside is expected to keep up significant growth of residential stock at least until 2020.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

In such a scenario, migration, not mortality or fertility, becomes the major driver of change. Even migration becomes less common when so much has settled down. A great deal of current migration is driven by not knowing. People do not know that the roads are not paved with gold in the cities that were once so far ahead of their times. Times change, but the stories change more slowly. Mass migration is driven by turmoil, war, famine, pestilence, or some other great instability. With slowdown, such migration too should slow. Who would want their very few children to move to the other side of the world? People will still move around in the future, of course. In a less frantic and more logical world, they should have much more time to do so.

So what, exactly, was it that you were worrying about—even if the population growth in the next eighty years occurs just as the UN projected it would in 2017? What we worry about (when we worry about population growth) is not growth, but death. We worry about too many people resulting in famines—because we have yet to learn that famines were never caused by there being too many people, but by politics. We worry that population growth will lead to mass migration—because we lack the collective imagination to see that migrants will be in huge demand and we should be afraid of having too few migrants, not too many. We think “too many people” leads to war. But it is just a very small number of men who start wars, and sadly it takes many people and usually the loss of many lives to stop wars.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.” “But most scientists don’t agree with this,” says Neil. “I looked through [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent reports] and see no reference to billions of people going to die, or children going to die in under twenty years. . . . How would they die?” Responds Lights, “Mass migration around the world is already taking place due to prolonged drought in countries, particularly in South Asia. There are wildfires in Indonesia, the Amazon rainforest, also Siberia, the Arctic.” “These are really important problems,” Neil says, “and they can cause fatalities. But they don’t cause billions of deaths.

The Summary “omits that better cultivars and improved irrigation increase crop yields. It shows the impact of sea level rise on the most vulnerable country, but does not mention the average. It emphasizes the impacts of increased heat stress but downplays reduced cold stress. It warns about poverty traps, violent conflict and mass migration without much support in the literature. The media, of course, exaggerated further.”21 It wasn’t the first time IPCC had exaggerated climate change’s impact in a Summary. In 2010, an IPCC Summary falsely claimed climate change would result in the melting of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. This was a serious case of alarmism given that 800 million people depend on the glaciers for irrigation and drinking water.


pages: 485 words: 133,655

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The expulsion of the Hyksos has long been believed to be the memory on which the story of Moses and the Exodus is based. By the end of fifteenth century BCE, the Eighteenth dynasty had started. Egypt entered a golden age of commerce, reaching the height of international prestige and prosperity. But the vulnerability to mass migration must have weighed heavily on the rulers’ minds. What had pushed Canaanites towards Egypt had been the harsh conditions of the dry southern Levant and the relative wealth of water-rich Egypt. A few centuries later, a more catastrophic shift in climate conditions around the Mediterranean revealed the extent to which this vulnerability could be disruptive.

If prior to partition there had been any hope of joint management, the events of 1948 made it impossible. What no one had anticipated at the moment of partition was the lack of clarity on the border. The haste with which the process was conducted, the lack of ground control, would lead to panicked mass migration. Some fifteen million people—the biggest human migration of the century—took place in a matter of a few months. Building on the already tense communal violence that had plagued the end of the Raj, the migration left a long trail of victims. Estimates vary, but it is possible that one to two million people died in mass killings and ethnic cleansing.


pages: 556 words: 95,955

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

This sympathy was no doubt increased by the guilt many in the West felt about the inaction of even the Allied nations (including the United States): restrictions on Jewish immigration had played a role in sealing the fate of millions of European Jews. In the wake of the Holocaust, global support for the Zionist project began to rise. Despite all this, the British, faced with Palestinian Arab fear, fury, and opposition, continued to prohibit mass immigration of Holocaust survivors to Palestine, even going so far as to enact a naval blockade to prevent ships bearing Holocaust victims from docking there. In response, the Yishuv ramped up its efforts to bring Jews to Palestine. Ships, often crewed by volunteer American and Canadian World War II vets, ran the British blockade, bringing survivors to the Jewish community of Palestine, the only place in the world that wanted them.* Often the ships were stopped and the survivors taken to internment camps in Palestine or Cyprus.

So, even as Israel facilitated the emigration of Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, and elsewhere, often in dramatic airlifts, the country’s establishment did not always welcome them as equals to the Ashkenazi Jewish majority. Mizrachi Israelis seethed at the treatment they received when they arrived. The 1950s saw civil unrest in Haifa and elsewhere, as Mizrachim demonstrated against brutal treatment by the police and discrimination in public housing. Despite these challenges and their lingering legacies, the mass immigration of Mizrachim changed the character of the new country, introducing new sensibilities, new foods, and new folkways that define what Israel is today. Some claim that the reason hummus and falafel are considered the national dishes of Israel is because of the cultural appropriation that occurred when European Jews encountered Palestinian Arabs and their traditional foods.


pages: 166 words: 49,639

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

The task is made easier for those who believe there will always be new opportunities, whatever the temporary difficulties. The consumer’s new mantra is value The most dramatic shift in consumer behaviour one witnesses in a cycle is the trading down from aspirational goods to ‘value goods’. It is a sudden, mass migration. In their work and personal lives, consumers cut back and look for a bargain. As always, the best businesses adapt to the new psychology and the rest asphyxiate. In the good times, nearly every company likes to think of its products as ‘aspirational’. It’s true there always will be customers willing to pay extra for premium goods, obsessively seeking quality over price.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

Rural farmers in Africa can access market information that prevents them from being ripped off by traders, and they can transfer funds electronically. But these same technologies mean that those in deprived parts of the world are aware of what they are missing. This awareness will trigger greater embitterment, motivating mass migration or conflict, if these contrasts are perceived to be excessive and unjust. It is not only a moral imperative, but a matter of self-interest too, for fortunate nations to promote greater equality—by direct financial aid (and by ceasing the current exploitative extraction of raw materials) and also by investing in infrastructure and manufacturing in countries where there are displaced refugees, so that the dispossessed are under less pressure to migrate to find work.


pages: 193 words: 48,066

The European Union by John Pinder, Simon Usherwood

Berlin Wall, BRICs, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, failed state, illegal immigration, labour market flexibility, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, non-tariff barriers, open borders, price stability, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

This is still a minor, though increasingly significant, element in the Union’s external relations. The Union’s external economic policies remain much more important. Meanwhile, the world has been becoming a more dangerous place, with sources of instability such as climate change, environmental degradation, cross-border crime, poverty, consequent mass migration, and terrorism, alongside the military forms of insecurity. The relative simplicity of the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union has been replaced by American supremacy, and with the perspective of an emergent multipolar world in which the US is in the process of being joined by China and, probably later, India as giant powers, while Russia along with other, rising powers must also be taken into account; and the balance of bipolar economic power, with the predominance of the US and the EU, is being rapidly transformed, likewise with the BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, into a multipolar world economy.


pages: 137 words: 35,041

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

For example, when so-called ‘TERFs’ (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) are casually stigmatised as ‘fascists’ and ‘bigots’, and No Platformed on that basis, there can be no possibility of mutual understanding between conflicting groups. I would no more debate a fascist than I would a madman; that is a task for experts in deradicalisation. However, I would happily debate an individual who has profound concerns about the economic impact of mass immigration, even if he has been unfairly branded a ‘fascist’ by the historically illiterate. Where nobody can agree on definitions, there can be no unanimity on where the limitations of free speech can be drawn. In such circumstances, the safest approach is to defend free speech for all, and that includes those whose views we might find reprehensible.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

At present (autumn 2017) the auguries are better from what they had been only a few months ago, though the crystal ball remains clouded. Long-term change is another matter. And here, the problems facing Europe (and the rest of the world) are daunting. Climate change, demography, provision of energy, mass migration, tensions of multiculturalism, automation, the widening income gap, international security and dangers of global conflict: all pose major challenges for the decades ahead. Just how well equipped Europe is to deal with these problems is hard to say. How to meet the challenges, to shape the future of the continent, lies not solely, but nevertheless in good measure, in the hands of Europeans themselves.

This describes not just economic integration arising from the free movement of capital, technology and information, but the interweaving of social and cultural patterns of progress across national boundaries and throughout developing areas of the world. Globalization was far from simply a positive trajectory to ever better material provision. It had obvious dark sides. It has caused, for example, massive damage to the environment, a widening gulf between rich and poor, intensified (largely uncontrollable) mass migration, and loss of employment through automation made possible by technological change – and it continues to do so. The transformation brought through globalization runs like a thread through the following chapters. It is far from an unequivocal story of success. Europe’s new era of insecurity is inextricably enmeshed with the deepening of globalization

The numbers crossing from Libya to Italy remained high, however, though they fell sharply in the summer of 2017 following the introduction of a tougher Italian and Libyan stance towards traffickers but also a less liberal approach to rescue organizations. Possibly, the worst of the refugee crisis was over. European countries had to recognize, even so, that mass migration – if not in the critical and uncontrolled dimensions of 2015–16 – was here to stay. This was not just because Europe constituted a peaceful haven for those whose lives had been ruined by war and devastating political violence; it was also because the crass economic disparities that had become ever more glaringly obvious in the process of globalization had themselves ensured a population transfer from poor to rich countries which needed labour and whose own birth rates were low or even in decline.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

And thanks to 9/11, new laws were being passed – most notably the EU’s Data Retention Directive – that gave the authorities blanket powers to store and manipulate surveillance information in whatever way they wanted. This was not all. Several external forces – globalisation, climate change, and the resource wars and mass migration that would inevitably follow – were creating the conditions for a “perfect storm”. Soon, every citizen would be a potential threat, an enemy of state stability. Powers reserved for combating terrorism would be unleashed on the entire population. Against such an irresistible force, what could hackers have done differently?


What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

banking crisis, British Empire, Doomsday Clock, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, informal economy, liberation theology, mass immigration, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, oil shale / tar sands, operational security, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

Then the next year you can’t pay him, so you’ve got to sell off your land. Pretty soon your children are starving and you can do nothing. That’s why the rate of peasant suicides is sharply rising within eyesight of the marvels that Friedman describes. As the journalist P. Sainath has pointed out, for the first time in Indian history there is mass migration from the countryside.19 There always was migration during harvests. This is different. People are fleeing the devastated countryside, where the large majority lives, and essentially pouring into the Mumbai slums. The most serious economic analyses—not the rave reviews on the op-ed page of the Times but real analyses—indicate that maybe 80 percent of the population or so is in the informal economy, which is not even counted.20 In states such as Uttar Pradesh, which has about the same population as Pakistan, the conditions for women are probably worse than under the Taliban.


pages: 225 words: 54,010

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

Webster believes that at the height of Copan’s magnificence, during the long reign of King Yax Pasaj, “life expectancy was short, mortality was high, people were often sick, malnourished, and decrepit-looking.”61 House remains show that in a century and a half, Copan’s population had shot up from about 5,000 to 28,000, peaking in A.D. 800; it stayed high for one century, then fell by half in fifty years, then dropped to nearly nothing by A.D. 1200. We can’t attribute these figures to mass migration in or out, for much the same pattern occurs throughout the Maya area. The graph, Webster observes, “closely resembles the kind of ‘boom and bust’ cycle associated with … wild animal populations.”62 He might have compared it to something more immediate: Copan’s fivefold surge in just a century and a half is exactly the same rate of increase as the modern world’s leap from about 1.2 billion in 1850 to 6 billion in 2000.


pages: 168 words: 56,211

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Abraham Maslow, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spice trade, supply-chain management, Vilfredo Pareto

But as I continued around the airfield, a more arresting spectacle came into view: on the horizon at the far end of the runway, the entire aeronautical population of a sizeable international airport appeared to have touched down and been parked in close formation, wing tip to wing tip, as if a calamity I had not yet heard about had prompted a mass migration by aircraft from every continent to this particular corner of southern California. There were representatives from the Netherlands, Australia, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Switzerland; there were short-haul Airbuses and giant 747s. Adding to the eeriness of the scene, the planes had none of their usual supporting equipment – no jetties, buses, baggage carts or refuelling trucks.


Scandinavia by Andy Symington

call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, connected car, edge city, Eyjafjallajökull, full employment, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, period drama, retail therapy, Skype, the built environment, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city, work culture , young professional

Kronborg Slot Channel Shakespeare at Hamlet’s old haunt in Helsingør (Click here ) St Petersburg Be dazzled by the candy-coloured swirls and brilliant mosaic decoration on the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood (Click here ) Tallinn Weaving your way around the medieval Old Town’s narrow, cobbled streets is like strolling back to the 14th century (Click here ) Gotland Historic churches dot this Swedish island (Click here ) Norwegian stave churches Admire World Heritage–listed Urnes Stave Church on the banks of a fjord (Click here ) Olavinlinna Finland’s most spectacular castle, delicately perched on a rocky islet, lords it over the centre of one of its prettiest towns (Click here ) Wildlife Watching The clamour of seabirds fills the air across the Atlantic while whales roll in the ocean. Elk are widespread, Finnish forests harbour serious carnivores and the mighty polar bear still lords it – for now – over Svalbard. Low population densities make it excellent for observing wildlife in summer. Fanø Witness mass migration of the feathered kind in Denmark (Click here ) Bird boating To and through the spectacular Faroese bird cliffs (Click here ) Reindeer These roam at will across the north of Sweden, Norway and Finland; learn about reindeer in Jukkasjärvi, in Sweden (Click here ) Central Norway Track down the prehistoric musk ox (Click here ) Svalbard Watch out for Europe’s last polar bears in Svalbard (Click here ) Whale watching Head to Norway’s Lofoten Islands (Click here ) or Húsavík in Iceland ( Click here ) Látrabjarg These dramatic cliffs are the world’s biggest bird breeding grounds (Click here ) Bear watching Head out to the Finnish forests on a bear- watching excursion (Click here ) Design Why is Scandinavian design so admired?

Swedish music stars José González and Salem Al Fakir and film director Josef Fares are testament to Sweden’s increasingly multicultural make-up. In 2007, the small town of Södertälje, 30km south of Stockholm, welcomed 1268 Iraqi refugees; the USA and Canada combined accepted just 1027 the same year. Some 200 languages are now spoken in Sweden. Sweden first opened its borders to mass immigration during WWII. At the time it was a closed society, and new arrivals were initially expected to assimilate and ‘become Swedish’. In 1975 parliament adopted a new set of policies that emphasised the freedom to preserve and celebrate traditional native cultures. Not everyone in Sweden is keen on this idea, with random hate crimes – including the burning down of a Malmö mosque in 2004 – blemishing the country’s reputation for tolerance.


pages: 126 words: 37,081

Men Without Work by Nicholas Eberstadt

business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, deindustrialization, financial innovation, full employment, illegal immigration, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral hazard, post-work, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population

Though only beginning in 1994, CPS data on employment by nativity are compelling. In 1994, prime-age immigrant men were reportedly less likely to be working than their native-born counterparts and more likely to be out of the labor force altogether. By 2015, this situation had been completely reversed. After two decades of mass immigration, prime-age male work rates were more than five points higher among the foreign born, and LFPRs were over four points higher. Indeed, immigrants pushed national prime-age male work rates and LFPRs up by about one percentage point in 2015. The long-term fall in prime-age male work rates and rise in NILF rates are also due to the changing weight of subgroups in the composition of the overall population.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

Anti-Trump conservatives of today are deemed ‘cuckservatives’ by the alt-right, the passive cuckolding husband to the rapacious non-white foreign enemy at the gates. The neocon and old-fashioned Christian right is hated in this way by the alt-right for, in one way or another, failing to protect the nation aggressively enough, by playing too nicely and thus not being up to the job of defeating feminism, Islamification, mass immigration and so on. In stark contrast to the Pepe-posters and potty-mouthed Milo fans would be someone like British conservative columnist Peter Hitchens, for example, who called Trump ‘this yahoo, this bully, this groper, a man who threatened his opponent with jail… I loathe Mr. Trump for his coarseness, his crudity, and his scorn for morals, tradition and law.’


pages: 349 words: 114,038

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

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

These men had made phony war their business for decades, and ran the largest budgets in the world, so when their era of "mutually assured destruction" ended, they were presumably looking for new work. I would, in their place. I think that by the end of the last century, Islam was selected as the best candidate for a Bad Guy to replace the crumbling East-West divide with its slowing profits for the military-industrial complex. We have the mass immigration of North Africans and Turks into Europe as the basis for anti-Islamic public policies in Europe. We have the conflicts in Chechnya, Indonesia, India, Afghanistan, ex-Yugoslavia, and of course, Palestine, to prove how Islam is the religion of hate. We had at least $600 million of American money going to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the founder of the Hezb-e Islami radical Islamic militant faction.

By September of 2013, the U.S. military had been involved in various activities in Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde Islands, Senegal, Seychelles, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda and Zambia, among others, constructing bases, undertaking "security cooperation engagements, training exercises, advisory deployments, special operations missions, and a growing logistics network. The battlefield covers the whole world, and above all, the American homeland itself. The US is the keystone in the Para-state's power structure. It represents by far the richest food source for this parasitic political class. The US is wealthy due to three things: centuries of mass immigration, abundant natural resources, and a geography blessed with generous natural transport. If it was not for the Para-state's predations, the US would be considerably more prosperous, easily affording first rate healthcare, education, transport to all its people, and a massively better technological infrastructure.


pages: 196 words: 58,886

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

PLO attack on Tel Aviv reciprocated by Operation “Litani”—Israel occupies part of southern Lebanon. 1981 Annexation of the Golan Heights to Israel. 1982 Sinai returned to Egypt. Operation “Peace for the Galilee” in which Israel invades Lebanon in an attempt to destroy the PLO. 1987 The First Palestinian Intifada. 1989 Collapse of the USSR and mass migration of Jews and non-Jews from across the Eastern Bloc to Israel. 1991 First Gulf War. US convenes international conference on Palestine in Madrid. 1992 Labor returns to power and Yitzhak Rabin becomes prime minister for the second time. 1993 The PLO and Israel sign the Oslo Declaration of Principles in the White House. 1994 The Palestinian National Authority is formed and Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, arrives in the occupied territories to become president of the PNA.


pages: 164 words: 57,068

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

If that were accompanied by a profit-sharing scheme related to base salary it would allow a proportional level of reward for everyone, including the senior executives. If that formula were to be internationally agreed that would be even better. Even if it weren’t an international norm there is no evidence that there would be a mass migration of talent in search of more exotic rewards. Money, I sometimes think, is often rightly called compensation, compensation for stressful, tedious or pointless work in unpleasing surroundings. Not everyone would judge the extra compensation to be enough for the pain and upheaval of moving home and family to the other side of the world.


pages: 248 words: 57,419

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy by Richard Duncan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bretton Woods, business cycle, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, deindustrialization, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, inflation targeting, It's morning again in America, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization

From Korea and Japan in the North to New Zealand in the South to Burma in the West, all of Asia would be at China’s mercy. And hunger among China’s population of 1.3 billion people could necessitate territorial expansion into Southeast Asia. In fact, the central government might not be able to prevent mass migration southward, even if it wanted to. In Europe, severe economic hardship would revive the centuries-old struggle between the left and the right. During the 1930s, the Fascists movement arose and imposed a police state on most of Western Europe. In the East, the Soviet Union had become a communist police state even earlier.


pages: 147 words: 41,256

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi

ghettoisation, market clearing, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, one-state solution

There had been no prior communication between them; the Jews of Yemen didn’t know about the groups of young Zionists forming in Europe. Those Yemenites weren’t “Zionists” in any political sense. But they were Zionists in the deepest sense: They were Jews returning to their homeland, in anticipation of the restoration of their people’s sovereignty. Zionism came full circle by the end of the twentieth century, with the mass immigration to Israel of Russian Jews, refugees from seventy years of Communism. Subjected to government-imposed assimilation, forbidden to study and practice their faith, many hardly seemed Jewish at all. But here they have rejoined the Jewish people, learning Hebrew and living by the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and marrying Jews from other parts of the Diaspora.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

In a speech in December 2012, Theresa May, then still Home Secretary, cited a London School of Economics report and claimed that more than a third of all new housing demand in Britain was caused by immigration, and that it was this that was pushing up house prices. ‘And there is evidence that without the demand caused by mass immigration, house prices could be 10 per cent lower over a 20-year period,’ she said. There was no shortage of Daily Mail headlines from the same period peddling the same ideas: ‘Immigration “causing housing crisis”’ (2003); ‘Revealed: How HALF of all social housing in England goes to people born abroad’ (2012); ‘We don’t have a housing crisis – we have a population crisis’ (2017); ‘Immigration has pushed house prices up by 20 per cent over a 25-year period, says Tory minister’ (2018).

It is not the reason that welfare has been stripped back. And it is not the reason that we don’t have enough social housing. None the less, this narrative – that the housing pinch points we are all experiencing, such as not being able to buy, unaffordable rents, a lack of social homes – are caused by mass immigration has been pervasive and persuasive. In 2018, the National Conversation on Immigration, run jointly by Hope Not Hate and British Future, produced the largest ever public survey on immigration, with more than 13,000 people surveyed. In the south-east, they found that a scarcity of affordable housing meant a common demand of those they surveyed was greater control over rates of immigration and over migrants’ access to social housing.


pages: 229 words: 61,482

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

The Gig Economy retirement may never be the corporate-funded, work-free decades they once were, but there’s a case to be made that with thoughtful planning and commitment, retirement can still exist. The less-good news is that we have to save for and finance retirement ourselves. Corporate pensions are no longer around to foot the bill. Instead, employers have mass migrated to offering defined contribution retirement plans, such as 401(k)s, in which employees decide for themselves whether to participate in the plan, how much to contribute, and where to invest their contributions. Pensions still exist in the public sector for government workers and teachers but are generally underfunded, in some cases severely.1 Government sources of retirement funds, like Social Security, appear unreliable at best and insolvent at worst, depending on your generation.


pages: 219 words: 61,334

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

It has been the source of a great deal of muddled thinking about the meaning of nations. The idea of lifeblood coursing through the veins of the nation may be instinctively attractive, but it gets analysis off on the wrong foot. National blood ties are always more mixed, loyalties and interests more divided. These tendencies are reinforced in an age of mass communications and mass migration in which, in the West at least, ideas, opinions and people travel more freely than ever before. In English, the term nation entered common currency during the thirteenth century, when it was deployed to refer to a people characterized by common racial affinities. Implicit was a separate meaning of a political group that stands in a relation of representation with respect to the nation.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

As we have seen, this will be very difficult because of low wages, a growing unemployment problem and the Chinese propensity to save rather than consume. However, local consumption will be increasingly essential because the primary incentives which drive the private sector to locate manufacturing in countries like China are likely to shift dramatically in the coming decades. The Future of Manufacturing Recent years have seen a mass migration of manufacturing to developing countries. Low labor costs have clearly been the primary incentive underlying this trend. In the future, however, factories of all types are likely to become increasingly automated. As the years and decades progress, labor costs will comprise a smaller and smaller component of manufacturers’ cost structures.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

But Puerto Rico was a U.S. colony, and it was poor and lacking in opportunity (like most other colonies), for a long time before the large flow of Puerto Ricans into the continental United States started. Two interrelated things happened in the 1940s that turned the long-standing unequal relationship into a cause for mass migration. One side of the coin was Operation Bootstrap (which I discuss in more depth in Part One). U.S. investment had been streaming into Puerto Rico for decades, but Operation Bootstrap was something new. Up until now colonial powers had used their colonies to support industrialization at home. Now a colonial power began to take advantage of colonial labor to deindustrialize at home.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

The kolkhozes would now in essence tell the center what they would produce, instead of the other way round, and it was the job of Gosplan to reconcile these “draft plans from below” with each other and with economy-wide objectives. Growth in the 1950s was rapid. A massive program of house building coincided with a mass migration of peasants to the cities as technological transformation in agriculture radically reduced labor requirements. Advances in education and training were among the greatest achievements of the era, along with impressive extensions of healthcare and the status of women, with many women becoming engineers, technicians and judges a goodly time before such breakthroughs were achieved elsewhere.


Rough Guide DIRECTIONS Venice by Jonathan Buckley

car-free, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, place-making, Suez canal 1869

Note that many internet points offer international calls at a better rate than you’ll get from Telecom Italia’s public phones. 9/29/06 2:39:59 PM 05 VeniceChronology.indd 183 Places Chronology 9/29/06 2:40:33 PM 05 VeniceChronology.indd 184 9/29/06 2:40:33 PM 185 9^hedebe]o 05 VeniceChronology.indd 185 C H R O NO L O G Y 453 The first mass migration into the Venetian lagoon is provoked by the incursions of Attila the Hun’s hordes. 568 Permanent settlement is accelerated when the Germanic Lombards (or Longobards) sweep into northern Italy. The resulting confederation owes political allegiance to Byzantium. 726 The lagoon settlers choose their first doge, Orso Ipato. 810 After the Frankish army of Charlemagne has overrun the Lombards, the emperor’s son Pepin sails into action against the proto-Venetians and is defeated.


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

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

One long-run impact of this thinking was the creation of purchasing price parity (PPP) measures of economic growth used by organisations such as the International Monetary Fund to measure national economies using market domestic exchange rates and national prices rather than expressing growth in dollar terms. The other major finding that stands out from the many Samuelson made on trade goes by the awkward name of the factor price equalisation theorem. Economists have known for some time that the free movement of capital and labour – as was seen during the British Empire and the mass migration to America – could equalise rates of return between the old and new worlds. But could trade in goods have the same impact? Samuelson proved that in theory trade between two countries with the same commodity prices and levels of technology would lead to prices of the output goods falling to the same level, which would lead to the prices of the factors of production (capital and labour) also equalising between the two countries.


pages: 223 words: 60,936

Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere by Tsedal Neeley

Airbnb, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discrete time, Donald Trump, future of work, global pandemic, iterative process, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lockdown, mass immigration, natural language processing, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Silicon Valley, social distancing

Virtual leaders must proactively search for the earliest warning signs in situations where their collocated counterparts might still thrive under a more reactive approach. If these challenges are left unattended, they will swell into fissures that splinter your remote team. LOCATION CHALLENGE The mass migration to remote work in the months immediately following the onset of the pandemic was unique in that everyone was similarly located—at home. Despite differences in home office setups, technology access, or child-care responsibilities, everyone was on more or less equal footing in that they were equally distant from leaders and colleagues; no one was collocated in a physical office.


pages: 575 words: 171,599

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, delayed gratification, estate planning, Etonian, glass ceiling, high net worth, junk bonds, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, McMansion, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, technology bubble, too big to fail

Around the same time, on a separate train, Arjun’s future wife and Sanjay Wadhwa’s mother, eight-year-old Rashmi, left Sargodha, where her family owned vast swaths of land and her father, a government contractor, was well connected, even friendly with the Muslim police commissioner. He was so tied to Sargodha he would stay in his ancestral home until August 14, making the trek to Delhi like thousands of other displaced Punjabis only after it was clear that Sargodha would go to Pakistan. Partition triggered a mass migration of people, with about 7.2 million Hindus and Sikhs moving to India from the newly created Pakistan and an equal number of Muslims making the reverse migration. One million lives were lost along the way, many victims of brutal sectarian violence. Stemming bloodshed as a result of Partition was just one of the goals on the new republic’s political agenda.

Punjab Province, a collection of 17,932 towns and villages with 15 million Hindus, 16 million Muslims, and 5 million Sikhs: Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 121. Partition and the division of Punjab and Bengal: Ibid. Partition triggered a mass migration of people, and 1 million lives were lost: Ibid. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (London: Macmillan, 2007), 32. Jawaharlal Nehru invited the country’s masses to fulfill their “tryst with destiny” and “awake to life and freedom”: As quoted in “A Tryst With Destiny,” guardian.co.uk., May 1, 2007.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

But, by 2070, researchers have concluded, 19 per cent of the planet – home to some 3 billion people – might be uninhabitable. This suggests that the world is about to see hundreds of millions of people displaced, and billions more suffer, as the fastest and most disruptive change in recorded history furiously unfolds. Mass migration at this level will be globally destabilizing. While good can come from such change – the US, after all, is a product of immigration – the enormous scale of what’s to come is more likely to foster competition and conflict, as ever larger numbers of people fight over ever scarcer resources while, at the same time, geopolitical powers erect walls, fences and boundaries to keep migrants out.

. / 3.20 The True Cost of Climate Change Eugene Linden What might be the socio-economic cost of climate change? If we continue along our current path and the Earth warms by 3°C above pre-industrial levels, the risk is, simply, the collapse of civilization itself. This will be a global calamity marked by financial collapse, mass starvation, mass migration and the descent of many nations into civil disorder. Had governments recognized the gravity of the risk in the early 1990s, this apocalyptic prospect might have galvanized action to contain greenhouse gas emissions and avert potential catastrophe. Instead, early projections of the socio-economic damage of climate change were absurdly low, providing intellectual cover for those who would delay action (one influential 1993 paper by an economist who later won the Nobel Prize calculated the cost to the US economy of a 3°C warming by 2100 to be a minuscule one quarter of 1 per cent of GDP).


pages: 518 words: 143,914

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

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

Immigration is playing a dual role in Europe’s religious economy. First, the arrival of millions of Muslims is making many lapsed Christians more aware of their religious inheritance. Nominal Christians are much more likely to practice their faith in areas where there are lots of Muslims. Second, mass immigration is bringing in millions of Christians from the developing world as well. On any given Sunday in London, 44 percent of the people going to church are African or Afro-Caribbean, and another 14 percent are nonwhites of other descent.49 Britain’s most successful preacher is arguably a Nigerian missionary, Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo.

It meant reasserting the primacy of Enlightenment values such as reason and tolerance. And it meant making the maximum possible room for individual freedom and self-expression. All this has made it peculiarly difficult for Europeans to come to terms with the influx of a large religious minority. To begin with, the European elites who masterminded mass immigration simply expected Muslims to undergo the same process of secularization that they themselves had. Back in 1966, Roy Jenkins, then Britain’s Labor home secretary, argued for a multicultural model of immigration: “Not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.”


Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, blood diamond, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, crossover SUV, Donald Davies, European colonialism, failed state, feminist movement, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, mass immigration, megacity, oil rush, prediction markets, random walk, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, unemployed young men

After all of last year’s harvest has been eaten, the cattle sold off, and all favors from friends called in, households sometimes face some very uncomfortable arithmetic. What if there are still too many mouths and too little food? Each household member could go his own way in search of food or work, and migration is a common response to famines. This happened seventy years ago in the United States when the Great Plains turned into a giant dustbowl, causing mass migrations to California during the Great Depression. But countries like Kenya and Chad don’t have a Golden State of opportunity where fortunes can be sought by the starving masses—remember the migrations of Niger’s Tuaregs from chapter 5? Without a possibility of escaping to greener pastures, everyone in the household could instead be called upon to first cut back on what they spend and consume.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

In the countryside, agricultural production soared as new rules gave farmers new freedoms and new incentives to produce. As with Japan and the Asian Tigers, trade expanded and manufacturing boomed. Economic change created social problems. The injection of huge amounts of money into China’s labyrinthine bureaucracy created corruption on a massive scale. In a country with little history of labor mobility, mass migration brought tens of millions of peasants from rural backwaters into the boomtowns of the southern and eastern coasts. A spike in social unrest followed as the gap between rich and poor widened and already populous cities became dangerously overcrowded. Political leaders who feared that the party would lose control of all these changes grew even more anxious as a different form of experimentation sparked turmoil inside the Soviet Union.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

But the ability to control temperature and humidity in office buildings, stores, and wealthier homes allowed these urban centers to attract an economic base that has catapulted them to megacity status. It’s no accident that the world’s largest cities—London, Paris, New York, Tokyo—were almost exclusively in temperate climates until the second half of the twentieth century. What we are seeing now is arguably the largest mass migration in human history, and the first to be triggered by a home appliance. — THE DREAMERS AND INVENTORS who ushered in the cold revolution didn’t have eureka moments, and their brilliant ideas rarely transformed the world immediately. Mostly they had hunches, but they were tenacious enough to keep those hunches alive for years, even decades, until the pieces came together.


pages: 239 words: 68,598

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

When it happens the ocean may have risen twenty or even thirty metres, if much of West Antarctica melts into the ocean as well as Greenland; and almost everywhere will be five to six degrees hotter than now. These changes are at least as devastating as was the interglacial shift and will affect a world that is already hot and dry. When they do mass migration is inevitable. The recognition that we are the agents of planetary change brings a sense of guilt and gives environmentalism a religious significance. So far it is no more than a belief system that has extended the concept of pollution and ecosystem destruction from the local to the planetary scale.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Southern fashion looked not much different from what was worn in Pennsylvania or Illinois. Sunbelt cities—if you could actually call them cities—were thriving; but they were so low density sprawling and absent any economic center, that they were really more like suburbs connected by freeway arterioles. This air-conditioned-induced mass migration would have enormous consequences for national politics as the South regained the dominant position in federal electoral politics that had been wrested away by FDR’s New Deal coalition. Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to peel Democrats off what was once the “solid South” could not have been better timed.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It’s essentially a catchall term for all the various processes by which ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services cross international borders at unprecedented speed. Together, these processes have created a much more integrated global economy through trade, foreign direct investment, large-scale capital flows, the construction of global supply chains, innovation in communications technologies, and mass migration. None of these individual elements is entirely new. Global trade has existed for centuries. But the multiplier effect these forces create and the velocity with which they move make this phenomenon qualitatively different from anything that has come before. Globalization, like capitalism, is powered by the individual impulses of billions of people.


Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

For a hundred thousand years, at least, the passenger pigeon had been the most abundant bird on the planet, reaching a population in the billions by the early nineteenth century. “Then they met us,” Phelan said. No amount of spiderweb-patterned glass could have saved the passenger pigeon: A mass migration of Europeans into the North American wilderness, combined with the rise of the commercialized use of pigeon meat, led to organized shoots. By 1900, the very last wild passenger pigeon was killed. A few years later, the species was officially declared extinct. The doomed bird was the prime model of what happened when humanity refused to coexist with its environment.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

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

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

The term white flight is an unnecessarily narrow description applied to the depopulation of core cities and the explosion of horizontal growth following World War II. While there is no question that race was an accelerator in the process, and practices like redlining went beyond class to systematically disenfranchise minorities, affluence was the underlying factor driving the mass migration. In a broad sense, people with means and agency decamped from cities, leaving behind those who lacked that option. I make this distinction because, as despotic as that outcome was for those left behind, it pales in comparison to the conditions being created on the current trajectory. When poor people were left behind in the center of Americans cities, they still lived in coherent neighborhoods.


pages: 220 words: 66,323

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Airbnb, mass immigration, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, women in the workforce, yield curve

I couldn’t even guess.” There were more than that. The eye couldn’t take them all in, couldn’t find them in the shadows of the trees. Only the people who knew such things knew there were around thirty-six thousand deer in the county. They were not the deer Rose had seen but were on their way to join those. A mass migration. A disaster response. A disaster indicator. A disaster unfolding. Clay wanted to tell him that the night before they’d seen a flock of flamingos, but it would have seemed like one-upmanship. “The animals,” Danny continued. “They know something. They’re spooked. I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know when we’re going to figure out what is.


One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

This is somewhat less true in reality than a Mercator projection makes it look, but it is true that all the arctic nations—Russia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland—tend toward low population densities.* On a warming planet this is perhaps less of an inevitability going forward than it has been in the past. But I don’t want you to think that the viability of one billion Americans hinges on a mass migration to Alaska. The fact is that even without Alaska, Hawaii, and other overseas territories, the contiguous 48 states are not particularly dense. With about 105 people per square mile, the population of the Lower 48 even when tripled would leave the main part of America about as dense as France and less than half as dense as Germany.


pages: 252 words: 66,183

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Collectively, these innovations allowed developers to build exponentially more floor area on the same plot of land, allowing densities to follow demand.3 All of this building supported ongoing urban industrialization between 1890 and 1920, leaving cities with a near insatiable appetite for labor. Between the mechanization of agriculture and this surging demand for industrial labor, mass migration from the countryside began, including among African Americans moving from the South as part of the Great Migration.4 Concurrently, millions of immigrants flowed from southern and eastern Europe into northeastern and midwestern US cities, and to a lesser extent from East Asia into West Coast cities.


The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

., but there were other dimensions to those relationships, many of them contributing to the creation of a more integrated social system in Italy.4 Ancient writers liked to think in terms of migrations and there was even the idea of a “sacred spring,” the moment when a new people arrived in a land for the first time. Mass migrations were a reality, but they were only a part of a more complex story. No case illustrates this better than Rome’s relations with peoples they usually called Gauls and the Greeks called Celts, especially with those who inhabited the Po Valley and other parts of Adriatic Italy north of the Apennine ridge.5 There are implausible myths (written down much later) about great organized migrations from central France.

Les bourgeoisies municipales italiennes aux IIe et Ier siècles av. J-C. Centre Jean Berard, Institut Français de Naples: Éditions du CNRS & Bibliothèque de l’Institut Français de Naples, Chadwick, John. 1976. The Mycenaean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Champion, T. C. 1980. “Mass Migration in Later Prehistoric Europe.” In Transport Technology and Social Change: Papers Delivered at Tekniska Museet Symposium No 2, Stockholm, 1979, edited by Per Sörbom, 33–42. Stockholm: Tekniska Museet. Champion, T. C. 2013. “Protohistoric European Migrations.” In Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration, edited by Immanuel Ness, 2463–2468.


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Asilia Naboisho Camp, Naboisho Conservancy One of the best camps for big cats and guided walks in the Mara. Elsa's Kopje, Meru National Park Stunning lodge and a real sense of oneness with the African wilderness. Sasaab Lodge, Samburu | NIGEL PAVITT / GETTY IMAGES © Escaping the Crowds The wildebeest migration is not the only mass migration in Kenya from July to October – visitors also arrive in the millions. Avoiding them is easier than you think. Meru National Park A match for the more famous parks of Kenya’s south, but without the crowds. Shompole Conservancy ( GOOGLE MAP ; %0716511162, 0722460958; www.shompolewilderness.com; s/d all inclusive US$750/1000) One of Kenya's more remote tented camp experiences with good wildlife encounters and a chance to get to know the Maasai.

Self-driving is only permitted in Mara North if driving to/from your camp. Most visitors fly into one of the conservancy's airstrips, where vehicles from the various camps pick up guests. THE NORTHERN MIGRATION The Loita Hills are important for what's known as the northern migration, a smaller version of the mass migration of wildebeest from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara. During the northern migration, as many as 250,000 wildebeest and zebras migrate down onto the Mara plains from the Loita Hills, bringing prey in abundance into Mara North, Olare-Orok, Naboisho and the other conservancies, as well as the northern reaches of the reserve itself.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

The Progressives were inspired and frightened by movements from below among farmers and workers, and they set out to realize the reform ideas of the Populists and Socialists through democratic institutions. The ills that concerned them were the same as ours: monopoly and corruption, poverty and inequality, the problems of mass immigration and rapid technological change, the rights of women. Only racial injustice was not on their agenda. Most Black people still lived in the South, where, after Reconstruction’s tragic demise, they had fallen under the long night of Jim Crow. Perkins was a middle-class girl, born in Massachusetts in 1880, educated at Mount Holyoke.


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

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

This overclass is still overwhelmingly White, and even WASP, but creams off and co-opts small numbers of the Black and other elites while diverting the energies of radicals into essentially pointless struggles over symbols—and away from concrete transracial issues such as immigration control and raising the minimum wage, which would genuinely help ordinary members of the racial minorities, who on average remain markedly poorer than the White population.70 Political correctness of this type is not simply the result of a swing to the Left in academia on one hand meeting a newly radicalized Right on the other. It also reflects profound changes in American society from the 1960s on: the freeing of Blacks as a serious political force and the resumption of mass immigration without racial restrictions. The resulting new society is one to which Americans of many different political allegiances have had to respond. Thus not just official American patriotic propaganda, but the visual propaganda of the nationalist and religious Right is in general deliberately multiracial (Lynne Cheney's patriotic primer is full of drawings of Black and Asian American toddlers waving flags and playing at being soldiers).71 Indeed, to be fair, one could almost say that America over the past generation or so has become so complicated that its educational system is more or less forced back to simplistic myths, for trying to teach or discuss the full reality would be physically impossible.

Equally important, if continued, will be the fading of the American Dream as far as large sections of the American middle classes are concerned, due to economic change and the effects of globalization. Over the past thirty years, incomes in this central part of American society have stagnated or even fallen, with the skilled and semiskilled working classes suffering particularly badly.1 Meanwhile, incomes at the lower end of the scale have been held down by the resumption of mass immigration, both legal and illegal. Median family income rose by 40 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, but in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by only some 7 percent, despite the fact that a vastly greater number of women entered full employment over the latter period. Meanwhile income inequality increased considerably.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Return to beginning of chapter Food & Drink * * * STAPLES & SPECIALITIES Breakfast Lunch Dinner Regional Specialities Puddings DRINKS Alcoholic Nonalcoholic WHERE TO EAT & DRINK Picnics & Self-catering Cafes & Teashops Restaurants Pubs & Bars FOOD GLOSSARY * * * Once upon a time, English food was highly regarded. In the later medieval period and 17th century, many people – especially the wealthy – ate a varied diet. Then along came the Industrial Revolution, with mass migration from the country to the city, and food quality took a nosedive – a legacy that means there’s still no English equivalent for the phrase bon appétit. But today the tide has turned once again. In 2005, food bible Gourmet magazine famously singled out London as having the best collection of restaurants in the world, and in the years since then the choice for food lovers – whatever their budget – has continued to improve, so it’s now easy to find decent food in other cities, as well as country areas across England

From Tudor times onwards Devon and Cornwall helped England build an empire – plaques on Plymouth’s Barbican (Click here) note the departures of Sir Francis Drake, America’s first settlers and emigrant ships to Australia and New Zealand. The late 1800s saw a sharp decline in Cornwall’s mining industry and mass migration – some communities were cut by a third; today ruined engine houses still dot the county’s cliffs, most dramatically at Geevor and Botallack (Click here). The Victorian era brought the railways, mass tourism and resorts – notably at Torquay (Click here) and Penzance (Click here). WWII brought devastating bombing and hundreds of thousands of American servicemen.

Its relative isolation meant that it traditionally had stronger ties to the Low Countries than to London and when Edward III encouraged Flemish weavers to settle here in the 14th century this connection was sealed. The arrival of the immigrants helped establish the wool industry that fattened the city and sustained it right through to the 18th century. Mass immigration from the Low Countries peaked in the troubled 16th century. In 1579 more than a third of the town’s citizens were foreigners of a staunch Protestant stock, which proved beneficial during the Civil War when the Protestant parliamentarians caused Norwich little strife. Today the spoils of this rich period in the city’s history are still evident, with 36 medieval churches (see www.norwichchurches.co.uk) adorning the streets whose layout is largely unchanged since this time.


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

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

There are some 13,000 islands. Vital trade routes move through the region. Most of the oil that goes to China and Japan moves through the region, so any disintegration or instability in this area would be a vital concern to both of those countries. Terrorism almost certainly would increase, and the prospect of mass migration would be a serious one for Australians to worry about. Another less spectacular but not unimportant surprise may be in the offing: a serious change in the character of the U.S.-Australian alliance. For fifty years the alliance has been marked by undeviating devotion on Australia’s 2990-7 ch13 harries 7/23/07 12:15 PM global discontinuities Page 145 145 part, a willingness to march in lockstep with its great ally.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

Lest we forget, villages provided intimate coziness and shelter that meant, by extension, intrusive supervision and the social caging of individuals. The protective inertia of traditions, the inequalities of age and sex inscribed in the patriarchal households, the denigrating and violently vengeful attitudes toward strangers and outsiders were part and parcel of village life, too. The modern history of mass migrations, demographic transitions, and the creation of new political communities brought enormous costs and traumas. The overseas emigration of European settlers helped to improve the ratio of demographics to resources at the cost of the displacement, enslavement, and downright extermination of the indigenous peoples in the colonies who lacked guns and immunity to the germs brought by the invaders.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Chapter Five The New Colonialism: Better Than the Last Some states were never meant to be—and really never were. Centuries of Western colonialism created the modern world as we know it, but that map is unraveling as some states splinter, collapse, or seem to fall off it altogether. Terrorist cells striking from zones of chaos and mass migrations from countries with no economy or stability are a constant reminder that even if we peacefully remap volatile regions, the postcolonial world—which includes most members of the United Nations—is in a state of high entropy, fragmenting into a fluid, neo-medieval labyrinth. Globalization has filled this void with a twenty-first-century colonialism of strong states, international agencies, NGOs, and companies.


pages: 237 words: 77,224

The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, borderless world, invention of movable type, Khyber Pass, mass immigration

Within three years of the failure of the siege, the Austrians had taken Budapest (or Buda as it was then) and two years later, Belgrade (though in a sick convulsion the Ottomans recovered it half a century later). Back in Constantinople people began to fear that a Christian army would suddenly appear at the gates. House prices fell. There was a mass migration across the Bosporus to Asia. There were veiled mutterings against the indifference and pomposity of the sultan and his court, the luxury and abandon, the absurdities of his ram fights and of camel wrestling, and of the cruel caprices of the courtiers’ whims. At its zenith the empire was truly vast—Morocco to Mesopotamia, Poland to Yemen—and when it began to totter, Russia and Austria discussed dividing it between them.


pages: 233 words: 75,477

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert D. Kaplan

Ayatollah Khomeini, citizen journalism, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Live Aid, mass immigration, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, the market place

Outside of the main towns, most of Eritrea and Tigre were in the hands of antigovernment guerrillas: the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Tigre People's Liberation Front (TPLF), each with its own famine relief organization whose declared purpose was the same as the RRC's. With troops constantly on the move, and mass migrations of peasants in progress, it often was impossible to know exactly how many starving people were in the territory of any one army at any particular time. As few as one-third, or as many as two-thirds, of those starving could have been in areas held by the EPLF and the TPLF on a given day. A common assumption was that almost half of the eight to ten million affected peasants were in territory reached only by guerrilla relief agencies.


pages: 222 words: 75,561

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier

air freight, Asian financial crisis, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, British Empire, business cycle, Doha Development Round, export processing zone, failed state, falling living standards, Global Witness, income inequality, mass immigration, out of africa, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, zero-sum game

There is a straightforward explanation: conflict generates territory outside the control of a recognized government, and this comes in handy if your activity is illegal. Osama bin Laden chose to locate in Afghanistan for the same reason. So countries in civil war have what might be called a comparative advantage in international crime and terrorism. AIDS probably spread through an African civil war: the combination of mass rape and mass migration produces ideal conditions for spreading sexually transmitted disease. Consequently, wars in the bottom billion are our problem as well. All in all, the cost of a typical civil war to the country and its neighbors can be put at around $64 billion. In recent decades about two new civil wars have started each year, so the global cost has been over $100 billion a year, or around double the global aid budget.


pages: 219 words: 74,775

Liquid: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, airport security, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, mass immigration, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, The Design of Experiments

Nevertheless our ability to control liquids has mostly yielded a positive impact for humanity, and my bet is that at the end of the twenty-first century we’ll look back at lab-on-a-chip medical diagnostics and cheap water desalination and hail them as major breakthroughs that made possible longer life expectancies, and prevented mass migrations and conflict. By then I also hope we’ll have said goodbye to burning fossil fuels, and in particular kerosene. This liquid has given us the gift of cheap global travel, of sunny holidays and exciting adventures, but its role in global warming is too great to ignore. What liquid will we invent to replace it?


pages: 247 words: 78,961

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

It has stockpiles of anthrax, cholera, and plague, as well as eight industrial facilities for producing chemical agents—any of which could be launched at Seoul by the army’s conventional artillery. If the governing infrastructure in Pyongyang were to unravel, the result could be widespread lawlessness (compounded by the guerrilla mentality of the Kim Family Regime’s armed forces), as well as mass migration out of and within North Korea. In short, North Korea’s potential for anarchy is equal to that of Iraq, and the potential for the deployment of weapons of mass destruction—either during or after pre-collapse fighting—is far greater. For a harbinger of the kind of chaos that looms on the peninsula, consider Albania, which was for some years the most anarchic country in post-communist Eastern Europe, save for war-torn Yugoslavia.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

For Frans van der Hoff (2005: 136), one of the structural characteristics of neoliberalism is that ‘it takes away money from the poorer social classes to give it to the wealthier social classes’. 27. The economist and historian Jeffrey Williamson, as well as many of his colleagues, distinguish a first ‘wave’ of globalisation, which they place between 1870 and 1913 and refer to as the ‘age of mass migration’. In contrast, the second ‘wave’ of globalisation would have started in the 1950s and continues to the present. From their point of view, the intervening period (1913–45) would be one of de-globalisation. See for example Williamson (1996). 28. According to Rodrik (2007b: 8), with a 3 per cent increase in their share of the labour force of rich countries, immigrants from the South would enjoy net gains of $265 billion per year.


pages: 246 words: 76,561

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

This city within the city comprised 130 buildings, providing 15,000 apartments. At its height, Tlatelolco housed nearly 100,000 people. It was the kind of solution that the problem of Mexico City seemed to demand, a problem of population explosion fuelled by industrialisation and the accompanying mass migrations from the countryside. What was a population of a little over a million in 1940 was on its way to becoming 15 million by 1980. Tlatelolco’s architect was Mario Pani. Like other prominent Latin American architects of his generation, he was trained in Europe, indeed in Paris, where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1920s before imbibing the spirit of Corbusian modernism.


pages: 240 words: 74,182

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev

4chan, active measures, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, data science, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, mega-rich, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, post-truth, side hustle, Skype, South China Sea

One meme created by Infokrieg, for example, showed a highly saturated drawing of a happy American family right out of a 1950s advert, with the words ‘Right Wing Extremists’ printed beneath it, indicating that traditional ways of life are being marginalised. But what caught my eye on Infokrieg was the language used by some of the participants: ‘Don’t use any National Socialist memes. Focus on lowest-common-denominator themes: mass migration, Islamification, Identity, Freedom, Tradition.’ ‘Lowest common denominator’ was a concept right out of Srdja’s playbook. Infokrieg was created by members of the ‘Génération Identitaire’ movement. Martin Sellner, leader of the Identitarian Movement of Austria, is perhaps the movement’s most prominent figurehead and its intellectual leader.


pages: 272 words: 78,876

Heart: A History by Sandeep Jauhar

blue-collar work, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, Easter island, Future Shock, Honoré de Balzac, John Snow's cholera map, mass immigration, medical residency, placebo effect, publish or perish, Rubik’s Cube, selection bias, stem cell, the scientific method

With the end of British rule in August 1947, the long-standing animosity between Hindus and Muslims in Punjab, as in the rest of the Indian subcontinent, exploded. That year, six years before my grandfather died, the country was partitioned into India and West and East Pakistan (now called Bangladesh), along largely sectarian lines. The result was the largest mass migration in recorded history. Millions of Hindus trekked into India (my grandfather’s family among them). Millions of Muslims went in the opposite direction. The violence on both sides was unimaginable, with massacres, rapes, abductions, and forced religious conversions. One victim was my grandfather’s family’s priest, whose throat was cut by a Muslim gang when he refused to say “Allahu akbar?”


pages: 264 words: 74,688

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

The British notably sought to end the enslavement of minorities, and can be criticized today by those who seek to enforce a monoglot interpretation of nationhood, like Buddhists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka and Hindu supremacists in India. This point needs to be borne in mind in any debate about imperialism, as does the argument that ethnic variety itself was functionally an advantage for, and of, imperial systems, particularly for their commercial viability. Today, in an increasingly multicultural world, marked by mass migrations and new intermixing of peoples, the larger and more capacious political unit can, to some, appear more attractive and efficient than the narrower and more exclusive ones, whether one is looking in present-day terms or historically. Empires indeed arouse particular scholarly interest at present because, for all their faults, they are perceived to embody a wealth of experience in the management of difference and diversity.


Genentech The Beginnings of Biotech (Synthesis) -University Of Chicago Press (2011) by Sally Smith Hughes

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, barriers to entry, creative destruction, full employment, industrial research laboratory, invention of the wheel, Joseph Schumpeter, mass immigration, Menlo Park, power law, prudent man rule, Recombinant DNA, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley

“Faculty Members as Corporate Officers: Does Cost Outweigh Benefit?” In From Genetic Engineering to Biotechnology, edited by William J. Whelan and Sandra Black, 195–201. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Yanchinski, Stephanie. 1980. “More Freedom for US Genetic Engineers.” New Scientist (June 26): 574. Yi, Doogab. 2008. “Cancer, Viruses, and Mass Migration: Paul Berg’s Venture into Eukaryotic Biology and the Advent of Recombinant DNA Research and Technology, 1967–1980.” Journal of the History of Biology 41:589–636. Yoxen, Edward. 1983. The Gene Business: Who Should Control Biotechnology? New York: Oxford University Press. Oral History Bibliography The oral histories for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, can be found in a searchable collection on bioscience and biotechnology at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/biosci/.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

It had Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, and last but not least, there was Pakistan’s Mahbub ul Haq, who would become his country’s chief economist and later its finance minister. I know a tiny bit of this generation, as it is the generation of my own parents: children of the partition of India and participants in what is still the world’s largest mass migration. In the late 1940s, members of my own family were debating what to do: whether to stay put in India or to leave for Pakistan. After centuries of coexistence, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs found themselves having to choose a new nation and in effect a new identity. India’s Muslims and Pakistan’s Hindus struggled with the idea of diminished influence.


pages: 255 words: 79,514

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, Donner party, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, mass immigration, Nash equilibrium, nuclear winter, out of africa, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, trolley problem, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile

Despite the patent disapproval of his subsequent employers (the decidedly anti-British American Presbyterian Mission in North India), my grandfather continued to be a regular visitor to the British Club solely in order to spend time with the Scots officers of the regiments stationed in the locality. I hasten to add that he was a lifelong teetotaller, so it wasn’t the drink that drew him there – just the social gathering and the opportunity to immerse himself for an evening in things Scottish. [Page 37] The Scots have had a long tradition of such clubbishness. There had been mass migrations from Scotland to London in the second half of the seventeenth century that were associated with the founding of many Scots clubs and associations in the capital. The Highland Society was founded in London in the 1750s to provide support for immigrant Scots and, importantly, to ensure the preservation of Scottish culture, dress, music and language –and when they said language, they meant, of course, Gaelic.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

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

Farage refers to the BNP as the ‘Bloody Nasty Party’.32 He pointed out that many of UKIP’s potential voters were old enough to remember the Second World War and had a lifelong allergy to fascism. When Theresa May, then Home Secretary, set up a pilot scheme to round up illegal immigrants, he criticised her methods as ‘nasty’ and ‘not the British way’. UKIP is officially opposed to ‘unlimited mass immigration’. But for the most part, it has focused on stopping Britain from turning into ‘a province of the United European superstate’. Only during the Brexit campaign did the party endorse overt xenophobia with its ‘breaking point’ poster showing hordes of Muslim immigrants streaming across the border.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

The Kurgan hypothesis is also strongly supported by recent DNA evidence and, although still unproven, will form the basis of any references to the PIE question for the remainder of this book.52 PIE migrations To the terrified Harappans standing on their city ramparts, defending the remnants of their civilization against marauding bands on horseback, it really didn't matter where they came from. What mattered was that a new, ascendant culture was entering the Indian subcontinent. The invasion of India by the Aryans is considered the earliest documented mass migration in history. The documentation comes to us in the form of the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns chanted by priests at sacrifices where a psychedelic beverage, soma, was drunk. Since the early Aryans had no writing, the Rig Veda was originally transmitted orally across the generations until it was written down hundreds of years later.53 Figure 6.2: The PIE homeland according to the Kurgan hypothesis The Rig Veda is clearly the work of an invading people.

On the other hand, the earth's natural systems appear to be entering the late stages of a conservation phase, coming precariously close to tipping points that could destabilize our civilization. Could our global civilization itself be in the late stage of a conservation phase and face imminent collapse? That possibility is consistent with the warning issued by Limits to Growth. In the decades to come, as the world experiences the stress of climate disruption, with increased mass migrations, infrastructure breakdowns, and crop failures, these stresses on our global system may further reduce its resilience to unexpected shocks. The crucial question is how much resilience is built into our global system. Unfortunately, much of it has been designed with short-term efficiencies in mind, which have tended to reduce resilience rather than increase it.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

The Jewish East End, which evolved between Aldgate and Bromley-by-Bow and north and south of Whitechapel,57 presents one of the best examples of an ethnic concentration in the history of modern London, especially because of the amount of attention it has attracted. By the beginning of the twentieth century the area had come to symbolize everything wrong with mass migration in the eyes of racists, including overcrowding, sweating, filth and clannishness. In addition, partly because of its proximity to the centre of power in Westminster, the area acted as the springboard for the introduction of the seminal piece of legislation to control immigration in modern Britain – the Aliens Act of 1905.58 As well as Evans-Gordon, numerous other observers came to similar conclusions about the area.

Much of his early period consisted of becoming fit and integrated into the professional ethos of the club.73 The number of Irish-born footballers playing in the Premier League after its formation in 1992 declined in comparison with those in the First Division,74 even though, in 2012, 241 professional footballers (including forty-eight in the Premier League) in the entire English game hailed from Ireland.75 The key reason for this relative decline lies in the globalization of football that took place from the last decade of the twentieth century, which meant that Ireland became just one potential source of talent for English and London clubs, aided by the Bosman ruling by the European Court of Justice in 1995, allowing footballers to move at the end of their contract without a fee, and the ability of sportsmen to migrate freely within the European Union. While the mass migration of footballers did not begin in the 1990s, the increasing globalization of the sport meant that the traditional paths of migration which, for example, took the Irish to Britain, no longer acted as the only options for these players, who increasingly moved as elites, headhunted by clubs not just in London and England but across Europe, where the largest and most successful clubs lay.


Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Refrigerator, washing machine, and microwave ownership has also approached saturation levels among better-off segments of Asian and Latin American populations, and they also have a high ownership of air conditioning units. Patented first by Willis Carrier (1876–1950) in 1902, air conditioning was limited for decades to industrial applications. The first units scaled down for household use came during the 1950s in the United States, and their widespread adoption opened up the American Sun Belt to mass migration from northern states and increased the appeal of subtropical and tropical tourist destinations (Basile 2014). Household air conditioners are now also used widely in urban areas of hot-weather countries, most of them being single-room wall units (fig. 6.19). Figure 6.19 A Shanghai high-rise apartment building with air conditioners for virtually every room (Corbis).

The most obvious physical transformations of the new fossil-fueled world have been created by the intertwined processes of industrialization and urbanization. On the most fundamental level, they released hundreds of millions of people from hard physical labor and brought a growing supply and greater variety of food and better housing conditions. The combination of more productive farming and new labor opportunities in expanding industries led to mass migration from villages and sustained rapid urbanization on all continents. In turn, this change has had an enormous positive feedback on the global use of energy. The infrastructural requirements of urban life increase the average per capita energy consumption much above rural means even if the cities are not highly industrialized.


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

To the extent that the increased demand kept prices stable or gave them a modest upward nudge, a basic income would be beneficial. A Basic Income Would Induce In-Migration An upsurge in migration, and the recent refugee crisis in Europe, have bolstered claims that a basic income for all would induce mass migration from lower-income countries. These claims have been further strengthened by prejudiced political rhetoric about ‘welfare tourism’. Opponents, including the Swiss government, used this argument to whip up fear during the referendum campaign to introduce a basic income in Switzerland (discussed in Chapter 11), which some observers believed led to its defeat in June 2016.


pages: 318 words: 85,824

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

The urban/rural differential in real incomes is now, according to some estimates, greater than in any other country in the world.7 Forced to seek work elsewhere, rural migrants—many of them young women—have consequently flooded—illegally and without the rights of residency—into the cities to form an immense labour reserve (a ‘floating’ population of indeterminate legal status). China is now ‘in the midst of the largest mass migration the world has ever seen’ which ‘already dwarfs the migrations that reshaped America and the modern Western world’. By official count, it has ‘114 million migrant workers who have left rural areas, temporarily or for good, to work in cities’, and government experts ‘predict the number will rise to 300 million by 2020, eventually to 500 million’.


pages: 291 words: 87,296

Lethal Passage by Erik Larson

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

Erase these ineffective regulations—but immediately replace them with a formal, rational federal code that at last recognizes guns for what they are: the single most dangerous, socially costly, culturally destabilizing consumer product marketed in America. Herewith, the Life and Liberty Preservation Act, its provisions divided into three parts governing the distribution, purchase, and design of firearms: I. DISTRIBUTION Any serious effort to halt the mass migration of weapons to illegal hands must first concentrate on the firearms distribution network, in particular, the role played by retail dealers. As things stand now, it is simply too easy to get a license to buy and sell guns. As a first step, Congress should repeal all provisions of the McClure-Volkmer Act, except the machine-gun ban.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

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

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

Knowledge industries such as software, finance, communication, surveillance, and military contracting are the vital economic sectors of our time, and the corporate world has proceeded to bulk up with armies of middle managers, efficiency experts, laboratory scientists, and public-relations specialists. As the professional-managerial class grew, its political alignment also changed. Between the Eisenhower era and today, professionals undertook a mass migration from the Republican to the Democratic Party, for reasons that will become apparent as we proceed. In fact, according to the sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, professionals went from being the most Republican social formation in the country in the 1950s to being the most Democratic by the mid-Nineties.14 Professionalism is “postindustrial ideology,” and today the Democrats are the party of the professional class.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

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

That meant, for signalling your status to others and establishing your place in the village’s social hierarchy, what you did was as important as what you owned. In those times, to signal status, the conspicuous consumption of leisure – that is, experiences – was just as good as the conspicuous consumption of goods. It was the arrival of cities that changed all that. The mass migrations of the 20th century, from small communities where everyone knew everyone else to large metropolises where you barely knew your neighbour, meant that what you did with your time became virtually useless as a way to signify status. In the relative anonymity of urban and, to a lesser extent, suburban life, your neighbours, friends, colleagues at work, and the people you passed on the street were much more likely to see what you owned than know what you did.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

If globalization represents a triumph for market forces, why are we seeing the rise of state capitalism, a topic that crops up time and again in this book? Do we really live in a global market economy when so much economic activity is influenced by governments, either directly via high levels of public spending or indirectly through government influence on energy supplies or bond prices? If past economic success owed much to mass migrations of people both within countries and across borders, what should we make of heightened border controls and the growth of anti-immigration politics? How will Western countries deal with the economic hole created by population ageing? Will they be forced to rethink their current resistance to large-scale immigration?


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Jobs and Visas During the 1990s, more than one million Soviet emigrants arrived in Israel, most of them highly educated. Given Israel’s size, this amounted to an unprecedented increase in human capital. Although the impact on local manufacturing was disappointing, the high-tech sector experienced a significant jump in productivity and innovation. The same pattern emerges in other cases of mass migration of skilled individuals. On July 1, 1997, Great Britain handed over Hong Kong to China. Concerned about living under Chinese rule, thousands of Hong Kong residents, many of them wealthy and well educated, moved to Vancouver in the years preceding the handover. While there were some inevitable cultural tensions early on and not all the Chinese remained, in the end the city gained from this inflow in terms of both human and financial capital.


pages: 285 words: 83,682

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Millions of people crossed the borders in Punjab, in the west, and Bengal in the east, which were divided between India and Pakistan. Six and a half million Muslims moved into West Pakistan, nearly 5 million Hindus moved in the opposite direction into India. Perhaps three-quarters of a million Muslims moved into East Pakistan, and more than 2.5 million Hindus moved from there into India. This was the largest mass migration in human history, involving a total of nearly 15 million people. Nevertheless, between 30 million and 40 million Muslims remained in India, which will soon have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. For some South Asians, the new borderland was a scar. Several years after Partition, the Indo-Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto wrote a story, in Urdu, titled “Toba Tek Singh,” and it told of a decision of the Indian and Pakistani governments to exchange members of its lunatic asylums, as they had exchanged prisoners.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Though the internal combustion engine is almost certainly one of the big culprits in the climate change we are experiencing today, climate shifts have been causing massive structural transformations since before the first histories were written. Desertification played a role in the collapse of the Harappan Civilization in the Indus Valley around 1300 BCE, and environmental degradation has been one of the biggest drivers of mass migrations.1 Paleoclimatologist Douglas Kennett has theorized that drought led to the decline of Mayan civilization.2 Christianity, Islam, democracy, Communism, the Enlightenment, free-market capitalism, and the scientific method are all examples of structural transformations that were driven by ideas and beliefs.


pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

It will not be the total end of time on earth, but it may be the end of time as we know it. Where will 1.5 billion people go in the next 50 years when temperature rises to uninhabitable levels, floods take over habitats established for hundreds of years, drinkable water becomes scarce, and resulting mass migration causes uncontrolled wars all over the globe? What will time be like for those poor folks whose lifespans will be shrunken to the average age of a horse? When things get worse, were will they go? Stephen Hawking tells us that we’d better look for another planet. Speaking in Trondheim, Norway, at the Starmus Festival IV, nine months before his death on March 14, 2018, he warned, “If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before. . . .


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. There is certainly no shortage of excellent writing about our present global predicament, in which rising geopolitical tensions are combined with growing ecological and demographic challenges (including aging, urbanization, and mass migration). My own brief account is a plea to Americans to recognize that America should not aim for “primacy” in the twenty-first century, but rather for global cooperation, the rule of law, and security for all nations under the UN Charter. Bibliography Allison, Graham. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?


pages: 290 words: 82,220

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

biofilm, Black Lives Matter, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Graeber, Easter island, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, megacity, off-the-grid, rent control, the built environment, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

It’s only a matter of time before another hurricane-ravaged city falls prey to a plague that can’t be stopped because governments refused to spend money on rescue efforts.3 Civil unrest and widening class divisions will exacerbate these problems. If our political systems can’t address the twin problems of climate and poverty, there will be more food and water riots, as well as global wars over natural resources. The costs of city life will far outweigh the benefits, sparking mass migrations of people seeking new homes—and more international conflicts. Eventually, some of today’s megacities will look like something out of a far-future science-fiction movie, full of half-drowned metal skeletons covered in incomprehensible advertisements for products we can no longer afford to make or buy.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

After the Nazis’ fall, the symbol became popular with neo-Nazis, and featured prominently on the cover of a manifesto by Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist who murdered fifty-one worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Tarrant, who livestreamed the massacre on Facebook, titled his manifesto after a conspiracy theory about immigrants “replacing” white populations. The theory is often paired with antisemitic tropes that accuse Jews of organizing mass migration in order to overthrow white majorities. (A different neo-Nazi would cite the same conspiracy theory when he killed eleven worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.) If the swastika is a chart-topping single, the sonnenrad is a deep cut: less mainstream but well known among true fans. Mike’s Big Dipper explanation was particularly obscure; I had to Google it to discern what the hell he was talking about, and even then I only got a few hits, largely from the notorious troll forum 4chan, as well as from a blog called Daily Bitcoin News, where a blogger explained why various Nazi symbols were, in his opinion, actually not racist.


pages: 254 words: 82,981

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

“Plastic ingestion within the food web is potentially as complex as the food web itself, 53 54 a poison like no other but it’s also very prevalent,” says Choy. “The amount and the quality of that organic matter is really what dictates life in the deep sea.” Every day, ocean life embarks on a mass migration that puts a bird flock or reindeer herd to shame. When the sun’s up, animals large and small hang out in the relative safety of deeper, darker waters, where their predators can’t see them. But at night, they move en masse to surface waters, where there’s more sustenance—and more microplastics they mistake for sustenance.


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

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

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

Above all, although the major rivers of Siberia – Ob, Yenisey and Lena – run north–south, their tributaries form an almost continuous east–west waterway from the Urals to Lake Baikal. Likewise the broad rivers that run from Muscovy south towards the Black and Caspian Seas – Dnieper, Donets, Don and Volga – allow communications by boat in the summer and on the ice in winter. These natural ‘corridors’ permitted not only mass migration, the transmission of orders, tribute and trade, but also dramatic military raids: Cossack adventurers captured Sinop in Anatolia in 1614 and Azov near the Crimea in 1641. The principal strategic challenges to the Russian state nevertheless lay elsewhere. Smolensk, forward bastion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, stood just over 200 miles west of Moscow, while Narva, a Baltic outpost of the Swedish state, stood scarcely 400 miles to the northwest.

Not surprisingly, this combination of advantages attracted a substantial migration of peasants from the north. Some joined the Cossacks beyond the Belgorod and Simbirsk Lines, seeking Tatar booty, while others fell victim to Tatar raiders and begged to be ransomed; but most settled and prospered on the hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin farmland now available behind the Lines. This mass migration created a crisis for the ‘servitors’ of the northern regions, on whom the tsars relied to defend the empire. To finance their military service, most servitors depended on the labour and services exacted from the unfree inhabitants of their estates. Now, the servitors claimed, no sooner had they departed on campaign than either their serfs fled southwards or else neighbouring noblemen kidnapped them as extra hands to work their own estates: they could therefore no longer fulfil their military obligations for lack of peasants.

Unsurprisingly, these measures enraged the local population and alienated them from their Jewish neighbours.52 Rabbi Hannover did not mention one more factor that helped to precipitate the rebellion that would cost half of Ukraine's Jews their lives and property: adverse weather. The failure of the 1637 revolt triggered a mass migration of Cossacks to the lower Dnieper which, even at the best of times, suffered from almost unbearable humidity and heat in summers and intense cold in winters. As elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, these were not ‘the best of times’. The diary of Marcin Goliński of Kraków recorded the deteriorating situation, with high bread prices in 1638; an exceptionally cold summer in 1641 (during which the sparse grain harvest ripened late and the wine was sour); spring frosts in 1642 and 1643 that blighted all crops; and heavy snow and frosts in the early months of 1646 that gave way to daily rains so torrential that the roads became impassable.


pages: 363 words: 11,523

The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat: How to Buy, Cut, and Cook Great Beef, Lamb, Pork, Poultry, and More by Joshua Applestone, Jessica Applestone, Alexandra Zissu

back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, gentleman farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, mass immigration, McMansion, refrigerator car, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration

Butchers back then were from England and members of an exclusive guild. They passed their skills down from father to son. Apprenticeship took years (and truthfully it still does). There were no actual butcher shops; meat was only allowed to be sold in public markets. But in the 1840s, during a period of mass immigration, skilled German and Irish butchers arrived. They were excluded from the guild, so they set up illegal butcher shops. Eventually the city council realized it couldn’t stop the shops, so in 1843 it gave guild status to all of these butchers and legalized the sale of meat in private shops. By 1850, there were 531 shops, and half of the city’s butchers were foreign born.


pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

What kind of identity or vision does it assert? But among the many things unreckoned with by David Cameron’s government, when it initiated Britain’s current political disaster, was the extent to which voters were up for a bit of negativity. The vote for Brexit was a ‘no’ to many things: wage stagnation, mass immigration, local government cuts, Brussels, London, Westminster, multiculturalism, ‘political correctness’ and who knows what else. Political scientists and pollsters can spend as much time as they like disentangling one factor from another in an effort to isolate the really decisive one, but Leave’s greatest advantage was that it didn’t have to specify exactly what was being left.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of racisms in the world, and California’s is no less serious. But the exploitation in California cut across race. So we had the best of all possible worlds. Massive amounts of money—makes life easier—that’s reinvested in the region. Skilled labor to use the money to innovate. And mass immigration, wave after wave of educated people who could do the shit work. The three pillars that built California. And it gave us the independence to build the culture and politics that allowed us to protect what we had built. We were an outlier city, we had money, we had autonomy, and we were a port, so we had intercourse with the world.


pages: 298 words: 89,287

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

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

According to the Israel Democracy Institute, the rate of observance remained fairly constant between 1999 and 2008, with a 1 percent increase in those who consider themselves partially, non- or only slightly observant (69 percent) and in those who consider themselves fully observant (13 percent) and a 2 percent drop in those who consider themselves very observant, to 18 percent. The reason for this can be found in two countervailing trends, which effectively cancel each other out numerically and antagonize each other socially and culturally. On the one hand, there has been the mass migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, where “being a Jew” was considered not just a religion but a nationality, like being a Russian, a Tartar or a Ukrainian. The impetus for many of these immigrants to come to Israel was primarily economic rather than religious, and their attachment to Judaism, compared with other Israelis’, was relatively weak.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

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

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

These clashes marked the beginnings of increasingly sectarian violence: more than 200 Muslims killed by Christians in May 2004; 500 protesters killed by Nigerian troops in Port Harcourt later that year; attacks on gas pipelines in 2006; kidnapping of foreign oil workers; and, in 2009, the emergence of Boko Haram, the Islamist movement intent on imposing Sharia law on the entire country, whatever the cost in terms of bloodshed.22 Should this violence escalate further (with luck, the risk may be less than before, following the peaceful democratic transition of 2015), Nigeria would eventually be in danger of becoming Africa’s Syria. In the event, Syria’s refugee crisis – appalling as it is – might end up being a mere footnote in a new epoch of mass migration. Ultimately, the African migration story will be driven by population, modest gains in per capita incomes, improved transportation linkages with the rest of the world and, in some cases, the emergence of ethnic and religious violence: precisely the conditions, in fact, that led to the exodus from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.


pages: 323 words: 95,188

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

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

The chief of the checkpoint looked as if he had not slept in days. “We are seeing more than ten thousand refugees every day,” he said wearily. “They keep coming, all day and all night. We do not expect a letup.” He figured one hundred thousand people had crossed over since the border opened roughly a week ago. This was psychosis, a mass migration feeding on itself. “Twenty of my friends have gone to the West this year,” said a twenty-three-year-old waiter from Jena. A young man, leaving with his girlfriend, told me how it had grown “lonely” back home. “We have as many friends in Frankfurt now as we do in Erfurt.” A woman who hitchhiked through Czechoslovakia with her husband and young child said that the sight of so many people leaving made her pick up and go, too.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

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

For them, the conflict of interest between rich bourgeois capitalists and poor exploited workers was irreconcilable. Others, following Rousseau, worried that the individualistic nature of a capitalist society was destroying a shared sense of community. Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village is an eloquent attack on the shortcomings of modernity and the impact on the country of mass migration to industrial cities induced by capitalism: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay; Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.20 In like vein, the German playwright, poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller emphasised the anti-spiritual, anti-aesthetic tendency of contemporary political economy.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

An underlying trend is at work that supports and enables the developing world: urbanization. People have been moving to cities for centuries, attracted by the possibility of higher income, more opportunity, and a better life. But the scale and pace of today’s urbanization is without precedent. We are in the midst of the largest mass migration from the countryside to the city in history. The population of cities globally has been rising by an average of 65 million people a year over the last three decades—equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom—and the growth has been heavily driven by rapid urbanization in China and India.12 While Europe and the United States urbanized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century, China and India, each with a population of more than a billion, are now in the middle of their urban shifts.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

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

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

Adam Smith himself insisted that markets will not yield their famous optimality without a strong moral dimension: absent trust and empathy between buyer and seller, markets quickly lose their efficiencies and fail—as numerous scandals and scams and bubbles and busts have demonstrated. But you didn’t have to wait for a full-blown collapse to see the costs of our mass migration from social customers to more purely economic consumers. You only had to look as far as the big-box phenomenon. Although these mega-stores with their mega-efficiencies meant lower prices and larger selections, they also brought a new set of costs for those same empowered small-town consumers.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

These are among the reasons behind a gradual drive to incorporate the world’s population into a global labour force, fostered by imperialism and globalisation.117 On the other hand, capital requires a particular type of surplus population: cheap, docile and pliable.118 Without these characteristics, this excess of humanity becomes a problem for capital. Not content to lie down and accept its disposability, it makes itself heard through riots, mass migration, criminality, and all sorts of actions that disrupt the existing order. Capitalism therefore has simultaneously to produce a disciplined surplus and deploy violence and coercion against those who resist. One of the principal ways to manage the unruly surplus has been to champion the social democratic ideal of full employment, whereby every physically capable (male) worker has a job.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

To HMS and JCS CONTENTS Introduction: Breathing Life into a Dying System 1 On the Surface: Symptoms of Death and Rebirth 2 Structure: Systemic Disconnects 3 Transforming Thought: The Matrix of Economic Evolution 4 Source: Connecting to Intention and Awareness 5 Leading the Personal Inversion: From Me to We 6 Leading the Relational Inversion: From Ego to Eco 7 Leading the Institutional Inversion: Toward Eco-System Economies 8 Leading from the Emerging Future: Now Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors About the Presencing Institute INTRODUCTION Breathing Life into a Dying System Finance. Food. Fuel. Water shortage. Resource scarcity. Climate chaos. Mass poverty. Mass migration. Fundamentalism. Terrorism. Financial oligarchies. We have entered an Age of Disruption. Yet the possibility of profound personal, societal, and global renewal has never been more real. Now is our time. Our moment of disruption deals with death and rebirth. What’s dying is an old civilization and a mindset of maximum “me”—maximum material consumption, bigger is better, and special-interest-group-driven decision-making that has led us into a state of organized irresponsiblity, collectively creating results that nobody wants.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

The objection might make some sense if we were talking about a fifty-year span, or even a century. But on a thousand-year scale, the force of cultural drift becomes far more powerful. Technological and geopolitical changes obviously have a tremendous impact—killing off entire industries, triggering mass migrations, launching wars, or precipitating epidemics. Neighborhood clusters are extremely vulnerable to those dramatic forces of change, but they are also vulnerable to the slower, mostly invisible drift that all culture undergoes. Over twenty or thirty generations, even something as fundamental as the name of a common item can be transformed beyond recognition, and the steady but imperceptible shifts in pronunciation can make a spoken language unintelligible to listeners.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

Shopping meccas like L.A.’s Beverly Center became cultural landmarks, and the default leisure activity of hanging at the mall would define an entire generation of “Valley girls.” But as mall culture went global, Gruen’s design became increasingly prominent in the downtown centers of new megacities. Originally conceived as a way to escape the harsh winters of Minnesota, Gruen’s enclosed public space accelerated the mass migration to desert or tropical climates made possible by the invention of air-conditioning. Today, the ten largest shopping malls in the world are all located in non-U.S. or European countries with tropical or desert climates, such as China, the Philippines, Iran, and Thailand. And while the mall itself would expand in scale prodigiously—a mall in Dubai has more than one thousand stores spread out over more than five million square feet of real estate—the basic template of Gruen’s design would remain constant: two to three floors of shops surrounding an enclosed courtyard, connected by escalators.


The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

London’s unusual openness to national and international populations has been a marked feature of its economic trajectory since the early 1990s. London was at the centre of an upsurge in asylum-seeking from eastern Europe and from conflict-ridden areas in Africa and Asia, which peaked in the late 1990s. This mass migration was part of a global trend – the number of people residing outside their country of origin almost doubled between 1980 and 2000 (Gordon et al., 2007: 12). But in fact most of London’s immigration since 1991 has consisted of migrants arriving initially from the Asian Commonwealth and other Asian countries and, more recently, from the EU-A8 Eastern European countries.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Since then they live dispersed in a dozen countries and their number in Turkey most probably exceeds that in Russia. Many of these displaced communities were able to preserve their traditional way of life completely unmodified, but Circassians are also known to marry outside their group. The mass migration left an old culture behind, but it was now broken and fragmented, severed from its source and ready to be appropriated in strange new ways. Such thoughts were inevitably on my mind as I observed the tall Russian models, wearing modern Circassian dresses like a war trophy, and the clothes hanging nearby with price tags that outside Moscow would be considered prohibitively expensive.


pages: 304 words: 88,773

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

But in both cases, one of the primary solutions may well prove to be to encourage people to move to metropolitan areas. A warmer planet is still a city-planet, for better or worse. Yet that doesn’t mean continued urbanization is inevitable. It just means that the potential threats will come from somewhere else. Most likely, if some new force derails our mass migration to the cities, it will take the form of a threat that specifically exploits density to harm us, just as Vibrio cholerae did two hundred years ago. IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF THE 9/11 ATTACKS, MANY commentators observed that there was a certain dark irony in the technological method of the terrorists: they had used what were effectively Stone Age tools—knives—to gain control of advanced American machines—four Boeing 7-series planes—and then employed that technology as a weapon against its creators.


pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

., Ivis illustration of, 18–19 story of, 18, 20 Long Wolf, Verlyn illustration of, 7 on rape, 5, 6 story of, 4–5 Los Nietos, 73 Ludlow massacre, 160 Lueders Park Piru Bloods, 62 Lumumba, Patrice, 40 Lynchings, 64, 195 Malt liquor, sales of, 2, 3 Mara Salvatrucha, 73 Marland, William C.: severance tax and, 170 Marsh Fork Elementary School, 128 Martin, Julian: on coal towns, 151–152 Marx, Karl, 232 proletarian revolution and, 244–245 proletariat/bourgeoisie and, 253 Mass migrations, 204 Massey Energy Coal Company, 118, 161, 168 dust-monitoring system and, 164 Elk Run and, 164 lawsuit against, 163–164 MTR by, 164–165 safety/environmental violations by, 165, 166 Matewan massacre, 160 Matiaz, Abel, 190, 191, 193, 194 Mayer, Carl, 90 Maynard, Spike, 168 McCormack, John Count, 75 McDonald’s, 182, 207, 248, 255 McDowell County, 153, 155 personal income in, 132 McDowell County Correctional Center, 159 McGraw, Warren, 168 McKibben, Bill, 266 McNamara, Robert, 152 Means, Bill, 45, 55 Means, Russell, 48, 50–51 Medel, José Hilário, 199, 200–201 Medicaid, 153 Medical bills, 237, 239, 265 Mencken, H.


pages: 323 words: 94,406

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, Cape to Cairo, Crossrail, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, railway mania, refrigerator car, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban planning

The Trans-Siberian, therefore, does not merely have a major role in railway history, but its contribution to the wider geopolitics of the twentieth century cannot be overestimated. Without the Trans-Siberian, modern maps of Europe and Asia might have a very different complexion. The sequence of wars, as well as the mass migration stimulated by the line, were the source of much suffering, and there are numerous tragic stories in this book. But there is also a fantastic, positive tale to be told, one that is too often omitted or simply forgotten in the clichéd view of Russia. The construction and the continued efficient operation of the Trans-Siberian ranks among the greatest achievements of mankind.


pages: 271 words: 87,303

Trust Me, I'm a (Junior) Doctor by Max Pemberton

affirmative action, mass immigration, young professional

The likes of Mr Butterworth would have just let his scrubs fall to the ground. He probably wouldn’t even have noticed. That’s focus for you. Tuesday 3 February Tonight, junior doctors up and down the country move jobs. On the first Wednesday in August and February, we all switch, our six-month jobs having come to an end. It’s a mass migration that goes unnoticed by the public. This is probably because we don’t get any time off to relocate; it happens after we’ve finished work, in the dead of night when most sensible people are asleep in bed. By late evening, the roads are packed with junior doctors, all their worldly possessions crammed into boxes and suitcases, speeding towards their new hospitals.


Data Action: Using Data for Public Good by Sarah Williams

affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, City Beautiful movement, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data philanthropy, data science, digital divide, digital twin, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, fake news, four colour theorem, global village, Google Earth, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sidewalk Labs, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Steven Levy, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transatlantic slave trade, Uber for X, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration

At a 2006 exhibition of the Architecture League in New York City, maps of New York (New York), Wichita (Kansas), New Haven (Connecticut), New Orleans (Louisiana), and Phoenix (Arizona) were presented to the public (figure 4.16). A video seen upon entering the exhibition showed the flow of those incarcerated from their homes in Brooklyn to prisons in upstate New York, which amounted to a mass migration of people. The video asks the public to imagine if just “one million dollars was spent on resettlement rather than imprisonment,” what the communities might look like. While the video did not suggest a policy action, it was meant to teach the public about a topic, ask them to rethink it from their own perspective, and ultimately provoke a debate on mass incarceration and its effects on the communities once home to the incarcerated.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

“They [my relatives] have often bitterly entreated me in the hope that I will speak out less,” Tohti complained. “They wanted me to mind my own business, and focus on making money.” Tohti urged a moderate, reasoned, tolerant approach. The explosive economic growth of the past two decades had brought with it the uprooting of family and community social structures, mass migrations to cities in search of affluence and opportunity, and the resulting “theft, pickpocketing, drug trafficking, drug abuse and prostitution.” People, it seemed, no longer trusted each other.11 Tohti watched as the Han Chinese members of the bingtuan (called the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corporation in English) built new suburbs and farms and ran its own paramilitary organization.


pages: 259 words: 87,875

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World by Nicholas Schou

airport security, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fixed income, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, old-boy network, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea

First the police, and later Rolling Stone magazine, would brand them the “Hippie Mafia.” They called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. This book is their story. 1. The Farmer IN THE MID-1950s, Anaheim, California, a smog-choked working-class town fifteen miles from the nearest beach, was bursting with recent Mexican immigrants and a mass migration of blue-collar white Americans who had fled south from the wave of black families who began to move into Los Angeles suburbs like Watts and Compton after the Second World War. A century after it was founded by German immigrants as a farming community in 1857, Anaheim’s boundless orange groves were quickly being devoured by factories and suburban tract.


pages: 932 words: 307,785

State of Emergency: The Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

anti-communist, Apollo 13, Arthur Marwick, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Doomsday Book, edge city, estate planning, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, financial thriller, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, post-war consensus, sexual politics, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Like most of his ministers, Heath had always been determinedly moderate on questions of race and immigration; indeed, his dogged refusal to play the race card and his decision to sack Enoch Powell for rocking the boat on immigration had upset many grass-roots Tories in the last years of the 1960s. But his position in the election campaign of 1970 had been clear. Public opinion overwhelmingly demanded an end to mass immigration, so an end must be made. In October 1971, therefore, the government had passed a landmark Immigration Act bringing up the drawbridge. From now on, only so-called Commonwealth ‘patrials’ with a parent or grandparent born in the United Kingdom (which meant they were likely to be white) had the right to settle in Britain; all other Commonwealth citizens had to apply for work permits, just like everybody else.

Some observers detected a hint of racism in the distinction between ‘patrials’ and the rest; indeed, Reginald Maudling told his colleagues that since assimilation was ‘all but impossible’ for Asians, immigration ought to be limited to people from a ‘cultural background fairly akin to our own’. But Heath’s ministers were, by and large, a liberal-minded lot, and certainly far more tolerant than the majority of the population. They closed the door to mass immigration not because they were racist reactionaries, but because public opinion – as manifested in one poll after another – demanded it. The Act worked and the furore died down – until Idi Amin reignited it.4 At first, even as terrified Ugandan Asians were desperately calling friends and relatives in Britain to beg for help, the government tried to play for time.

For one thing, they were widely dispersed across the country; for another, they worked such long hours and were so discreet that they were rarely even noticed. Ironically, although critics often complained that immigrants did not even try to fit in, the ones who provoked least hostility were those who made least effort to do so.18 Ever since mass immigration from the Commonwealth began in the early 1950s, successive governments had been anxious to make sure that the newcomers found productive work and a chance to make their way up the ladder. Initially there seemed good reason for optimism: a study in 1970 found that many immigrants had readily adapted to new challenges, with 18 per cent of both Indians and West Africans finding professional or technical work and another 19 per cent getting clerical jobs.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

Second, the United States became an urban, industrial society where most people for the first time depended on formal employment in big companies for a living. Up until 1880 or so, most Americans more or less worked for themselves. By the early 1900s, the vast majority were ‘‘employees.’’ They felt powerless and exploited, even though U.S. wages were in fact high by world standards. Mass immigration of Europe’s poor added to both the reality and the visibility of misery in the midst of plenty. Immigrants also brought the radical politics of Europe, where industrialization had brought trade unionism, socialism, communism, and anarchism to the working class. The Limits of Financial Regulation Third, starting in the states but reaching the White House in the person of Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive movement took root in American politics that stood traditional roles of government and the private economy on their head.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

‘I never thought it would feel so good to play second fiddle in my own house,’ he said. He felt that Derek had many strengths that he himself lacked, not least a supple intellect. The youngster was able to coin phrases that captured the public imagination. When Derek talked of ‘white genocide’ caused by mass immigration, Don noticed the way that it took hold, filtering into the mainstream. As for Chloe, Derek’s mother, she also had a long association with the white nationalist movement. She married David Duke, one of the highest profile members of the Ku Klux Klan, in her twenties, and had two daughters with him.


China: A History by John Keay

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, invention of movable type, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, éminence grise

Though less obvious than an elegant literacy, or the primacy awarded to history, to the membership of an agrarian society surrounded by more nomadic peoples, and to imperial integration as the political norm, ‘the Confucian persuasion’ yet underpinned all these conceits and would prove no less enduring. Wang Mang’s ‘fundamentalism’ did not discredit the principles of Confucianism, and neither can his reactionary reforms be held primarily responsible for the chaos that engulfed the empire during and after his reign. Rather was it the social and economic upheaval, the mass migrations and the breakdown in law and order that resulted from the flooding of the Yellow River. Destitution being the most compelling of dictators, probably no emperor could have controlled the situation. A form of government devised for a settled agrarian population was in deep trouble the moment villagers turned vagrants and farmers took to brigandage.

Communal kitchens were closed, some land was again made available for private cultivation, informal markets reappeared to handle this local output and productivity began to shoot up. This was matched in the industrial sector, where incentives were introduced, innovation encouraged and energy supplies improved when a major oilfield came on line. Mass migration from the countryside to the cities was reversed, with restrictions on internal travel to prevent a further exodus from the fields. And the problem of an exponentially growing population was addressed in the first serious attempt to promote birth control. Mao had always insisted that the larger the proletariat the better.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Anatoly Karlin, “Berlin Gets Bad News from PISA,” The AK Blog, May 12, 2012, http://akarlin.com/2012/05/berlin-gets-bad-news-from-pisa. 3. Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson, “Europe’s Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration,” American Economic Review (2012): 1832–56, http://www.econ.ucla.edu/lboustan/research_pdfs/research11_massmigra tion.pdf. 4. Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, “What Do International Tests Really Show About US Student Performance,” Economic Policy Institute (2013), http://www.epi.org/files/2013/EPI-What-do-international-tests-really-show-about-US-student-performance.pdf. 5.


pages: 313 words: 100,317

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

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

The journalist Claudia Keller was reminded of the 1920s, when the “assimilated Jews from genteel Charlottenburg didn’t want anything to do with the ‘Eastern European Jews’ from East Berlin’s barn quarters.” In the meantime, according to Kugelmann, the Jewish Community is shrinking again. After all, she explains, its enormous expansion wasn’t the result of natural growth but of the mass migration of sorts that began after the fall of the Wall. Moreover, Jewish communities throughout the country are registering many more deaths than births. Since 2005, Germany has insisted that only “halachic Jews”—people of Jewish origin on both their mother’s and father’s sides—have the right to immigrate to Germany.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

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

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

Nothing else on their agenda—not Doha, not global financial regulation, not even expanding foreign aid—comes even close in terms of potential impact on enlarging the global pie. I am not talking about total liberalization. A complete, or even significant, reduction in visa restrictions in the advanced countries would be too disruptive. It would set off a mass migration that would throw labor markets and social policies in the advanced nations into disarray. But a small-scale program of expanded labor mobility would be manageable, and still generate very large economic gains for the migrant workers and their home economies. Here is what I have in mind. Rich nations would commit to a temporary work visa scheme that would expand their total labor force by no more than 3 percent.


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

Central Command, retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni, who participated in a high-level Military Advisory Board review on the subject, we either address climate change today or “we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” The 2007 report concluded that climate change would act as a threat multiplier by exacerbating conflict over resources, especially because of declining food production, border and mass migration tensions, and so on—increasing political instability and creating failed states—if no action was taken to reduce impacts. The findings of this report agree with those of the confidential assessment of the security implications of climate change by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the coordinating body of America’s sixteen intelligence agencies.


pages: 364 words: 102,528

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cognitive bias, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, gentrification, guest worker program, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, iterative process, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, price discrimination, refrigerator car, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Free land was very important then in part because many cities had become cesspools of infectious diseases. Today, the diseases are mostly gone (in the wealthy countries), the economic infrastructure of cities works better, and so most hunger-related migration is to more densely populated areas, including the mass migration from Western China to the Chinese cities in the east of the country. Migration has been directed at cities since at least the late nineteenth century. For instance, given how much land there is in Australia, it is remarkable that it is one of the most urbanized nations in the world with cities full of first- or second-generation immigrants.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

Even so, according to a case study by the UN’s World Water Assessment Program, the unsustainable use of water has caused irreversible damage to water quality and the ecosystem of the Aral Sea basin. There is heavy pollution of surface water and groundwater from untreated wastewater containing high concentrations of pesticide, fertiliser, and industrial runoff. According to the case study, mass migration away from the basin, as well as malnutrition and extreme poverty for many of the people who remain there, are consequences of Soviet policy. The Soviet Union is long gone; in its place since 1991 are five Central Asian republics—Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan—with an interest in the Aral Sea’s health because of the rivers that flow through the basin.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The Origins of Free Trade Long-distance movements of goods and tools have been a feature of human civilization since the beginning of agriculture. The Mediterranean trade was central to Athenian, Carthaginian, and Roman development. Mohammad was a trader and the trading routes of the Muslim world and on to Asia via the Silk Road helped maintain the light of civilization through the Middle Ages in the West.1 Mass migrations were also a feature of early history. Many of the great empires were established and later destroyed by nomadic tribes that flooded from the North Asian steppe southward, westward, and eastward. The Germans, the Huns, the Mongols, the Turks, and other groups moved, often violently, through established civilizations to find, conquer, and eventually settle more fertile and civilized lands, only to be attacked by the next wave of nomads.


pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

Macron calls the intervention in Libya in 2011 ‘a historic error’, on a par with that in Iraq in 2003, which the French under Jacques Chirac at the time tried to prevent.4 Outside interference of this sort, he judges, based on a moralizing attempt to teach lessons to regimes deemed ‘evil’, ends up creating new threats: internal and regional conflicts, political instability, mass migration, and a breeding ground for jihadism. ‘Democracy isn’t built from the outside without the people,’ he says. ‘France didn’t take part in the Iraq war, and that was right. And France was wrong to go to war in Libya in this way. What was the result of those interventions? Failed states where terrorist groups prospered.’5 To this end, he has reversed the French policy pursued by Hollande of calling for the removal of Bashar al-Assad, arguing that this should not be a precondition for diplomatic efforts in Syria.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

That includes some of the world’s most densely populated regions, in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as those Middle Eastern cities along the sea. In these places, extreme heat waves that now happen once every twenty-five years will become “annual events with temperatures close to the threshold for several weeks each year, which could lead to famine and mass migration.”8 Because, of course, these are precisely the places where most of the population works outdoors. In 2018, new research made it clear that the North China Plain, with 400 million residents, fell squarely in this red zone. “This is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future,” one MIT professor explained.


pages: 364 words: 102,225

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

battle of ideas, British Empire, call centre, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, illegal immigration, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Kibera, knowledge economy, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, urban planning, urban renewal

In the 1970s the government undertook a variety of new development schemes, and even developed a master plan for the city. But it could hardly keep up with the city’s accelerating growth. The civil war that came in 1971 convulsed the country, and when it was over, Pakistan was split in two: East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Karachi became the destination of another mass migration: years after the war, Bengalis fled their impoverished new country and migrated to Karachi seeking work. The breakaway of Bangladesh was a symptom of ethnic discord all across the country. Secessionist movements arose, including one in Karachi’s province of Sindh. These movements, and government crackdowns, added to the poverty and instability of the countryside, encouraging still more migrations to Karachi.


pages: 316 words: 103,743

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

The Dai diaspora from Banna into Shan State and the north-west of Laos, which borders both Shan and Banna, dates back centuries. Sipsongpanna stretched into what is now Myanmar and Laos, and the Dai have always moved beyond borders to different areas of their old kingdom. But it was the CCP’s takeover of China and the subsequent chaos of the Cultural Revolution especially which prompted the last great mass migration of the Dai and the other ethnic groups of Banna into the Golden Triangle. Not even the remote rainforests of Yunnan’s borderlands were spared the Red Guards. As monasteries were raided and wrecked, monks took sanctuary in the temples of Kengtung and Muang Sing in north-west Laos. With schools closed for years in the turmoil, many Dai sent their children to stay with relatives over the borders, or went with them to escape being punished for adhering to their traditional lifestyle.


pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

Historically, this has been the way that people have escaped dire poverty and other threats. The current phase of globalization is characterized by sharp increases in all cross-border flows, but, as a share of national or global populations, migration is being curtailed to levels that are far below those of the age of mass migration over a century ago. Too many people are trapped in poverty and are unable to benefit from the opportunities provided by a globalized world. As Goldin, Cameron, and Balarajan show in their book Exceptional People, migration is the orphan of the global system. This needs to be remedied by policies developed to increase the number of migrants accompanied by regularization and policies to ensure that migrants accept the responsibilities that go with their rights.90 8 Managing Systemic Risk The world we live in is markedly different from that of just a couple of decades ago.


pages: 302 words: 97,076

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Bletchley Park, centre right, colonial rule, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, trade route, urban sprawl, éminence grise

It was a split predominantly defined not by language, culture, costume or physical appearance, all of which remained very similar across the local population, but by faith. The modern history of the Western Balkans began roughly halfway through the first millennium, with the collapse of ancient Rome and the arrival in the area of a dominant population of Slavs, one of the many mass migrations from further east that populated much of Europe. Long before the tight modern concept of today’s nation state, national identity was then defined most strongly through religion, and in the Western Balkans the south-Slav arrivals found themselves atop some of the great faith fault lines of medieval Europe.


pages: 398 words: 100,679

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

Instances of extreme road rage flare as drivers grow increasingly desperate, before abandoning their cars among the others already littering the shoulders and lanes and joining the droves of people pushing onward on foot. Even without an immediate hazard, any event that disrupts distribution networks or the electrical grid will starve the cities’ voracious appetite for a constant influx of resources and force their inhabitants out in a hungry exodus: mass migrations of urbanite refugees swarming into the surrounding countryside to scavenge for food. TEARING UP THE SOCIAL CONTRACT I don’t want to get stuck in the philosophical quagmire of debating whether mankind is intrinsically evil or not, and whether a controlling authority is a necessary construct to impose a set of laws and maintain order through the threat of punishment.


pages: 357 words: 99,684

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

There is a ‘heroic’ period of globalization, beginning in 1989 and ending around 1999, during which China’s entry into the world market helps suppress inflation; where falling wages are offset by a seemingly sustainable expansion of credit; where house prices rise, allowing the credit to be paid off and a whole bunch of innovations are suddenly deployed—above all mobile telephony and broadband Internet. Then there is a second phase in which the disruption overwhelms the innovations: China’s increased consumption of raw materials creates world-wide inflationary pressure; the house-price boom ends, because the banks run out of poverty-stricken workers to lend to; mass migration begins to exert a downward pressure on the wages of unskilled workers in Europe and the USA; the financial dynamic overtakes, dominates and ultimately chokes off the dynamics of production, trade and innovation. The rise of finance, wage stagnation, the capture of regulation and politics by a financial elite, consumption fuelled by credit rather than wages: it all blew up spectacularly.


pages: 391 words: 99,963

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

Snowmelt and Runoff Snow-fed rivers amid forested mountains: Many large cities of India, Pakistan, and China; Portland and the Pacific Northwest; Sacramento–San Joaquin river basin; downstream from the Alps. 5. Fire and Beetles Arid regions: Western United States, Canada (Alberta, British Columbia); Spain; Portugal. 6. Food and Mass Migration Agricultural plains: United States Great Plains; Australian coastal regions; Tijuana, Mexico; Lagos, Africa; Nairobi, Kenya. 7. Permafrost Thaw Seasonal freezing: Fairbanks, Alaska; northern Canada in general; Siberia. 8. Heat Hot and humid (summer) weather regimes: Texas generally, New York, Chicago, Paris, southern China. 9.


pages: 352 words: 98,424

Cathedrals of Steam: How London’s Great Stations Were Built – and How They Transformed the City by Christian Wolmar

Ascot racecourse, British Empire, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Crossrail, driverless car, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, pneumatic tube, railway mania

Although the ‘railway interest’ that was such a powerful force in the mid-nineteenth century had somewhat dissipated and weakened, a study of railway schemes and investments in this period still shows that there was a relatively small group of men – and they were all men – who both instigated and benefited from these schemes. It is quite likely that a few would have had property interests on the side. The effect of these services, together with the associated expansion of suburban lines, is unarguable. They stimulated a mass migration from the overcrowded parts of inner London, known today as Zone 1, and even parts of what is now Zone 2, such as Hackney and Stoke Newington. This not only ensured the filling up of the outer suburbs but greatly relieved housing pressure on the inner ones. Indeed, it is difficult to exaggerate the impact on the suburbs, particularly those served by the Great Eastern.


Your Own Allotment : How to Find It, Cultivate It, and Enjoy Growing Your Own Food by Russell-Jones, Neil.

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, discovery of the americas, Easter island, information retrieval, Kickstarter, mass immigration, spice trade

The salvation of Europe in the eighteenth century, with its immense yields the potato quickly replaced all other vegetables to become the main source of food. The dependence became too great, however, and when blight hit the crops it caused massive famine in the nineteenth century, which devastated many areas and caused the mass migrations from Scotland and Ireland to the USA and other parts of the British Empire. One of the reasons the blight spread so quickly was the custom of using the previous year’s potatoes and swapping them with others. There are hundreds of varieties – both for new/earlies and main crops. They are very easy to grow and give excellent yields.


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

In ‘Mountains’, power remains concentrated in elites; entrenched power hampers globalisation and economic development, making political reform difficult. Individualism remains a prevalent mindset, with a belief that people get what they deserve. The internet becomes balkanised, with elite access for the few. Oil loses ground, shale gas becomes a global success; clean coal and nuclear energy expand while renewables struggle to compete. Mass migration drives defence spending. ‘Mountains’ portrayed a world of volatile peaks and valleys. ‘Oceans’, by contrast, describes a world of greater cohesion, where power is more broadly shared. That makes reform slower but more effective in unleashing economic productivity and ambition for reform. Social justice emphasises solidarity over individualism: people believe that systems get what they deserve.


The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

Frustrated astronomers and observatory staff have tried a variety of repelling measures over the years—sound, air guns, flashlights, fluorescent bulbs, lavender oil, and copious cursing—but multiple observatories have settled on what has been nicknamed “the mothinator,” a simple but effective combination of a lamp, a fan, and an industrial-sized garbage bucket that can fill to the brim with moth carcasses in a matter of days during peak moth season. Ladybugs can cause similar problems; early every summer, huge swarms of ladybugs traversing the American Southwest will alight on high mountain peaks during mass migrations, turning out in such numbers that entire building walls can appear bright red and slightly teeming. All of these, though, pale next to the scorpions. At observatories in the American Southwest and Australia, scorpions do pose a danger to astronomers. New observers are warned sagely to watch out for the “small brown ones” and told to shake out towels, bang out boots, and give their pillows and bedsheets a once-over before climbing in.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Science always needs intellectual freedom to flourish, and every scientific breakthrough has to fundamentally question the stranglehold of scientific consensus. The freer people feel to question, the faster science will advance. Today, the technological changes afoot may seem mysterious, but they’re far less murky than the social changes that will accompany them. Mass migrations, autocratic crackdowns, billion-strong protests, financial restrictions, new taxes, and water wars may be the least of it. It’s great that the pope now has an astronomer, and Pope Francis has even spoken publicly about artificially intelligent robotics being deployed solely in service of humanity.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Such populations may have no other place to grow their crops, no means to buy grains from a neighboring state, and no infrastructure to haul the supplies to the families in need; an unprecedented humanitarian crisis could easily ensue if subsistence agriculture in these regions takes a substantial hit. The resulting famine, armed conflict, and mass migration would probably have global spillover effects, making the entire planet more volatile and less free. The fear of this outcome is perhaps the strongest selfish argument in favor of rich nations providing foreign aid to the developing world; it’s also a solid argument against climate policies that curtail industrial progress and economic growth in developing countries.


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

But from a neuron’s perspective, it is anything but. When a nerve impulse comes roaring down a nerve fiber, channels open in the neuron and millions of ions get instantly sucked through them into and out of the extracellular space, taking all their charge with them. The electrical field generated by this mass migration of charge works out to about a million volts per meter, which at that scale would feel like passing an entire bolt of lightning from one of your outstretched hands to the other. That’s what it feels like to be every neuron in your body, every moment of your life. Biologists have known for a long time that these kinds of bioelectrical signals are responsible for all communication between the brain and the nervous system: you can think of them as the telephone wires that help the brain’s command center communicate with your muscles to operate your limbs.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

As a company, our position is simply this: We can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.” It was clear where the suburbs were headed, but America was on an unbendable building program, and California was the national exaggeration. The state’s post–World War II growth was a bigger and grander extension of this new mass migration to what by the early 1950s some were beginning to call sprawl. Recruiting newcomers had long been a commercial way of life for the Golden State economy. By 1945, the state had been at it for more than a century, and whether it was through pamphlets or radio or pop music or the movies, it was almost always the same general sales pitch of nice weather and an affordable house with a yard full of bright vegetation.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It’s a world in which pandemics, inflation, recession, the climate crisis, nuclear escalation, and other risks combine to magnify harm via a series of vicious feedback loops. A pandemic triggers supply chain snags, causing prices to rise, tipping economies into recession, resulting in a global hunger crisis that affects poor people in low-income countries, leading to destabilizing mass migration that triggers political unrest and topples governments. “A polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises,” Tooze wrote. “It is a situation… where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.” It’s what world national security expert and former Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem calls “the age of disasters.”


pages: 752 words: 201,334

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Boycotts of Israel, Burning Man, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, Transnistria, Yom Kippur War

“Srulik,” Arik called him, a Yiddish endearment for Yisrael. The nickname seemed to Yisrael a subtle put-down, reminder of his outsider status as a religious Jew. But he kept his resentment to himself. NATAN ALTERMAN DIED in 1970 at age fifty-nine. Some said the poet died of heartbreak. Only a mass immigration of Western Jews, he had argued, would allow Israel to absorb the West Bank without risking a Palestinian majority, but the Jews weren’t coming. Café Casit closed for the funeral. Yisrael Harel was assigned the role of escorting the poet’s mistress behind the casket. Chapter 13 UTOPIAS LOST AND FOUND AVITAL GEVA, PROVOCATEUR THE FARMERS HEADING toward the fields of Ein Shemer weren’t sure they were seeing right.

Yet the brigade survived relatively intact, losing fifty-seven men (along with three hundred wounded)—half the number of its fatalities in the battle for Jerusalem. Along with grief came rage. The Labor Zionist leadership had led the Jewish people through the twentieth century, remained steady through war and siege and terrorism, through waves of mass immigration and economic devastation. Until now. How had the pioneer statesmen and their hero generals become so complacent, so arrogant, that they had failed to notice the growing strength of Arab armies and the prewar buildup on the borders? The world had never seemed to Israelis a more hostile place than it did in late October 1973.


pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

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

Edison opened his lab at Menlo Park and Alexander Graham Bell presented his first working telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The exposition itself stood as a striking symbol of the dominance of the engine and machine over the new American landscape.40 During the same period the nation’s population doubled. Most of the increase was due to the first great wave of mass immigration, bringing to American shores more than ten million people between 1860 and 1890. In the next wave, from 1890 to 1914, another fifteen million would join them, drawn from Russia and southern Europe and including large numbers of Jews. These transformations were a double blow to a social and intellectual elite that had already been caught off guard by mass democratic politics.

She suffered and endured all the ups and downs that go with a book of this sort, and when my own strength ran out, she always found some of her own to give me. INDEX Abbey, Edward, 400, 425–26, 429–31 Absurdity, Sartre on, 338 Academic Left, 366 Adams, Brooks, 42, 152, 165–74, 188, 249, 384–85 anti-Semitism of, 173 deterministic vitalism of, 170–73 economic change and, 165–74 as imperialist, 176, 177–79 on legal realism, 167–68 on mass immigration, 166, 180–81 panic of 1893 and, 169–70 in politics, 168–69 on poverty, 167 on socialism, 168, 178–79 theory of civil society, 170–73 Adams, Charles D., 182 Adams, Charles Francis, 152, 154–55 Adams, Henry, 7, 9, 147, 152, 153–65, 166, 172n, 173–74, 177, 179, 188, 229, 259, 260, 383, 406, 412, 444 on Anglo-Saxon thesis, 160–64 anti-Semitism of, 173 antislavery and, 154–55 biography, 153–55, 169, 182 on class system, 160 fear of democracy, 157–58, 180 on individual and morality, 156–57 organicist view of progress, 155–56 post-Civil War change, reaction to, 157 as professor, 160 reform agenda, 158–59 Adams, John, 150–52, 158–59, 170 Adams, John Quincy, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154 Adaptability, McNeill’s thesis of, 290 Adorno, Theodor, 39, 295, 297, 298, 302, 303, 309, 314, 316–21, 326, 366, 425 Dialectic of the Enlightenment, 304–8, 312, 319, 320, 336n, 405, 434–35 Africa, Du Bois on, 202, 203–4, 207–8 Afrocentrism, 390–99, 447 Age of Constantine the Great, The (Burckhardt), 82 AIDS, 357, 439 Alexandrian man, 96 Alienation, 42, 229, 301–2, 315, 352, 375 All-African Peoples Conference (1958), 363 America.


pages: 293 words: 81,183

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

greater than a 50 percent increase in world GDP: For a comprehensive list of these estimates, see “Double World GDP,” Open Borders: The Case, http://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/. Readers interested in open borders are encouraged to explore this excellent resource. You might have some concerns about this idea. Won’t mass immigration be politically disruptive? Won’t it cause a “brain drain,” resulting in all the best talent from poor countries leaving, making those left behind worse off than before? Won’t it harm the native workers of the rich country, depressing wages and increasing unemployment? There are good responses to each of these worries.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

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

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

It was always something you called someone who could be considered anything less than you.”12 Jews followed a similar immigrant path when they began to arrive at the end of the nineteenth century in response to pogroms in Eastern Europe. They were discriminated against, and restricted in where they could live, work, and sometimes simply stay during the first half of the twentieth century—from the age of mass immigration from Eastern Europe to the end of the Second World War. There were a few rich Jews—the heirs of earlier court Jews—but they were the exception to the general rule. Most Jews were lumped in with blacks even though they were not black. After the tragic effects of the Second World War and in postwar prosperity, Jews began to be accepted everywhere; they had become white.


pages: 278 words: 88,711

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

So the mass deployment of robotics technologies will not be taking place until the 2040s, and the full transformative power of robotics will not be felt until about 2060. Ironically, immigrant technologists will be critical in developing robotics technology, a technology that will undercut the need for mass immigration. In fact, as robotics enters the mainstream of society, it will undercut the economic position of those migrants engaged in unskilled labor at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Once again, the solution to one problem will be the catalyst for the next one. This situation will set the stage for the crisis of 2080.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

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

According to Buchanan, Democrats needn’t fret about politics anymore; demography is destiny. We’ve won. “The European and Christian core of our country is shrinking,” he wrote. “The birthrate of our native born has been below replacement level for decades. By 2020, deaths among white Americans will exceed births, while mass immigration is forever altering the face of America.” Soon, even whites who supported Obama, Buchanan warned, “may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.” The architect of Nixon’s win-over-whites strategy simply couldn’t see a place for himself in a majority nonwhite America. It’s impossible to know how many white people feel the same way, but the book became a best seller.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

The combination of hacking and trolling isn’t unique to ISIS. In March 2016, printers across US college campuses suddenly started printing flyers with swastikas. From the University of California to Princeton, students found pieces of paper saying: WHITE MAN ARE YOU SICK AND TIRED OF THE JEWS DESTROYING YOUR COUNTRY THROUGH MASS IMMIGRATION AND DEGENERACY? JOIN US IN THE STRUGGLE FOR GLOBAL WHITE SUPREMACY AT THE DAILY STORMER. ‘I cannot believe what just came out of the printer. Clearly, we need to further isolate it from the internet. #racist #garbage,’ tweeted Ed Wiebe, a researcher at the University of Victoria in Canada. The man behind the hack, Andrew Auernheimer, who goes by the handle Weev, describes himself as a ‘hacker and troll of fair international notoriety’.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The superpowers engaged in proxy wars – notably the Korean War (1950–53) and Vietnam War (1959–75) – with only the mutual threat of nuclear annihilation preventing direct war. Meanwhile, with its continent unscarred and its industry bulked up by WWII, the American homeland entered an era of growing affluence. In the 1950s, a mass migration left the inner cities for the suburbs, where affordable single-family homes sprang up. Americans drove cheap cars using cheap gas over brand-new interstate highways. They relaxed with the comforts of modern technology, swooned over TV, and got busy, giving birth to a ‘baby boom.’ Though the town of Woodstock, NY, lent its name to the mythic music fest of 1969, the event actually took place in the nearby hamlet of Bethel, where dairy farmer Max Yasgur rented his alfalfa field to organizers.

The city is ‘Minnesota Nice’ in action. History Timber was the city’s first boom industry, and water-powered sawmills rose along the Mississippi River in the mid-1800s. Wheat from the prairies also needed to be processed, so flour mills churned into the next big business. The population boomed in the late 19th century with mass immigration, especially from Scandinavia and Germany. Today Minneapolis’ Nordic heritage is evident, whereas twin city St Paul is more German and Irish-Catholic. Sights & Activities The Mississippi River flows northeast of downtown. Despite the name, Uptown is actually southwest of downtown, with Hennepin Ave as its main axis.


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

More and more, each move you make, online and offline, is recorded, including transactions conducted, websites visited, movies watched, links clicked, friends called, opinions posted, dental procedures endured, sports games won (if you’re a professional athlete), traffic cameras passed, flights taken, Wikipedia articles edited, and earthquakes experienced. Countless sensors deploy daily. Mobile devices, robots, and shipping containers record movement, interactions, inventory counts, and radiation levels. Personal health monitors watch your vital signs and exercise routine. The mass migration of online applications from your desktop up into the cloud (aka software as a service) makes even more of your computer use recordable by organizations. Free public data is also busting out, so a wealth of knowledge sits at your fingertips. Following the open data movement, often embracing a not-for-profit philosophy, many data sets are available online from fields like biodiversity, business, cartography, chemistry, genomics, and medicine.


pages: 380 words: 104,841

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Open your imagination to how we began—as semiupright apes who spent some of their time in trees; next as ragtag bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers; then as purposeful custodians of favorite grains, chosen with mind-bending slowness, over thousands of years; and in time as intrepid farmers and clearers of forests with fixed roofs over our heads and a more reliable food supply; afterward as builders of villages and towns dwarfed by furrowed, well-tilled farmlands; then as makers, fed by such inventions as the steam engine (a lavish power source unlike horses, oxen, or water power, and not subject to health or weather, not limited by location); later as industry’s operators, drudges and tycoons who moved closer to the factories that arose in honeycombed cities beside endless fields of staple crops (like corn, wheat, and rice) and giant herds of key species (mainly cows, sheep, or pigs); and finally as builders of big buzzing metropolises, ringed by suburbs on whose fringes lay shrinking farms and forests; and then, as if magnetized by a fierce urge to coalesce, fleeing en masse into those mountainous hope-scented cities. There, like splattered balls of mercury whose droplets have begun flowing back together, we’re finally merging into a handful of colossal, metal-clad spheres of civilization. Among the many shocks and wonders of the Anthropocene, this is bound to rank high: the largest mass migration the planet has ever seen. In only the past hundred years, we’ve become an urban species. Today, more than half of humanity, 3.5 billion people, cluster in cities, and scientists predict that by 2050 our cities will enthrall 70 percent of the world’s citizens. The trend is undeniable as the moon, unstoppable as an avalanche.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

“Who we are fighting for,” Elizabeth Mpofu of Zimbabwe said, “is every single peasant farmer . . . on the planet. People are eager to join hands in building a global voice.”16 Corporate land grabs and mass dispossessions of farmers are endangering global food supplies, congress participants argued, sparking mass migrations and generating “new forms of slavery.” Attendees at the summit vowed to protect “rights to land, water and natural resources, to seeds, biodiversity, decent income and means of production. . . . Our collective future,” they wrote, “and the very future of humanity, is bound up with the rights of peasants.”


Lonely Planet's Best of USA by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, mass immigration, obamacare, off-the-grid, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, the High Line, the payments system, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

The superpowers engaged in proxy wars – notably the Korean War (1950–53) and Vietnam War (1959–75) – with only the mutual threat of nuclear annihilation preventing direct war. The UN, founded in 1945, couldn’t overcome this worldwide ideological split and was largely ineffectual in preventing Cold War conflicts. Meanwhile, with its continent unscarred and its industry bulked up by WWII, the American homeland entered an era of growing affluence. In the 1950s, a mass migration left the inner cities for the suburbs, where affordable single-family homes sprang up. Americans drove cheap cars using cheap gas over brand-new interstate highways. They relaxed with the comforts of modern technology, swooned over TV, and got busy, giving birth to a ‘baby boom.’ Middle-class whites did, anyway.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Napoleon imperialism invasion/occupation of Germany nostalgia for era of secular universalist project ‘narcissism of small difference’ nation states implosions of in Africa/Middle East legacy of imperialism nineteenth-century rise of postcolonial nation-building ideologies rise of in Africa and Asia social democracy in post-WW2 era nationalism Arab Chinese cult of sacrifice and martyrdom cultural economic and emphasis on duties English fin de siècle fin de siècle celebration of violence/virility French German invention of concept Italian Khomeinism Mazzini’s non-European disciples messianic fantasy of redemption and glory nineteenth-century adaptations worldwide poet-prophets post-9/11 toxic nationalists post-Cold War resurgence of in post-colonial states present-day as product of men of letters religiosity of sentiment ‘rise again’ rhetoric and Rousseau and twentieth-century world wars us-versus-them/demonization of ‘other’ white nationalists in USA see also Hindu nationalism Nazism Hindu nationalist admiration for Nechaev, Sergei negative solidarity concept Nehru, Jawaharlal neo-liberalism axioms of autonomy and interest-seeking conflation of free enterprise with freedom crony-capitalist regimes New York Review of Books Newsweek Newton, Isaac Niebuhr, Reinhold Nietzsche, Friedrich death of God on development on French Revolution the last men and Napoleon nihilism rejection of German nationalism and ressentiment superman idea and Voltaire-Rousseau battle and Wagner will to power concept nihilism see also anarchism Nordau, Max, Degeneration (1892) North Korea Northern Ireland Norway, Breivik massacre in (2011) Novalis Obama, Barack oil industry Oklahoma City bombing (1995) Oriani, Alfredo Orlando massacre (2016) Ortega y Gasset, José, The Revolt of the Masses (1930) Orwell, George, Nienteen Eighty-Four (1949) Ottoman Empire Polish émigrés in revival of Ottomanism Paine, Thomas Pakistan Pal, Bipin Chandra Palestinian militant groups Papini, Giovanni Pareto, Vilfredo Pascal, Blaise Patel, Vallabhbhai Paul, Saint Paxton, Joseph Paz, Octavio, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) Pea, Enrico Perovskaya, Sofia Peter the Great Petöfi, Sándor Philippines philosophes material comfort and hedonism as not democratic notion of self-expansion patronage of autocrats and religion as shapers of society trahison des clercs philosophy German phrenology Pol Pot’s Year Zero Poland partition in late eighteenth century present-day nationalism in uprising (1831) Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (1944) Pope, Alexander popular culture Posivitism post-colonial states autocratic modernizers in see also individual countries brutal police/intelligence states growth of ressentiment in insurgencies since mid twentieth century and Islam and Naipaul’s ‘mimic men’ nation-building ideologies post-Cold War period Western inspired national emulation and ‘Western Model’ progress, Enlightenment/modern notions of assumed spread eastwards era of US hegemony and fin de siècle thinkers and First World War as fundamentalist creed in West as globalized fantasy post-Cold War and Marxist universal utopia and nineteenth-century French literature notion of self-expansion and the philosophes present-day constraints/doubts and reason religion of secular progress Rousseau rejects and Russian literature and Social Darwinism ‘propaganda by the deed’ Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph Prussia defeat at Jena-Auerstädt Franco-Prussian war (1871) Frederick II pseudo-science public sphere Pushkin, Alexander The Bronze Horseman (1836) Eugene Onegin Imitations of the Quran (1824) Putin, Vladimir al-Qaeda Qutb, Sayyid racism after Brexit vote Californian Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) institutionalization of by colonialism Islamophobia in late nineteenth century scapegoats and invented enemies scientific on social media white supremacists worldwide upsurge of see also anti-Semitism radicalism and militancy, historical as conjoined with globalization ‘decade of regicide’ (1890s) emergence in nineteenth century influence of Nietzsche local defences of autonomy martyrdom, sacrifice and death and mass migration in nineteenth-century Russia politics of flamboyant gestures pre-1848 conspirators and insurgents and quests for transcendence revolts in Spanish American colonies revolts of 1820s revolutionary period (1830) revolutionary period (1848–9) and rise of mass air travel shared aspirations across movements in space between elites and masses spread of socialism see also anarchism; ressentiment; terrorism radicalism and militancy, present-day Bakunin as forebear of craving for unlimited despotism eruption of ‘global civil war’ identity as neither stable nor coherent nineteenth/early twentieth-century antecedents and paradox of individual freedom social backgrounds and urbanization violence as end in itself volatile desire for creative destruction see also ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria); Islamism, Radical; ressentiment; terrorism Rai, Lala Lajpat Ramdev, Baba Reagan, Ronald reason and cult of progress fantasy of a rationally organized world and French Revolution and philosophes’ support of despots and principle of equality theoretical rationalism and triumphs of capitalist imperialism see also individual, liberal universalist ideal of Reclus, Élisée Red Brigade in Italy refugees religious faith and French Revolution ideal of transcendence and nationalist sentiment in nineteenth-century Germany pseudo-religions in 1815–48 period see also individual faiths and religions Renan, Ernest Republican Party, US ressentiment alienated young man of promise in Austria-Hungary characteristics of in colonial India and conflicted/contradictory identity as default metaphysics of modern world disaffected educated classes and Dostoyevsky German Romantics growth of in post-colonial states and jingoism and Kierkegaard and mimetic desire and ‘narcissism of small difference’ and Nazism and Nietzsche and political spectrum present-day and Rousseau in Russian literature Max Scheler’s theory ‘superfluous’ groups/people ‘superfluous’ men in Russian fiction in unified Germany in unified Italy unsatisfied fantasies of consumerism white male Rhodes, Cecil Rice, Condoleezza Rida, Rashid right-wing extremism Rimbaud, Arthur Robespierre, Maximilien Roca, Mateo Morral Roman Empire Romantics see also German Romantics Roof, Dylann Roosevelt, Theodore Rostow, W.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Erasmus was undoubtedly a progressive thinker in his time, taking radical positions opposing slavery and promoting the rights of women, but he was also a man of his age, steeped in the ideas and culture of the Georgian era. It was a period in which Britain was undergoing massive political upheaval, technological progress and social change. Mass migration to cities and new colonies was disrupting centuries of settled rural life. Britain was at war constantly and lost its thirteen American colonies in the Revolutionary War (1775–83). It also had a front row seat on the French Revolution (1792–1802) and became embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), whilst also fighting a rear-guard action in Ireland, putting down the Irish Rebellion of 1798.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

The Big Picture There are deeper societal issues that need to be addressed when looking at soil conservation on a global scale. First, urbanization needs to be better managed. The wholesale conversion of rural lands to concrete jungles consumes and degrades vast amounts of soil. In many places, particularly much of the developing world, the roots of mass migration to cities – poverty, war, desperation – need to be addressed. Franklin suggests, “The more small farmers have control over their land, the less likely they’ll be to mine the soil.” In addition, cities can mitigate damage to soils by supporting low-impact development and construction of eco-roofs and integrated parking lots.


The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

Both led to the same conclusions: that the best interests of society lay in a system of universal com- pulsory education which would isolate the student from other in- cally, these observations appeared at the very moment European conditions were about to reproduce themselves in the United States, in the form of a mass migration of European workers and peasants. Beginning with the Irish in the 1840s with the students the immigration of politically backward elements as they were commonly regarded sharpened the fear, already an undercurrent in , , American social thought, that the United States would regress to a hated old-world pattern of class conflict hereditary poverty, and political despotism.


The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, disinformation, Easter island, financial innovation, Google Earth, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, polynesian navigation, seigniorage, South China Sea, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

At the end of the 700s, multiple cities collapsed and were abandoned, possibly because of overfarming, possibly because of environmental change. After 830, very little new construction took place. A prolonged drought occurred between 1000 and 1100, causing a precipitous decline in population, as well as mass migration to the northern Yucatan, where the new city of Chichén Itzá arose. Although the written record in Mayan glyphs stops before the year 1000 (the last inscription on a stone monument dates to 910), the Maya in Chichén Itzá experienced a revival, extending their trade contacts north to the Mississippi Valley and the Four Corners region (where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet), and south to Panama and Colombia.


pages: 390 words: 109,519

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

A week later it announced a partnership with the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). A week after that, Tumblr added a slightly revised version of the new rule to its guidelines. But the controversy was not over. In March, Jezebel ran a similar exposé, focusing this time on Pinterest (perhaps benefiting from mass migration following Tumblr’s ban).53 Pinterest quickly announced a rule similar to Tumblr’s. In April, Instagram made a similar change to its policy. Facebook, which already prohibited “promoting self-harm,” made some editorial tweaks to the language of its rule. Whether these changes were effective is a matter of dispute.


pages: 375 words: 105,586

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

A world in which millions of people feel impelled to seek a tolerable life by moving from their natal lands doesn’t seem intrinsically desirable to me. But rather than unjust, futile and politically dangerous border mobilisations to stop it, I’d argue that we should take seriously the ‘human right not to have to migrate’ by trying to mitigate the environmental drivers, economic inequalities and social injustices behind mass migration. It’s probably too late to do this adequately to prevent large-scale migration from happening anyway. In a world of rising temperatures, melting ice caps and melting global capital reserves, it seems likely that a lot of people will be moving away from the mostly coastal mega-cities where jobs serving the nodes of global capital will be increasingly thin on the ground, and indeed where ground itself will be increasingly thin on the ground.


Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt

4chan, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, work culture , zero-sum game

By 1970, nearly three-quarters of Japanese citizens would live in industrial centers such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya. America had once experienced a similar process of urbanization, but it had played out over the course of a century. In postwar Japan, the demands of rapid industrialization compressed the mass migration into just a quarter of the time. Matenrow set a new standard for illustrated cool. Tatsumi and his comrades weren’t the only ones making a splash among savvier readers. So too was the work of Sanpei Shirato, creator of the 1959 rental-library manga Ninja Bugeicho (Arts of the Ninja) and 1964’s gekiga Kamui-den (The Legend of Kamui).


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Li and his colleagues were right to use WeChat to raise alarms; the Chinese government was wrong to suppress them. Our networked devices can function like a collective nerve system, which could allow us to share information about hotspots, large gatherings of people violating quarantines, or sudden mass migrations that will require emergency measures in response, all the while informing ourselves and keeping us connected (and, yes, even suitably distracted). Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies were used extensively to monitor the environment; to share information in ways that the original designers intended (think of Wikipedia); to mobilize social movements and hold bad actors to account; to lift the lid on corrupt and despotic leaders in the way the Citizen Lab, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, R3D, Derechos Digitales, AccessNow, Bellingcat, Privacy International, and other civic watchdogs do.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

The private sector avoids the perils of shareholder capitalism because it has been compelled to pursue stakeholder capitalism—not so much by government mandate as by the collective influence of its workers, empowered by organized labor, work councils, and board-level representation. That makes for an effective balance of power: citizens, business, and government are each able to serve, and provide checks on, the next. As the world grows more connected and climate change spurs mass migration in the years ahead, the Nordic model will be put to the test. But when you spin the globe and look at all the social contracts in place, the Nordics have enacted the best set of solutions to address the forces that have shredded social contracts elsewhere. * * * MORE DEMOCRACIES, ESPECIALLY the United States, would benefit by drawing lessons from the Nordic model.


pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

So many Cornish miners migrated to South Africa that they accounted for a quarter of the white mine workforce on the Rand by the mid-1890s, by the 1900s every mail was bringing £20,000–£30,000 (£8 million–£12 million today) for the families back home, and South Africa was referred to as ‘Greater Cornwall’ and Johannesburg ‘a suburb of the Duchy’.7 In 1938, a US Census demonstrated that 40 million US citizens declared ‘some degree of ancestry’ from England, 43.7 million from Ireland, 14.2 million from Scotland and 2.5 million from Wales. Meanwhile, Niall Ferguson has asserted that ‘no other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants’, and Eric Richards has claimed that Britain ‘pioneered mass migration, sustained the outward flows for two centuries … [and] helped to repopulate other continents’: the British ‘have been phenomenal people exporters’. Just as empire turned us into a multicultural society, it has also made the world more British, spreading millions of our citizens all around the planet.


pages: 1,002 words: 276,865

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

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

Attempts have been made to solve this problem with the help of blood groups and DNA.8 Claims have been made that the modern population of Murlo in Tuscany, which was once an important Etruscan centre, shares a significant number of genes with Levantine populations, and that cattle in central Tuscany are also more ‘eastern’ than might be expected, leading scientists to postulate the arrival of not just human migrants but their beasts as well.9 However, since Etruscan times there have been plenty of opportunities for easterners to settle in Tuscan towns, as Roman legionaries or as medieval slaves. All this encourages the historian to concentrate on the real problem: not whence the Etruscans came, but how their distinctive culture came into being in Italy. To say that Etruscan civilization emerged without a mass migration is not to say that the ties between Etruria and the eastern Mediterranean were insignificant. On the contrary, this explanation of the rise of Etruria places a heavy emphasis on the migration not of whole peoples but of objects, standards of taste and religious cults from east to west. Peoples may not have migrated; but there is good evidence from historical sources and from archaeology that individual people did so, for example Demaratos of Corinth, said to be the father of King Tarquin I of Rome (d. 579 BC), or the seventh-century Greek potter Aristonothos, who worked in Etruscan Caere.10 The Greeks and Phoenicians brought not just ceramics and luxury goods but new models of social behaviour.

In order to address the issue of converted Jews who kept up their old religious practices (often known as ‘Marranos’), he revived the Aragonese Inquisition, and extended it across Spain, where it was seen as a tool of royal interference even by Old Christian families.54 The Dominican friars who manned the Inquisition convinced Ferdinand that its job would never be done unless converts and Jews were totally separated, by the removal of all professing Jews from Spain.55 Ferdinand’s great hope was that most of the Jews would convert rather than depart (he had no antipathy to people of Jewish descent and favoured sincere conversos). Yet the decrees led to a mass migration. Very many Jews – perhaps 75,000 – abandoned Spain, though the great majority, by now, were Jews from Castile, given the disappearance of so many Catalan and Aragonese communities after the convulsions of 1391. Still, it was from the ports of the Crown of Aragon that many Spanish Jews from both Aragon and Castile set out in search of refuge.


pages: 323 words: 95,492

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

In her opening remarks, Le Pen said the influx of migrants arriving on the continent would ‘kill their civility forever’. Heinz-Christian Strache from the Austrian Freedom Party declared at the gathering: ‘We all agree that Europe and European culture and freedom are under threat today because of irresponsible mass immigration.’ ‘The European Union and leaders of national governments have failed in a dramatic fashion. We are here to say that we want a Europe as normal, that another Europe is possible,’ said the secretary of the Lega Nord, Matteo Salvini. He added that we must ‘recover sovereignty as a matter of urgency’.25 What is a ‘normal’ Europe?


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Fears about investment by Western companies overseas should also be calmed by the fact that, although capital has become very mobile, people are substantially less able to move between countries than they were at the end of the last century. Research suggests that the aspect of nineteenth century globalisation that was most responsible for falling wages and growing inequality in some countries was mass immigration. It was the doubling of the size of the population in Chicago and New York within the space of a decade, the quintupling of Detroit’s population between 1900 and 1930, that undermined wages for the uneducated masses. This is a phenomenon that is not going to be repeated as this century draws to a close, if politicians succeed in their desire to stem the flows in the tide of humanity from war and famine zones.


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

Some 80 percent of the population of a city like Dubai consists of immigrants. . . . I believe that it’s easier for these demographic groups to walk through Dubai, Singapore or HafenCity than through beautiful medieval city centers. For these people, (the latter) exude nothing but exclusion and rejection. In an age of mass immigration, a mass similarity of cities might just be inevitable. These cities function like airports in which the same shops are always in the same places.15 Koolhaas’ argument that the cultural trappings inherent in traditional cities may be alienating for mobile, multicultural residents of the modern city has merit.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Advanced economies cannot turn poor countries into rich ones, and we lack a foolproof recipe for poor countries seeking to make themselves rich. What can be achieved, and has reliably been achieved, is the process of helping residents of poor countries to become rich by welcoming them into places with strong social capital. Mass immigration has always been the obvious, pie-in-the-sky solution to wide gaps in incomes across countries. Yet the experience of the last two decades has left the people of the rich world deeply ambivalent, if not outright hostile, to the notion of increased immigration. Years of stagnant wages punctuated by the trauma of the financial crisis have voters turning inward, looking to fringe politicians of a nativist bent.


pages: 347 words: 86,274

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion by Virginia Postrel

Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Dr. Strangelove, factory automation, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, hydroponic farming, indoor plumbing, job automation, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, washing machines reduced drudgery, young professional

By opening up opportunities for economic advancement and offering goods and services that beautify, educate, and otherwise promote self-improvement, modern, commercial societies provide many such avenues. To these promises of transformation, such trends as urbanization, rapid transportation, colonial expansion (for the colonizers), and mass immigration add the prospect of escape—a new life in a new location. Modern commercial societies thus afford abundant material for constructing and experiencing glamour. In this way, glamour does seem quintessentially modern. But while premodern societies provided fewer opportunities for escape and transformation, and therefore fewer sources of glamour, fewer does not mean none.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

Friedrich List, one of the first theorists of the American System, had explicitly argued that America’s internally vibrant but externally protected market was a model for what he hoped would be the unified German economy. A decade later, Erasmus Peshine Smith published his Manual of Political Economy (1853), which was perhaps the most important theoretical defense of America’s developmental state. Like many in the antebellum United States, Smith saw abolitionism, protectionism, and mass immigration as part of a common program opposed to free trade and slavery. In his view, America’s high wages—a product of high tariffs, abundant land, and, outside the South, human liberty—caused America’s exceptional productivity. Expensive labor forced businesses to become more efficient and to invest in capital equipment.


The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler

A Pattern Language, blue-collar work, California gold rush, car-free, City Beautiful movement, corporate governance, Donald Trump, financial independence, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gentrification, germ theory of disease, indoor plumbing, It's morning again in America, jitney, junk bonds, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, Menlo Park, new economy, oil shock, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Skinner box, Southern State Parkway, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The government-funded low-income housing projects were built on the old existenzminimum principle of a Weimar siedlung, which assumed workers to have no higher aspiration for the quality of life than to be stacked like anchovies in a concrete can. The rise of America's postwar housing projects-the term project itself became a derogatory label-coincided with a mass migration of poor southern rural blacks to northern cities, where their presence in such large numbers was not warmly welcomed. The existenzminimum housing block was just the place to put them, in large, neat, high­ density stacks, out of the way, occupying a minimum of land. It wasn't the final solution, but it might do as long as the buildings lasted-which was not necessarily long.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

A new, lower-income ceiling for public housing residency was established by the federal Public Housing Authority, and families with incomes above that ceiling were evicted, thereby restricting access to public housing to the most economically disadvantaged segments of the population. This change in federal housing policy coincided with the mass migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Since smaller suburban communities refused to permit the construction of public housing, the units were overwhelmingly concentrated in the overcrowded and deteriorating inner-city ghettos—the poorest and least socially organized sections of the city and the metropolitan area.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

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

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

.* Beginning in the 1520s, the rest of Europe experienced another flow of displaced people—this time, as the result of Luther’s Reformation. That violent division of Christendom into Catholics and Protestants produced migration on a scale that Europe had not seen since the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and would not see again until the First World War.52 The most infamous mass migration was the Atlantic slave trade, which began within a few years of Columbus’s discovery of the New World and which transplanted over 11 million Africans to the Americas by the mid-nineteenth century. As with the seaborne goods trade, this grim business started off modestly. Some 400,000 Africans had been delivered by the year 1600, forced to join some 250,000 Europeans in their New World colonies.53 But the inhumanity had begun and would balloon in the centuries to come.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

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

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

They will rediscover the charms of the Italian Market in South Philadelphia, the North End of Boston, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Like future loft dwellers and brownstone townhouse owners, the new West Enders will lay claim to the bricks and mortar of the historic city, indulging in a collective amnesia about the earlier eras of factory work and mass migration that made these neighborhoods come alive. The urban authenticity to which they will aspire won’t be inborn or inherited; it will be achieved.29 These desires were given wings by an inflow of investment capital from globalization and deregulation. During the 1980s, when governments loosened restrictions on overseas investment, foreign money flowed like Perrier into New York real estate markets, coming mainly from Western Europe, Japan, and Canada.


pages: 364 words: 112,681

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

‘The main buyers of these bonds were individuals, usually from Eastern Europe but often also from Latin America, who wanted to have part of their fortune in mobile form so that if they had to leave they could leave quickly with their bonds in a small suitcase,’ Fraser wrote. ‘There was still a mass migration of the surviving Jewish populations of Central Europe heading for Israel and the West. To this was added the normal migration of fallen South American dictators heading East. Switzerland was where all this money was stashed away.’ Later historians tried to downplay Fraser’s account a little, and to claim that corrupt politicians – ‘fallen South American dictators’ – made up just a fifth or so of the demand for these early bond issues.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

But taken together, they add up to an unprecedented existential crisis, especially because they are likely to reinforce and compound one another. For example, although the ecological crisis threatens the survival of human civilisation as we have known it, it is unlikely to stop the development of AI and bioengineering. If you are counting on rising oceans, dwindling food supplies and mass migrations to divert our attention from algorithms and genes, think again. As the ecological crisis deepens, the development of high-risk, high-gain technologies will probably only accelerate. Indeed, climate change may well come to perform the same function as the two world wars. Between 1914 and 1918, and again between 1939 and 1945, the pace of technological development skyrocketed, because nations engaged in total war threw caution and economy to the wind, and invested immense resources in all kinds of audacious and fantastic projects.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

But, even for those who survived, fear generated a widespread perception that one could be safe only among the members of one’s own community; and this in turn helped consolidate loyalties towards the state, whether India or Pakistan, 222 A Concise History of Modern India Plate 7.4 Train carrying refugees, 1947. in which one might find a secure haven. This was especially important for Pakistan, where the succour it offered to Muslims gave that state for the first time a visible territorial reality. Fear too drove forward a mass migration unparalleled in the history of South Asia. Within a period of some three or four months in late 1947 a number of Hindus and Sikhs estimated at some 5 million moved from West Punjab into India, while 5.5 million Muslims travelled in the opposite direction. The outcome, akin to what today is called ‘ethnic cleansing’, produced an Indian Punjab 60 per cent Hindu and 35 per cent Sikh, while the Pakistan Punjab became almost wholly Muslim.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

The development of this habit—deficit spending in good times as well as bad—was a major contributor to the current debt problems in the United States and Western Europe, and India can ill afford it. What’s more, welfare schemes such as the rural employment guarantees create a perverse incentive for villagers to stay on the farm. As we’ve seen, China was able to convert its growing labor force into an economic miracle by encouraging a rapid mass migration of inland farmers to the more productive coastal cities. Over the past decade the share of the Chinese population living in urban areas rose from 35 to 46 percent. During the same period India’s urban population grew much more slowly—from 26 percent to 30 percent of the whole. India’s hope for a big payoff from population growth ignores where people are living.


Shotguns and Stagecoaches: The Brave Men Who Rode for Wells Fargo in the Wild West by John Boessenecker

California gold rush, mass immigration, transcontinental railway

Since the 1930s, many volumes have been published about Wells Fargo, but no book has ever been written about its express guards and sleuths.1 In the pages that follow are the true stories of twenty of the company’s most valiant shotgun messengers and detectives of the Old West. Wells Fargo’s story began with the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in January 1848. The news did not reach the East Coast for ten months, and when it did, all hell broke loose. Gold fever swept America and then the world as one of mankind’s greatest mass migrations erupted. The gold seekers were overwhelmingly young and male, far from the settling influences of home and family. Once in California’s mining region—known as the Mother Lode—young men behaved in ways they would never have dreamed of in front of their mothers, sisters, and sweethearts. They drank, gambled, whored, and brawled.


pages: 573 words: 115,489

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

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

But those who hope it will lead to a materialistic paradise are destined for disappointment. We simply don’t have the ecological capacity to fulfil this dream. By the end of the century, our children and grandchildren will face a hostile climate, depleted resources, the destruction of habitats, the decimation of species, food scarcities, mass migrations and almost inevitably war. Our only real choice is to transform the structures and institutions that shape the social world. To articulate a more credible vision for a lasting prosperity. This book has highlighted the principal dimensions of that task. We must establish the ecological bounds on human activity.


pages: 401 words: 119,043

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

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

More significantly, Schabowski had also failed to state that there would be strict criteria each applicant would need to fulfill in order to get access through the border checkpoints. He had inadvertently fired the starter’s gun. The unrest that had been brewing since the start of the year, the protest marches in Leipzig and Dresden, the mass migration into border states, and the shifting political alliances in the Warsaw Pact—this had bubbled for months. Now, after this press conference, the time frame for the GDR’s very survival could be measured in days and hours. Brokaw rushed out to follow Schabowski upstairs, his NBC crew toiling behind him with their camera still rolling.


pages: 308 words: 99,298

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

Will pro-European and anti-Brexit candidates perform well, which suggests support for Brexit is weakening amongst voters? To be sure, the further one moves from 23 June 2016 the less sacred and incontestable the vote won by a campaign of lies will seem. There is an interesting parallel with the Swiss referendum of February 2014. Voters were asked to vote against ‘mass immigration’ and amend the constitution accordingly. The speaker or chair of the Swiss parliament in 2016 was Christa Markwalder, a young member of the centrist Swiss Liberal Party, who rose fast to national prominence. Talking in January 2017 to British Tory and Swiss MPs at their annual New Year ski-race meeting in Switzerland, Ms Markwalder said: Like you we also had an important referendum three years ago about ‘taking back control’ of immigration to Switzerland.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

The immigration figures started to edge up from the mid-2000s, reaching a gross 600,000 per annum in 2014/15, with net migration peaking at over 300,000. Such levels are unprecedented in British history. Net migration is still around 250,000 per annum (the average since 2004), with non-Europeans taking up the slack as European net migration falls.13 Few societies find it easy to cope with what now could be described as mass immigration, and for Britain it was a crucial factor leading to the Brexit vote. The political ambition is clearly now to limit the number of European immigrants. Whether this objective is met, those who are here in the main expect to stay, and there will still be positive net immigration for years, and perhaps decades, from non-European countries.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

Since the middle of the New Labour era, there has been a conspicuous effort to identify and console an ageing, patriotic ‘white working class’. They were the excluded remainder of an otherwise benign liberal order. The allegation was that these workers were excluded above all by multiculturalism and mass immigration, a claim floated by New Labour intellectuals like David Goodhart, but taken up with gusto and gratitude by UKIP and the far Right. Absent that vital groundwork, no one today would see fit to classify young, urban, disproportionately poor, multiracial Labour voters, as the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’.


pages: 476 words: 129,209

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism by John U. Bacon

British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, discovery of penicillin, housing crisis, index card, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, transcontinental railway, yellow journalism

In 1992, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which has since been absorbed by Halifax, opened a grade school named for the CSS Tallahassee. Chapter 4 Waking Up Just in Time 1865–1914 From Halifax’s birth in 1749 through 1865, Haligonians had ridden a wonderful wave of wealth by supplying materials, people, and transport for wars around the world, mass migrations, and even the California Gold Rush. But after the American Civil War, Halifax struggled, and the Americans were none too eager to help the people who had helped the Confederates. Instead, talk resumed in New England papers of annexing British North America. This perpetual fear of an American invasion pushed British North America to set up a central government among Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the “Province of Canada,” present-day Quebec and Ontario, in 1867.


pages: 366 words: 123,151

The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover

airport security, Atahualpa, carbon footprint, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, financial independence, Google Earth, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, Ronald Reagan, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal

The “ideal of contamination,” he continues, “has no more eloquent exponent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa ‘celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it’” (p. 112). TRADITION HAS IT THAT CHILING’S SMITHS: Janet Rizvi, Ladakh, p. 160. ROAD ECOLOGY THE FLORIDA PANTHER, DOWN TO FEWER THAN A HUNDRED INDIVIDUALS: “Florida panther deaths increase from collisions with vehicles,” news release from Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, June 29, 2007.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

The Republicans had been out of the White House in the Nineties. Most of the party’s senior figures had treated the decade’s debates on humanitarian intervention and failed states with derision, and opposed the wars to stop ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia as bleeding heart indulgences. They hadn’t thought about the mass migration of refugees, chemical weapons in the hands of terrorists and global crime. They hadn’t come to terms with the new age of warfare where the infantry had to be soldiers one minute and police officers the next. Makiya’s last, best hope was George W. Bush, who as Packer said, came to power with ‘no curiosity about the world, only a suspicion that his predecessor had entangled America in far too many obscure places of no importance to national interests’.


pages: 440 words: 128,813

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

carbon footprint, citizen journalism, classic study, deindustrialization, digital rights, fixed income, gentrification, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

If mainstream scientific projections for sea level rise are accurate, hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move from low-lying coastal lands during the next century, and even more will be exposed to violence and deprivation related to food and water shortages. The process through which this conflict and this mass migration happens will become a central object of social science research, for the simple reason that it will also be a central challenge for states and societies across the planet. The changing climate has already made life on earth more violent and unstable. The World Meteorological Organization reports that extreme weather events occurred nearly five times more often between 2000 and 2010 than between 1970 and 1980, with a far greater economic and human toll.4 Internationally, hurricanes and floods are responsible for most disaster damage, though the young twenty-first century has already produced a heat wave that killed approximately 70,000 people across Europe in 2003 and another that killed some 50,000 people in Russia in 2010, as well as droughts resulting in food insecurity and political instability in Africa and the Middle East.5 Hurricanes, which generate the most expensive property damage as well as the most spectacular images, get the headlines in the United States.


pages: 1,203 words: 124,556

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Between 1795 and 1806 the Cape was passed like a parcel between the two colonial powers, with the French also briefly drawn into the power play. Even before the colony was formally ceded to the British Crown on 13 August 1814, the British had abolished the slave trade. The remaining Khoe-San were given the explicit protection of the law in 1828. These moves contributed to Afrikaners’ dissatisfaction and their mass migration inland from the Cape Colony, which came to be known as the Great Trek. Despite outlawing slavery, the British introduced new laws that laid the basis for an exploitative labour system little different from it. Thousands of dispossessed blacks sought work in the colony, but it was made a crime to be in the colony without a pass – and without work.


pages: 419 words: 125,977

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang

anti-communist, Deng Xiaoping, estate planning, fake news, financial independence, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of writing, job-hopping, land reform, Mason jar, mass immigration, new economy, PalmPilot, Pearl River Delta, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, vertical integration

Agriculture brings little economic benefit now; family plots, of just under one acre on average, are too small to be profitable. But across China, the family farm is still being tended, because that is what people have always done. The land is less an income source than an insurance policy—a guarantee that a person can live and will not starve. The continuing link to a family farm has stabilized China in an age of mass migration. Its cities have not spawned the shantytown slums of so much of the developing world, because the migrant who fails in the city can always return home and find someone there. A teenager may go out for work, leaving his parents on the farm. A husband who migrates may have a wife at home tilling the fields, or sometimes the other way around.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

By 2050, Russia may have fewer people than Uganda. By 2100, Britain’s indigenous population can be expected to halve, while Italy’s population could crash from 58 million now to just 8 million. Germany could have fewer people than today’s Berlin. Without a sharp rise in fertility rates, only mass migration into Europe can halt this. Perhaps that is how it will play out. The new demography may create a planet of itinerants as labour becomes globalized along with capital. We already see Indian workers building Dubai, Poles in the fields of England, Chinese foresters in Siberia, Guatemalan grape-pickers and housemaids in California.


pages: 502 words: 125,785

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

banking crisis, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentleman farmer, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, means of production, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker

The government had started work on a new highway to connect Willow Run to downtown Detroit. (Today this highway, the Edsel Ford Expressway, is part of I-94.) But it would take time to complete, and what good what it do if people were forbidden by law from driving on it? All over the country, infrastructure struggled under the weight of the most sudden and profound mass migration the United States had ever experienced. Seventeen million Americans would leave their homes for a job in a war factory between 1940 and 1945. In a nation suffering its twelfth year of depression, a steady paycheck was worth the move. Few urban centers would see a larger in-migration than the four counties in the Detroit-Willow Run area, into which 212,457 would arrive between 1940 and 1944, according to census figures.


pages: 473 words: 124,861

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

June – Andrew Wood, founder of the Higher Level Stewardship agri-environment scheme, visits Knepp. 2009 Knepp receives notice of Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) funding for the whole estate (to start on 1 January 2010), so now the Southern Block, too, can be ring-fenced for free-roaming animals. March – A 9 mile perimeter fence is built around the Southern Block. March – First ravens nest at Knepp. May – A mass migration of 11 million painted lady butterflies from Africa descends on Britain; at Knepp, tens of thousands are attracted by an outbreak of creeping thistle. May – 53 longhorn cattle introduced into the Southern Block. August – 23 Exmoor ponies introduced into the Southern Block. September – 20 Tamworth pigs introduced into the Southern Block.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

They look out on the sprawling tar-paper slums of Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Karachi, review the appalling labor conditions in the city factories (which the elite families generally own), assess the limited spaces available at the best schools and universities, and pronounce that the villagers would be better off staying at home in their villages. South Asian governments have compelling reasons to invest in their one million villages. The cities are overburdened, sometimes virtually crushed by mass migration from the villages. The state has failed to create industrial employment sufficient to match population growth, so for a time at least it must generate work in rural areas. Above all, South Asian governments need prosperous, efficient farms to feed their people. In East Asia, poor countries that have grown rich have proven that you cannot get from poverty to prosperity without enriching the countryside, the villages.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

And in 2003, as we saw, President George W. Bush launched two global initiatives targeting HIV and malaria. From this perspective, nothing about the appearance of SARS-2 in 2019 should have been surprising. Rumors of the end of infectious disease were, we can say with confidence, greatly exaggerated. Globalization, mass migrations, rapid airline links, the ever rising size of the human population, and humanity’s increasing localization in huge and densely packed metropolises also contribute to the persistence of deadly infectious diseases. Outbreaks of novel pathogens reflect, among other things, changes in the way humans come into contact with animals.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

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

Liberty did not overtake the Middle East. In 2011 and 2012, the Arab Spring yielded to a winter of armed conflict and repression. A war-weary United States and a risk-averse European Union found themselves without leverage in the Syrian civil war. Washington and Brussels stood by helplessly as bloodshed led to the mass migration of some eleven million Syrians, though when an Islamic State and Caliphate were proclaimed in Syria and Iraq in 2014, the United States and an international coalition rose to the occasion. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012, having come to power in 2000 and having partially given up the Russian presidency from 2008 to 2012, in no mood to concede anything to Washington or to any community of powers.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Rather than monotonous repetition, there are focal points in the overall plan Cerdà made for Barcelona in 1859 – green spaces distributed throughout the city rather than concentrated in one place, like pearls sewn into an otherwise even fabric.16 Today, the rapid growth of urban population favours the creation of additive grids in cities flooded by mass migration, as in Mexico City, because it can provide housing fast. A cellular grid is more slowly spun; an orthogonal on the Roman model demands a level of overall planning control missing in many barrios and other informal settlements. In terms of built form, the skyscraper is a vertical additive grid, each floor repeating the ones below and above.


Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

AIDS and other rapidly mutating viral diseases have also shown the limits of the nineteenth-century goal of targeting specific causes. In extending the lives of people with HIV, AZT and other therapies are slowing the progression of AIDS without halting it, adding it to the managed chronic illnesses. Environmental disruption and mass migration have led to fatal pandemics so often that it is hard to be optimistic about the short run. But there is also a positive paradox of research. The nineteenth century's own sense of crisis made possible the public health measures that succeeded in sharply reducing the impact of infection. Industrial nations are beginning only now to realize how seriously their health may be threatened by the unchecked spread of new infections in the tropics.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Return to beginning of chapter Food & Drink * * * FOOD DRINKS WHERE TO EAT & DRINK FOOD GLOSSARY * * * Once upon a time, in the later medieval period and the 17th century, many people in Britain – especially the wealthy – ate a varied diet, although Queen Elizabeth I did reputedly have the kitchen at Hampton Court Palace moved because the smell of cooking food drifted into her bedroom and spoilt her clothes. Then along came the Industrial Revolution, with mass migration from the country to the city, and food quality took a nosedive – a legacy that means there’s still no English equivalent for the phrase bon appétit. * * * Queen Elizabeth I decreed that mutton could only be served with bitter herbs – intended to stop consumption and help the wool trade – but her subjects discovered that mint sauce improved the taste.

Strictly speaking, Britain has been multicultural for millennia, made up as it is of three different countries with distinct languages, histories and cultures, colonised centuries ago by a melting pot of Romans, Celts, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. However, this ‘native’ multiculturalism has been greatly influenced by peoples from all over the world – French Huguenots, Russian Jews, West Indians, Poles and Somalis, to name but a few – who have immigrated here over the centuries. In the 20th century, mass immigration to Britain began with the arrival of many thousands of Afro-Caribbeans and Asians in the 1950s and ’60s, which saw the country’s non-white population increase from a few thousand in 1945 to 1.4 million in 1970. Today, British Asians (of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan descent) account for 5.3% of the population, Black British (Caribbean and African descent) 2.7%, and British Chinese 0.7%.

Its relative isolation meant that it traditionally had stronger ties to the Low Countries than to London and when Edward III encouraged Flemish weavers to settle here in the 14th century this connection was sealed. The arrival of the immigrants helped establish the wool industry that fattened the city and sustained it right through to the 18th century. Mass immigration from the Low Countries peaked in the troubled 16th century. In 1579 more than a third of the town’s citizens were foreigners of a staunch Protestant stock, which proved beneficial during the Civil War when the Protestant parliamentarians caused Norwich little strife. Today the spoils of this rich period in the city’s history are still evident, with 36 medieval churches (see www.norwichchurches.co.uk) adorning the streets whose layout is largely unchanged since this time.


pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

Unlike other Anglo-Saxons, they mixed readily with the native British, creating ‘the only recognisably Germano-Celtic cultural and political fusion in Britain’.28 Their long-term strategy, dictated by their advantageous coastal position, was to link up with their kinsmen in the Kingdom of Deur or Deira to the south, forming a united Anglian realm in Northumbria (that is, ‘North of the Humber’). At the same time, they could chip away at the surrounding British kingdoms of Rheged and Gododdin. The Gaelic Scots on the west coast developed their activities in similar fashion. The theory that they arrived from Ireland in one mass migration is now discredited: there may well have been ‘Scottish’ (meaning Irish) settlements on both sides of the North Channel from much earlier times. Yet the important political fact concerns the extension of a Gaelic Kingdom of Dalriada from Ulster to the British shore of what would henceforth be known as ‘Argyll’ or the ‘Eastern Gaels’, where Aedan macGabrain began his reign in 574.

Overpopulation underlay all other socio-economic ills. Food production had fallen well below rates in neighbouring countries in every crop except potatoes. The birth rate soared to 44/1,000 per annum. The death rate was dropping. The total population was heading for 9 million. Galicia could no longer feed its sons and daughters. Mass migration was the result. Migrant workers no longer returned home after a seasonal spell in Germany or in Western Europe, but went further and further afield. The coal mines of Ostrava or of Upper Silesia were a frequent destination, but once the railways were built, it was a relatively simple matter to take a train to Bremen or Hamburg and to sail for America.


Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

Unlike other Anglo-Saxons, they mixed readily with the native British, creating ‘the only recognisably Germano-Celtic cultural and political fusion in Britain’.28 Their long-term strategy, dictated by their advantageous coastal position, was to link up with their kinsmen in the Kingdom of Deur or Deira to the south, forming a united Anglian realm in Northumbria (that is, ‘North of the Humber’). At the same time, they could chip away at the surrounding British kingdoms of Rheged and Gododdin. The Gaelic Scots on the west coast developed their activities in similar fashion. The theory that they arrived from Ireland in one mass migration is now discredited: there may well have been ‘Scottish’ (meaning Irish) settlements on both sides of the North Channel from much earlier times. Yet the important political fact concerns the extension of a Gaelic Kingdom of Dalriada from Ulster to the British shore of what would henceforth be known as ‘Argyll’ or the ‘Eastern Gaels’, where Aedan macGabrain began his reign in 574.

Overpopulation underlay all other socio-economic ills. Food production had fallen well below rates in neighbouring countries in every crop except potatoes. The birth rate soared to 44/1,000 per annum. The death rate was dropping. The total population was heading for 9 million. Galicia could no longer feed its sons and daughters. Mass migration was the result. Migrant workers no longer returned home after a seasonal spell in Germany or in Western Europe, but went further and further afield. The coal mines of Ostrava or of Upper Silesia were a frequent destination, but once the railways were built, it was a relatively simple matter to take a train to Bremen or Hamburg and to sail for America.


pages: 267 words: 106,340

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

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

At subsequent EU summits, the Polish leadership emphasized the urgency of reaching a common energy security treaty for all EU states, which was made more difficult by Russia reaching special energy deals with Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands. A second issue in German-Polish relations concerned recognition of minorities in each country. Adam Krzemiński, longtime editor of a leading Polish weekly, Polityka, asked: “Must mass immigration involve giving minority status to the new ethnic groups in the EU member states? This is currently a bone of contention between Germany and Poland. If hundreds of thousands of Poles live in Germany, why shouldn’t they have minority status? Allocating such a status to Muslims has already been broached in debates in Germany.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

The end of error in finance would also be the end of new ideas, and indeed of most banking as we know it. We’d miss it. In the 1960s, my father-in-law tried to get a mortgage. He couldn’t. He was a dentist, so self-employed – too risky. Property was concentrated in the hands of a narrow class of wealthy landlords, who were able to buy it cheap, without much competition, and rent it out to the masses. Immigrants or those with the wrong colour of skin were often the last to be able to get hold of a loan to buy their own home. Let’s not forget that, although we ended up taking several steps too far in making mortgages easy to come by, those steps started off as being in the right direction. As in any other sector, some innovations in finance will inevitably fail.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

* The Great Calcutta Killings, as they were called, were the first of the wave of massacres that accompanied the Partition of India the following summer. Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed. The best estimate is between 1 million and 1.2 million. Around 15 million people were uprooted in a mass migration. The world had never been more full of refugees. In the immediate aftermath of the riots, Jinnah was blamed by both the British and the Congress for calling the Direct Action Day, and the Muslim League was blamed for ratcheting up the rhetoric of Islamic nationalism. But all the leaders in India were guilty of playing ethnic politics and then affecting surprise when their harsh words resulted in violent deeds.


pages: 582 words: 136,780

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

The weather for 1816 is the worst recorded, with low temperatures stretching as far south as Tunisia. French grapes could not be harvested until November. The German wheat crop failed entirely, and prices for flour had doubled in a year. In some places there were reports of famine, and in others there were riots and mass migrations. The diaries and newspapers of the day presenta litany of miseries. It is said that Byron composed his most miserable poem, ‘Darkness’ – Morn came and went –and came, and brought no day – the influence of that dismal year; and Mary Shelley may have composed Frankenstein while gripped by a similarly unseasonable melancholy.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Central to this process was the idea of leaving the ground-level street, with its pollution, congestion, conflict and poverty, for raised-up and rationally planned three-dimensional urban worlds that were emancipatory because they were designed in toto. To their advocates, mass vertical housing blocks ‘offered a social and political response to the chaos of cities rocked by an age of industrial poverty, population explosion, mass migration, and total war.’10 The rhetoric signified a step-change in mass industrial society, a planned and designed revolution through vertical, designed housing which mimicked the parallel rise of mass vertical housing in socialist and communist societies. The obsession was with the creation of a tabula rasa through massive demolition of what was there before so that a radically new society could be engineered.


pages: 433 words: 129,636

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

At its west end is Canoga Park, a district of sixty thousand people, bisected by boulevards with palm trees. Classic, modest suburban ranch-style houses made of stucco line its residential streets. For years after it emerged from citrus groves in the 1950s, Canoga Park and the Valley had been famously white, with only small islands of Mexican American barrios. But the mass migration of Mexicans to Southern California and the end of the Cold War changed the area. Defense contractors departed; so did many white people. Soon, districts of Los Angeles such as Van Nuys, Reseda, North Hollywood, and Canoga Park were largely Mexican. Those changes were beginning as Enrique arrived.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

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

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

The Earth’s atmosphere and its surface are complicated interrelated systems, too complicated to lend themselves to precise prediction even by the best scientists using the most sophisticated mathematical models. The social and political effects of the geophysical consequences of higher global temperatures involve even greater uncertainties. They could include famines, mass migrations, the collapse of governmental structures, and wars in the places most severely affected. Unfortunately, it is not possible to know in advance how, whether, and when global warming will trigger any or all of these things. So, yes, there are uncertainties surrounding the effects of climate change, but none about whether it is real.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

It seems laughable that way back in 2015, countries around the world signed the Paris Climate Change Agreement, committing in all seriousness to limit global warming to 2°C. Just fifteen years later, those countries had already pumped enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to guarantee at least such a temperature rise.4 Climate change has already taken a toll around the world. Rising sea levels have spurred waves of mass migration from the floodplains of Bangladesh. Ocean acidification has decimated fisheries from Norway to Nicaragua. Droughts across Africa and the Middle East have left hundreds of millions in a persistent state of famine and water scarcity; Egypt has just declared war on Ethiopia for choking off its supply from the parched Nile river.5 Far from interceding, the United States has turned inward from the crumbling world order to weather superstorms on the Atlantic seaboard and extinguish the wildfires perpetually raging in the west.


pages: 462 words: 142,240

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamond, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, quantum entanglement, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Fusion didn’t stop but ran incredibly slowly, mediated by quantum tunneling under conditions of extreme cold. Over a span billions of times greater than that which had elapsed since the big bang in the universe outside, light nuclei merged, tunneling across the high quantum wall of their electron orbitals. Heavier elements disintegrated slowly, fissioning and then decaying down to iron. Mass migrated until, by the end of the process, a billion trillion years down the line, the star was a single crystal of iron crushed down into a sphere a few thousand kilometers in diameter, spinning slowly in a cold vacuum only trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. Then the external force that had created the pocket universe went into reverse, snapping shut the pocket and dropping the dense spherical crystal into the hole at the core of the star, less than thirty seconds after the bomb had gone off.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

Their voyages were never without hazard; their destinations were often unhealthy and inhospitable. To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way ticket seems baffling. Yet without millions of such tickets – some purchased voluntarily, some not – there could have been no British Empire. For the indispensable foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white. For most of the emigrants, the New World spelt liberty – religious freedom in some cases, but above all economic freedom. Indeed, the British liked to think of this freedom as the thing that made their empire different from – and of course better than – the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Dutch.


On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

As the struggle for independence produced new states and new boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging structures of institutional power, rejected by the established order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness.63 In addition to mass migrations of mobile people (either forced or voluntary), the postmodern world includes the experiences of communication and transportation on a scale and speed hitherto unknown—the phenomenon David Harvey calls “time-space compression.”64 In this new world, a place such as the airport lounge, once seen as a reprehensible site of RT52565_C002.indd 44 3/6/06 7:44:17 PM The Metaphysics of Fixity and Flow • 45 placelessness, becomes a contemporary symbol of flow, dynamism, and mobility.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Nearly one-third of that population were millennials: young, urban, upwardly mobile with growing disposable income, ardent students of technology and the sciences, and almost always connected online. As in America, this Chinese generation had grown up with ubiquitous access to the internet. Nearly 97 percent of Chinese internet users ages fourteen through forty-seven owned some sort of smartphone. Westerners had experienced the mass migration from desktop computer to smartphone. But China’s millennials skipped the desktop, advancing directly to their phones. Like Kalanick, the Chinese believed in technology, embracing it much faster than Westerners. Kalanick needed them to embrace Uber. This was far easier said than done. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Dick Costolo, Evan Spiegel—almost all of the most influential Silicon Valley leaders of the past twenty years have made overtures to China to operate inside the coveted country.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Or Peter, the 22-year-old graduate, who told me he’s taken himself off Instagram and can see a really significant improvement in his happiness and emotional health. Or Maxine, the 40-year-old finance professional who came off Facebook because she felt she just couldn’t take reading another ‘smug post’ from a friend about their domestic or professional bliss. These, however, remain the exceptions. The mass migration to social media and its utility as messaging services means that those who come off can feel markedly excluded. This is especially true of the young. If your entire class ‘hangs out’ on Instagram, staying offline will for most feel simply untenable. Unless new social norms emerge in which being present in person has greater cachet than being always on social media, this is unlikely to change.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

Nightjars such as the whippoorwill tend to hatch during a new Moon, so when the chicks’ highest energy demand comes two weeks later, there’s moonlight for the parents to hunt insects. Serengeti wildebeest use the Moon to time their conception to a tight window, so calves are born safely ahead of the species’ mass migration in May or June. In 2015, scientists published the first example of a plant that reproduces by the Moon. Ephedra foeminea, a nonflowering relative of conifers and cycads, attracts insects during the full Moon by exuding drops of sugary liquid that “glitter like diamonds” in the nocturnal light.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

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

At the current rate of appreciation, it is only a matter of time before the wealth inequality will become irreversible and will create a feudal system of Kings and Serfs, ushering in a new Dark Ages, unless the public wakes up to what is actually happening in the world, and the media does its job and reports how dire the situation has become. The slow death of the American middle class was ramped up once NAFTA was put in place and the speculation from Ross Perot about a “giant sucking sound” came true as jobs were sucked out of America by Mexico. This was followed by the mass migration of factories to China and the gutting of the rust belt of America, just like they knew it would. The Globalists that pushed for NAFTA operate under the philosophy that they don’t really care in which country they earn their profits, as long as their profits are greater than the year before. They have no allegiance to America, so if things get too expensive to produce them in their own backyard, then they will simply move their operations somewhere else, thus the concept of Globalism.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Some 670 million people might live in low-income countries, but they accounted for less than 1 percent of global GDP. Their plight was a humanitarian issue. But it did not pose a systemic risk to the centers of economic and political power in the global north—unless, that is, their misery spilled over into mass migration. As Germany’s minister Müller bluntly put it: “Africa’s fate is a challenge and an opportunity for Europe. If we do not solve the problems together, they will come to us at some point.”68 That was a future fear. In the short run, the financial difficulties of Zambia or Ghana were a threat to only a tiny part of their creditors’ portfolios.


pages: 470 words: 128,328

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, citizen journalism, clean water, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, G4S, game design, hedonic treadmill, hobby farmer, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, mass immigration, Merlin Mann, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, science of happiness, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart meter, Stewart Brand, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, We are as Gods, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

The tale of the starving Lydians and their gaming is so fanciful that many modern historians have dismissed it as a myth or fable, perhaps inspired by facts but not bound by them. However, recent scientific research appears at long last to conclusively confirm several key details of Herodotus’ account of the Lydians, both of the famine they faced and their eventual mass migration. Geologists today believe that a catastrophic global cooling occurred between the years 1159 and 1140 BC—a nineteen-year time frame they’ve identified using tree-ring dating.3 A tree ring is a layer of wood produced during one tree’s growing season; during droughts and famines, tree rings are extremely narrow compared with normal seasons.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

As William Gibson said, “The future is already here—it is just not very evenly distributed.” ECONOMIC MODELS FOR SCARCITY AND POST-SCARCITY For millennia, human economic systems have evolved under one fundamental premise—scarcity. Scarcity exists when human wants for goods and services exceed the limited supply for them. Scarcity has been the cause of wars, mass migration, capital markets, and every aspect of how civilization has developed. Scarcity is an assumption made by all theories of economics. Economics is a social science concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The field is concerned with how individuals, businesses, governments, and nations make choices about how to allocate resources.


pages: 393 words: 127,847

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

I’ve sat with Inder in Kirun’s home in Massachusetts, as the winter winds swirled up from the frozen river below her house to shake the windowpanes, and told him about the city lights I see when I fly above Pakistan: of Karachi, more a generalized glow than a defined cityscape, and greened by that port city’s seemingly permanent marine haze; of Lahore, inland, its glow whiter and clearer; and of Islamabad, the lights of the capital pooled like snowmelt at the feet of the mountains that rise beyond it. I’ve told him, too, about how the border between Pakistan and India, the line that his family crossed nearly as soon as it was drawn, is illuminated like no other I’ve ever seen. The scale of the suffering associated with Partition, which is often described as the largest mass migration in history, is incomprehensible. In merely visual terms, as well, the glowing border is hard to take in: from a distance the path of its band of light can resemble the slopes of hills, apparently shortened by the angle at which you approach them, or because they are rising toward you, or dropping away, and its curious zigs and zags only begin to make sense when moonlight reveals all three dimensions of the borderlands.


pages: 642 words: 141,888

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

A former high school linebacker and wrestler, Logan Paul looked like a young Matthew McConaughey playing a beefy Disney prince. On Vine his Jackass-style antics earned an enormous following. In his clips he entered strangers’ cars and wrestled in supermarkets. He often removed his shirt. In October 2016, Twitter, Vine’s owner, unable to handle the service, unceremoniously shut it down. Paul led a mass migration of Viners to YouTube, where they made their videos longer and wilder. These creators grew up on Web 2.0—Paul was born in 1995—barely cognizant of a time before YouTube or internet fame. “Social media influencer” had become a natural career. “I want to be the biggest entertainer in the world,” Paul, then twenty, told an advertising magazine in 2016.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

We met some people who were more than ready to take that leap of faith with us—hungry for it, in fact, as if they had just been waiting for an invitation. But we also met people who might once have been open to that kind of collective mission but were now lost to new and more ominous narrative frequencies. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that unless something big shifted, this was only the beginning of a mass migration of minds. * * * The election results bore out what we saw at the door: Trudeau, who had called a snap election because he was certain he could parlay Canada’s fight against Covid into a parliamentary majority, ended up exactly where he started: still the prime minister, but with a parliamentary minority.


pages: 404 words: 118,759

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff

California gold rush, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, new economy, New Journalism, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, South of Market, San Francisco, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman

“It kills towns and builds up great cities, and in the same way kills little businesses and builds up great ones.” The economic forces unfettered by its arrival wouldn’t benefit everyone equally—on the contrary, it would concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, and make life harder for the rest. Mass immigration would force real estate prices up and wages down. The railroad barons, big landholders, and factory owners stood to gain an ever-greater share of land and capital, while ordinary people found it harder to earn a decent living. California’s relatively egalitarian society would disappear, fractured by the growing gulf between rich and poor already seen in the industrializing East.


pages: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

The nation quickly developed from an agricultural society of little houses on the prairie to an urbanized, “the business of America is business” powerhouse. In the country’s early days, most Americans lived like Dale Carnegie’s family, on farms or in small towns, interacting with people they’d known since childhood. But when the twentieth century arrived, a perfect storm of big business, urbanization, and mass immigration blew the population into the cities. In 1790, only 3 percent of Americans lived in cities; in 1840, only 8 percent did; by 1920, more than a third of the country were urbanites. “We cannot all live in cities,” wrote the news editor Horace Greeley in 1867, “yet nearly all seem determined to do so.”


pages: 387 words: 120,092

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, disinformation, double helix, facts on the ground, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, one-state solution, postnationalism / post nation state, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Mizrachim held key positions in government and in the army. But there was still good reason for a scholar or any other kind of knowledge producer to continue the search for the roots and realities of discrimination against Mizrachi Jews, since the socio-economic gap did not narrow and in many ways worsened. One of the main reasons for this was the mass immigration of Russian Jews in the 1990s. This led to a prominent voice in the anti-Zionist group of Mizrachi challengers, Smadar Lavie, who attacked the Israeli government for its attempt to ‘whiten the Jewish people’ by bringing in large numbers of Russian Jews, many of whom were in fact Christians.24 By the end of the twentieth century, still nearly 90 per cent of upper-income Israelis were Ashkenazi Jews, while 60 per cent of the lower-income families were Mizrachim.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

The founding ideas of the United States concerned the power of the state, not of private economic interests, because it was hard to imagine that those interests could ever become full rivals to the national government. But now here they were, dominating nearly every aspect of the life of the country. Industrial capitalism gave rise not only to extremes of wealth and poverty but also to big cities, mass immigration, political machines, and other developments that upended everyone’s assumptions about how the country worked. For two or three generations, what to do about big business was the central question of American life. In 1911, Justice John Marshall Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court, who was born in 1833 and was only a few months away from the end of his life, wrote an opinion in the case that affirmed the government’s breakup of John D.


pages: 427 words: 124,692

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

A new 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act would now create a clear distinction between ‘authentic’ Britons and those whose skin was a different colour, its unambiguous intention being to stop new arrivals and to encourage those already here to go back whence they had come. Like just about every other piece of immigration legislation dreamed up since, the law failed to curb mass immigration. Current United Nations forecasts project a UK population of over 70 million by 2050: when the 1962 Act was passed, it stood at about 53 million. The presence of significant numbers of people from one-time imperial communities has completely changed parts of Britain. The empire is not behind the British, it is living within them, for it has changed their very genetic make-up.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

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

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

On Christmas Eve 2016, George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, posted the provocative tweet “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” The tweet went viral, amplified by a Russia-linked Twitter account pretending to be based in Tennessee.28 Taken at face value, the tweet sounds horrifying, but its meaning changes once you learn that “white genocide” is a term used by white nationalist groups to express their fear that mass immigration and racial intermarriage will eventually lead to the extinction of white people. As Ciccariello-Maher later explained: “‘White genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies. . . . It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.”29 Despite initially promising Ciccariello-Maher that he would not face punishment for the tweet, Drexel quietly initiated an investigation in February 2017 and later barred him from campus, citing “safety concerns.”


pages: 388 words: 125,472

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

In other words, the IPPR can hardly be described as a think tank that is independent of the Establishment, let alone challenging it. Another self-styled ‘centre-left’ think tank is Demos, whose current director is David Goodhart, an Old Etonian who came to prominence by founding Prospect, a political magazine, in 1995, and whose overriding passion appears to be an almost obsessive opposition to what he regards as mass immigration. ‘The direction I very much want to take Demos in,’ Goodhart says, ‘is a “social glue” direction’ – by which he means social cohesion – ‘looking particularly at those difficult things for Labour, like welfare, immigration and multiculturalism’. A lonely exception to these organizations is the New Economics Foundation, a progressive think tank that remains studiously ignored by most mainstream media.


pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

Seven of the Mandate’s twenty-eight articles are devoted to the privileges and facilities to be extended to the Zionist movement to implement the national home policy (the others deal with administrative and diplomatic matters, and the longest article treats the question of antiquities). The Zionist movement, in its embodiment in Palestine as the Jewish Agency, was explicitly designated as the official representative of the country’s Jewish population, although before the mass immigration of committed European Zionists the Jewish community comprised mainly either religious or mizrahi Jews who in the main were not Zionist or who even opposed Zionism. Of course, no such official representative was designated for the unnamed Arab majority. Article 2 of the Mandate provided for self-governing institutions; however, the context makes clear that this applied only to the yishuv, as the Jewish population of Palestine was called, while the Palestinian majority was consistently denied access to such institutions.


pages: 453 words: 122,586

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

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

British member of Parliament, 1956–1987; chairman of the Conservative Party, 1965–1967; chairman of the party’s 1922 Committee, which represents the views of Tory backbench MPs, 1972–1984. 21.William Stephen Ian Whitelaw, 1st Viscount Whitelaw (June 28, 1918–July 1, 1999), Conservative politician who served in a wide number of Cabinet positions, including home secretary and deputy prime minister. 22.Gilmour, Britain Can Work, pp. 94–95. 23.Edward Heath, The Course of My Life (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1998), p. 576. 24.Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (HarperCollins, London, 1995), pp. 566–67. 25.John Enoch Powell (June 16, 1912–February 8, 1998), classical scholar, soldier, Conservative member of Parliament (1950–1974), Ulster Unionist Party MP (UUP) MP (1974–1987), and Minister of Health (1960–1963), who oversaw the mass immigration of West Indians to man the National Health Service. 26.http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.6.vi.html. 27.https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html. 28.George Edward Peter Thorneycroft, Lord Thorneycroft (July 26, 1909–June 4, 1994), British Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, 1957–1958. 29.Evelyn Nigel Chetwode Birch, Lord Rhyl (November 18, 1906–March 8, 1981), British Conservative Secretary of State for Air, 1955–1957. 30.Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality (B.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

The wanaxes had title to the lands, controlled the economy, were the interlocutors with the gods, levied taxes, redistributed wealth. They were the highest local powers. But sometime around 1200 bce, their world was undone by a combination of events including foreign incursions that precipitated mass migrations, bad weather, village-to-village competition, and other factors enabling mercenary bands to fill the power void. Dorians from northwest Hellas invaded southern Greece and the old ways and the Mycenaean age came to an end. Writing, art, great architecture, and detailed craftsmanship largely disappeared for hundreds of years.


pages: 506 words: 146,607

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market by Daniel Reingold, Jennifer Reingold

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, George Gilder, high net worth, informal economy, junk bonds, margin call, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, Michael Milken, new economy, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Telecommunications Act of 1996, thinkpad, traveling salesman, undersea cable, UUNET

Bonus time on the Street was the most eagerly anticipated, tension-filled month of the year. The rumors began early and spread faster than the usual sex or political gossip. And, once you found out your “number,” it was time to move. The end of February on Wall Street was the equivalent of summer in the Serengeti Plain, with the annual mass migration not of zebras and springboks, but of bankers, brokers, and analysts to their competitors who were willing to pay more. It was a time to plop new butts in all the suddenly empty chairs, disconnect and reconnect phone lines, empty and fill cabinets, and order new corporate credit cards. It was perfectly normal to walk in one morning and discover that the chemicals analyst you sat next to had evaporated into thin air.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

This event made it all too clear that extreme weather can sweep devastating tidal surges across low-lying and often populous coasts. The combination of global warming and such events is truly disturbing: droughts, deforestation and desertification (already happening in Spain, parts of Africa and California), increased extinctions of species and loss of biodiversity, food shortages, deaths from heat exhaustion, and mass migrations of people. By 2009, according to the Global Humanitarian Forum report The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis, hundreds of thousands of deaths had been caused by global warming, and many millions more people were negatively affected.38 Under these conditions we can expect political tensions to rise, and some think ‘resource wars’ will become common.39 Many climate scientists fear that even a 1 degree Celsius warming is risky, but the more optimistic figure of 2 degrees Celsius as the maximum that we can risk has been widely touted in political discussions, though this is very much a politically acceptable figure.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Sandra Bao

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, income inequality, low cost airline, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Daily visits to Contoy are offered by Asterix MAP ( 886-4270; www.contoytours.com; Blvd Kukulcán, Km 5.2; adult/child 5-11yr M$1300/750; tours 9am-7pm Tue, Thu & Sat) in Cancún and by the fisherman’s cooperative ( 274-0106, 886-4847; cnr Av Rueda Medina & Madero; M$750 per person; tour 8am-4pm) on Isla Mujeres. OFF THE MAP – ALTERNATIVE TOURISM ON THE RISE Many Maya communities are beginning to welcome tourism – it may be the only way to maintain their language and culture as mass migration to boom towns such as Cancún draws away the best and brightest, and children ask to study English rather than Yucatec. Ecoturísmo Certificado (www.ecoturismocertificado.mx) supports ecotourism in numerous communities throughout Mexico, including two projects that can be found on the road to Chiquilá, in the towns of Solferino and San Ángel.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Large parts of Manhattan may have to be evacuated, with Wall Street underwater. Governments will have to decide which of their great cities and capitals are worth saving and which are beyond hope. Some cities may be saved via a combination of sophisticated dikes and water gates. Other cities may be deemed hopeless and allowed to vanish under the ocean, creating mass migrations of people. Since most of the commercial and population centers of the world are next to the ocean, this could have a disastrous effect on the world economy. Even if some cities can be salvaged, there is still the danger that large storms can send surges of water into a city, paralyzing its infrastructure.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Railroads made it easier to move to urban centers or out West. With the spread of public education, the number of jobs for teachers swelled and salaries improved.65 Fortunately for the mills, in the mid-1840s, just as the influx from the countryside diminished, a new labor pool materialized with mass migration from famine-gripped Ireland. Between 1846 and 1847 alone, immigration from Ireland more than doubled, and by 1851 it more than doubled again. There were always Irish workers in Lowell and other mill towns; Irish men dug the canals and helped build the factories. But before 1840, the textile companies generally spurned Irish women; in 1845, only 7 percent of the Lowell mill workforce was Irish.


pages: 488 words: 145,950

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future by Jon Gertner

American ideology, Anthropocene, Charles Lindbergh, fear of failure, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mass immigration, move 37, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

And when it did, its chemical, biological, and radioactive legacy would not only create a significant environmental problem, but a political one as well. * * * — By that point—perhaps around the 2100 mark—it could already be the case that the world’s coastal regions, especially those located in its poorest and low-lying regions, will be struggling with catastrophic floods and mass migrations. This will likely be true even if sea level rises do not reach an upper bound reality. It’s important not to minimize the impact of such a calamity. Residents of the world’s richer coastal countries—and, in the United States and Europe, its richer cities—will have far more options for mitigation and relocation, and will likely not face the same kinds of crises.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that’s our only choice.37 For Brand and the readers of CQ, the fading of the New Communalist dream and the entry into middle age posed a dilemma: Having just repudiated the mainstream adult world, how could they join it? And if they did find a way in, how could they bring with them their entrepreneurial habits and their celebration of small-scale technology and spiritual community? In the late 1960s, the elevation of consciousness into a principle on which to found communities had helped justify a mass migration to the rural wilds. In the early 1970s, many were seeking a view of consciousness that might justify a return to civilization. In the pages of CQ, as in the Whole Earth Catalog before it, Brand supplied that view by turning to systems-oriented ecological theory and cybernetics. He explained in the first issue that the magazine took its name from the biological theory of “coevolution,” in which two species evolved symbiotically.


pages: 504 words: 147,660

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Mate, Peter A. Levine

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, corporate governance, drug harm reduction, epigenetics, gentrification, ghettoisation, impulse control, longitudinal study, mass immigration, megaproject, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, PalmPilot, phenotype, placebo effect, Rat Park, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), source of truth, twin studies, Yogi Berra

Tobacco and other potentially addictive substances, were available to North American Natives prior to the European invasions, even alcohol in what are now Mexico and the American Southwest—not to mention potentially addictive activities such as sex, eating and gambling. Yet, as Dr. Alexander points out, there is no mention by anthropologists of “anything that could be reasonably called addiction…. Where alcohol was readily available, it was used moderately, often ceremonially rather than addictively.” With the mass migration of Europeans to North America and the economic transformation of the continent came also the loss of freedom of mobility for Native peoples, the inexorable and still continuing despoliation and destruction of their homelands, the loss of their traditional livelihoods, the invalidation of their spiritual ways, persistent discrimination and abject poverty.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The REA convinced General Electric and Westinghouse to manufacture cheaper appliances that would sell at half the usual price to stimulate the equipping of millions of rural households with the latest electrical conveniences.54 The acquisition of new appliances by rural households accounted for an amazing 20 percent increase in appliance sales during the worst years of the Depression, helping to keep a flagging economy afloat.55 Rural electrification also increased property values across rural America and provided the electrical-transmission infrastructure for the mass migration from urban to rural areas in the 1950s to the 1980s, with the build-out of the interstate highway system and the construction of millions of new suburban homes, offices, and shopping malls off of the highway exits. The suburbanization of America also brought new commercial opportunities to rural areas, and with it, millions of new jobs, marking the most prosperous economic period in U.S. history.56 Every argument that Hotelling advanced in his paper in favor of federal government financing of the TVA proved to be astonishingly accurate.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

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

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

The evidence is that the vast majority of people want to work, detest unemployment and wish to insure themselves against the risk – but that is not the moral basis of the current unemployment compensation system. Some on the left might agree with this criticism, but they will cavil at another. For this is also why, in an era of mass migration, countries have to be careful to organise their welfare system so that migrants can qualify for the full array of benefits only after they have contributed for some years. The EU requires each member state to offer immigrants from other member states immediate access to benefits in the host state, which was a reasonable proposition when immigration was low and per capita incomes were broadly equal.


pages: 434 words: 150,773

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain by Robert Chesshyre

Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, British Empire, corporate raider, deskilling, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, housing crisis, manufacturing employment, Mars Society, mass immigration, means of production, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, oil rush, plutocrats, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, the market place, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wealth creators, young professional

Between the wars, it was the Welsh who left the valleys and headed east along the A4 to the town rising from ‘the dump’: recent newcomers have been Asians (‘it’s the first town they come to after leaving Heathrow’ is the local joke), and nearly a quarter of the population has origins in the Indian sub-continent, a proportion projected to rise substantially by the end of the twentieth century. Between these two mass migrations came Cockneys, Irish and Poles. The mobility continues, and one-fifth of all owner-occupier houses change hands each year. Because of its solid industrial base – and despite the extortionate house prices – Slough remains a community without frills. Shortly before my visit, the mayor, a former Londoner with a rough diamond reputation, had crossed swords with, of all people, the Queen Mother – a skirmish that said much about both the town and how its grand neighbours see it.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

Even with an extreme 20°C of warming there would be many coastal areas (and some elevated regions) that would have no days above the temperature/humidity threshold.89 So there would remain large areas in which humanity and civilization could continue. A world with 20°C of warming would be an unparalleled human and environmental tragedy, forcing mass migration and perhaps starvation too. This is reason enough to do our utmost to prevent anything like that from ever happening. However, our present task is identifying existential risks to humanity and it is hard to see how any realistic level of heat stress could pose such a risk. So the runaway and moist greenhouse effects remain the only known mechanisms through which climate change could directly cause our extinction or irrevocable collapse.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

At the end of the nineteenth century, corporate mergers and consolidation had accelerated, and political corruption by the rich and powerful had become extreme. A Wall Street crash occurred in 1907. Americans experienced extraordinary technological change—electrification, telephones, movies, airplanes and cars, all at once. The foreign-born population of the United States had tripled. The influx of non-Protestant foreigners and the mass migration into U.S. cities of black people, accompanied by skillful racist fictions in a riveting new medium (The Birth of a Nation), prompted a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Political engagement was high: the turnout in the midterm elections of 1914 wasn’t exceeded for a century…until 2018. The 1914 Walter Lippmann book I quoted earlier, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, is a staggering exhibit of the rhymes between then and now.


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

Putting pretension aside, we can simply call this the era of liberal babble. This era is now at an end, and this situation both carries a huge risk and offers a new opportunity.’ In Orbán’s world view, liberal societies faced a threat that they would not be able to withstand. That threat was immigration. ‘Mass migration is like a slow and steady current of water which washes away the shore,’ he said. ‘It appears in the guise of humanitarian action, but its true nature is the occupation of territory.’ He delivered a fairly typical example of the New Right’s narrative, which was itself a diluted version of the fascist notion of the corrupted volk.


pages: 811 words: 160,872

Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott

active measures, agricultural Revolution, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, land tenure, mass immigration, mobile money, new economy, North Sea oil, Red Clydeside, sharing economy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, work culture

The conflict closed off Scotland’s profitable French market and disrupted trading links with other continental states. More devastating still was a series of harvest failures between 1695 and 1699, which brought famine in their train and a heavy fall in population. The loss of population through high death rates was increased by mass migration, largely to Ireland but also to the West Indies and America, where the Scots had already settled in Nova Scotia, East New Jersey and South Carolina. 98 The combined effect of mortality and emigration was to reduce the population by perhaps 13 per cent to a figure of just over a million at the end of the century. 99 With its seriously under-developed economy relative to England, Scotland was ill-equipped to confront its devastating agrarian and commercial problems.


Lonely Planet Cancun, Cozumel & the Yucatan (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, John Hecht, Lucas Vidgen

Bartolomé de las Casas, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Day of the Dead, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Fisherman’s CooperativeTOUR ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %cell 998-1534883; cnr Av Rueda Medina & Madero; snorkeling incl lunch M$350, Isla Contoy tours M$1000, whale-shark tour M$1400; hoffice 8am-8pm) The local fisherman's cooperative offers snorkeling tours to various sites, including Isla Contoy and the reef off Playa Garrafón, and it does whale-shark outings as well. OFF THE MAP: ALTERNATIVE TOURISM ON THE RISE Many Maya communities are beginning to welcome tourism – it may be the only way to maintain their language and culture as mass migration to boom towns such as Cancún draws away the best and brightest, and children ask to study English rather than Maya. Ecoturísmo Certificado (www.ecoturismocertificado.mx) supports ecotourism in numerous communities throughout Mexico, including two projects that can be found on the road to Chiquilá, in the towns of Solferino and San Ángel.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

After that, Clark was deployed to a fulfillment center in Campbellsville, Kentucky, which would have an even bigger impact on him. The web of relationships he formed there would end up shaping both his personal life and the future of Amazon’s operations. The facility’s general manager was Arthur Valdez, whose mother had traveled to the U.S. from Cuba in the same mass migration, Operation Pedro Pan, as Bezos’s father, Mike Bezos. Growing up in Colorado Springs, he had been steeped in the world of logistics; both of his parents drove for UPS and the family ran a pharmaceutical delivery business on the side. But none of that prepared Valdez for the deluge of orders and insanity that inundated Amazon’s warehouses every holiday season.


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

Tucker covers his land in salt so nothing will grow there again. He kills his livestock. He sets his house on fire and it burns to the ground. He and his wife and child move north. “Tucker was feeling his African blood,” a white character says. His actions are a revelation to other black people in the town who had felt just as trapped. Word spreads and a mass migration of blacks eventually leave the state. I knew how Tucker felt. Like him, I wanted to burn my past to the ground. At one time my greatest dream was to go to Angola prison. Maybe that’s all I’d been allowed to dream. To survive Angola, I had become a man who acted against his true nature. Now I wanted to go as far as my humanity would allow me to go.


Lonely Planet Southern Italy by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, post-work, Skype, starchitect, urban decay, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The south is the only region to vote against the republic. 1950 The Cassa per il Mezzogiorno is established to help fund public works and infrastructure in the south. Poor management and corruption see at least one third of the money squandered. 1950s–60s Soaring unemployment causes another mass migration of about two million people from the south to the factories of northern Italy, Europe and Australia. 1980 At 7.34pm on 25 November, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake strikes Campania. The quake kills almost 3000 people and causes widespread devastation; the city of Naples also suffers damage. 1999 Brindisi becomes a strategic base for the Office of the UN and the World Food Organization.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

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

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

The time interval with the fastest real wage growth was 1910–40, when the growth rate of 3.08 percent was a full percentage point faster than during 1870–1910. A plausible explanation for this shift was the role of unlimited immigration in holding down real wages in the earlier period and the end of mass immigration caused by World War I and the restrictive anti-immigration quotas passed in 1921, which saw further tightening in 1924 and 1929. The encouragement of labor unions by New Deal legislation may have been just as important, as suggested by the extremely rapid 4.64 annual growth rate of the real wage series between 1936 and 1940.

Real Hourly Compensation of Production Workers and Real GDP per Hour, Bottom 90 Percent of the Income Distribution, 1870–2012 Sources: Wages are from Production Workers Compensation from MeasuringWorth, price deflator is ratio linked from the PCE deflator 1929–2010, NIPA Table 1.1.9, to the CPI for pre-1929 from MeasuringWorth, GDP is from Balke and Gordon (1989) Table 10, 1869–1928, and NIPA Table 1.1.6, post-1928, and Total Hours are from BLS and Kendrick (1961) Appendix Table A-X. Some part of the explanation of rapid real wage increases before 1940, particularly between 1920 and 1940, may be attributable to the end of mass immigration and the encouragement of labor unions by New Deal legislation. But ultimately it was technological change that drove real wages higher. Part of this was compositional—new machines that pulled, pushed, carried, and lifted shifted the composition of employment away from the common laborer to operatives doing specialized albeit repetitive tasks and to new layers of supervisors, engineers, and repairmen to plan the layout of the machines, train new workers, and tend the machines.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

His plan was a reproach to such crowded Old World cities as London, which had recently been razed by fire: the generous gridwork of streets included four substantial squares and a major park; each detached home was to sit in the center of its plot, surrounded by ample gardens and orchards.* Penn’s grid, which would be replicated in countless towns in the upper South and Midwest, was soon overwhelmed by mass immigration. As factories and workshops appeared, residential lots were subdivided and resold, and alleys were interpolated between the main streets. The row house, stately and tall on the main arteries, narrow and cramped in the alleys, emerged as Philadelphia’s answer to the New York tenement. Advancing westward in a tide of red brick, by 1840 the row houses had reached the site of the current City Hall, midway between the two rivers.


pages: 572 words: 134,335

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Capitalist Universalism and Anglo-Saxon Chauvinism The dream of the Rhodes trustees and Joseph Chamberlain to make British imperialism part of a wider Anglo-Saxon union was reciprocated from the other side of the Atlantic. Here, Anglo-Saxon chauvinism developed in the context of Progressivism, a disparate social and ideological movement through which the American bourgeoisie and middle classes responded to the rise of the trusts and mass immigration after the turn of the century. Idealizing the past for its gentlemanly democracy and individualism, the descendants of the first generations of colonists, mostly of British descent, felt particularly threatened by the hordes of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe crowding the rapidly expanding cities and subscribing to alien ideologies like Anarchism and Marxism.


pages: 471 words: 127,852

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

London won the intensified international competition to bag the rising volumes of footloose capital, in the process making Britain’s economy increasingly dependent on financial services. This turned the capital into what Prospect magazine called ‘a hyper-capitalist, deregulated, very unequal, financial services-driven, mass-immigration-driven city state’.15 This may have helped to create the conditions for the post-millennium boom, but it also made the economy much more vulnerable to the whims of global wealth, contributing to the debt-driven speculative bubble that finally burst in the autumn of 2007. By then, Britain had come to resemble what Ajay Kapur, head of global strategy at Citigroup in New York, called a ‘plutonomy’ - a society in which wealth and economic decision-making was heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority while growth was powered by and largely consumed by an affluent elite.16 The only other countries that conformed to this pattern were the United States and Russia itself.


pages: 470 words: 130,269

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Since the time of Maria Theresia and Joseph II in the late eighteenth century, the Habsburg state and its powerful bureaucracy underwent significant expansion, yet revenues lagged behind. Property taxes and indirect taxes did not cover state expenditures. After the unsuccessful wars of the 1860s and the economic downturn of the 1870s, these problems became more acute. By the 1880s, resolving the “social question” added to the state’s budgetary woes. The emergence of mass immigration and a poor urban industrial class further threatened the stability of the empire. Liberal Austrians, deeply invested in the Habsburg state, recognized the need for reform to stave off revolution. Austrian officials took a page out of Otto von Bismarck’s playbook in the German Reich, proposing welfare, housing, and insurance measures.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

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

Even though all generations have faced their own existential threats, at the moment there is a confluence of different such threats. We experience the first consequences of global warming at the precise moment of undergoing a geopolitical shift that almost seems like a Copernican revolution for the West: we are no longer the centre of the universe. We appear to be surrounded by chaos and enemies, and mass immigration and terrorist groups seem to be threatening our culture and our very societies. And suddenly a brand new coronavirus pandemic harms and kills on a massive scale. All this in an era when the financial crisis has just made us doubt the sustainability of our economy and the rationality of our leaders.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

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

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

Demand for tomatoes and pasta in New York City boosted the tinning and food industry in Italy. As the price of voyages on steamships fell, half the migrants returned home, bringing their newly acquired eating cultures with them. All this helped elevate pasta and sauce into a national dish, notwithstanding Mussolini’s attempt to make everyone eat local rice. Without the earlier mass migration from the mezzogiorno, pizza and pasta would be neither the national staple nor the global success story they are today. The Irish experience was the polar opposite of the Italian. The Irish diaspora made do without Irish food. There were no Irish delicatessens or Irish meals on St Patrick’s Day.

Panayi, Spicing up Britain; Maren Möhring, Fremdes Essen: Die Geschichte der ausländischen Gastronomie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich, 2012), pp. 63–6. 87. Isabella Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Household Management (Ware, 1861/2006), 290–2, 451, 618–20. 88. Timothy J. Hatton & Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York, 1998). 89. Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1998). 90. Phyllis H. Williams, South Italian Folkways in Europe and America: A Handbook for Social Workers, Visiting Nurses, School Teachers, and Physicians (New Haven, CT, 1938). 91.


pages: 692 words: 167,950

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

There was little surface water on the Plains, and it was a difficult place for humans to live. Native tribes used the plains as seasonal hunting grounds but withdrew to river valleys to build their communities. Cattle drives across the plains in the 1860s faced drought and problems from overgrazing. Homesteaders, beset by low rainfall and high soil erosion, were driven away in a mass migration during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But as farmers learned to use windmills to pump water from the aquifer in the 1950s, more than half the native grasslands were replaced by crops on the Plains, and permanent settlements took root. The process has accelerated in recent years, and some 25 million acres of cropland have been planted since 1982.


After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

8-hour work day, anti-communist, British Empire, death from overwork, disinformation, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, land reform, mass immigration, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Turning to the Khmer Rouge, Barron and Paul claim that “there is no evidence that the communists ever enjoyed the voluntary support of more than a small minority of Cambodians, in either the countryside or the cities” (a standard propaganda cliché of the Vietnam War applied to the NLF, although known to be false by official experts).296 Rather, the Khmer Rouge programs “alienated the peasantry affected” so that families “fled to the cities” in a “mass migration”—not from the U.S. bombing but rather from Khmer Rouge cruelty. Their “mute and phlegmatic” soldiers include children “impressed into the revolutionary army at age ten or eleven when the communists had overrun their villages.”297 On the assumption that these remarks accurately characterize the Khmer Rouge relation to the peasantry, the “difficult question” of how they now maintain control becomes an imponderable mystery, not to speak of their rise from a tiny movement to a substantial army under the most horrendous conditions and their success in defeating the Lon Nol army backed by massive U.S. force.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Rising average surface temperatures combined with rapidly expanding deserts, melting Arctic sea ice, and ocean acidification already provide what many of the world’s top scientists believe to be unequivocal evidence that human activities are fundamentally altering the Earth’s climate.4 Although we cannot fully predict the repercussions, the risk is that if we fail to rein in greenhouse gas emissions there will be devastating social disruption caused by extreme weather events, water and food shortages, mass migrations, unpredictable disease patterns, and loss of biodiversity.5 Moreover, the effects of climate change will be felt unevenly, with the burden falling most heavily on those least able to cope with the consequences, resulting in untold human misery. For many people, those consequences seem distant and it’s certainly true that the worst of it will be inherited by future generations.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

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

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

European expansion into the interior began soon after the British took over Cape Town from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars. This precipitated a long series of Xhosa wars as the settlement frontier expanded further inland. The penetration into the South African interior was intensified in 1835, when the remaining Europeans of Dutch descent, who would become known as Afrikaners or Boers, started their famous mass migration known as the Great Trek away from the British control of the coast and the Cape Town area. The Afrikaners subsequently founded two independent states in the interior of Africa, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The next stage in the development of South Africa came with the discovery of vast diamond reserves in Kimberly in 1867 and of rich gold mines in Johannesburg in 1886.


pages: 552 words: 163,292

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art by Michael Shnayerson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, banking crisis, Bonfire of the Vanities, capitalist realism, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Etonian, gentrification, high net worth, index card, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, mass immigration, Michael Milken, NetJets, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, rent control, rolodex, Silicon Valley, tulip mania, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

Kippenberger would die of alcohol-related liver cancer in 1997, a seeming failure, yet in 2014, a self-portrait would sell at Christie’s for $22.6 million, bought by Gagosian for a client.24 Reiring found the painting fascinating, but after a lifetime in contemporary art, she had no more idea than anyone else why a Kippenberger should sell for that price. METRO’S ARTISTS WERE SCRAPING BY IN the early 1980s, but at least they were on the roster of a reputable SoHo gallery. Hundreds more found SoHo’s doors closed to them: too many artists, too few galleries to take them all in. Almost overnight, impelled by rejection, a mass migration of hopefuls found their way to the East Village, where a half dozen hipster dealers awaited them in raw spaces they chose to call galleries. “It began around 1982, you could feel it,” explained Walter Robinson, the writer and artist whose East Village coverage would read like dispatches from the front.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

China has a remarkably large number of cities that started out with fewer than a quarter-million people three decades ago and mushroomed into metropolises of more than one million, and in some cases much more. In all, there are nineteen such boom cities in China, led by Shenzhen with more than ten million and the neighboring city of Dongguan with more than seven million. In a sense, the mass migration to the southwestern United States has an even larger echo in China, where the move has been from inland provinces to the southeastern coast. Over the same time period in India, only two towns of under a quarter-million have emerged as cities of more than one million—Mallapuram and Kollam in Kerala state—and their emergence is due largely to a redrawing of the local administrative map.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Keith Campbell, “Fitting In or Standing Out: Trends in American Parents’ Choices for Children’s Names, 1880–2007,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 1, no. 1 (2010): 19–25, doi:10.1177/1948550609349515. Knudsen, Anne Sofie Beck, “Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change During the Age of Mass Migration” (January 24, 2019), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3321790 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3321790; Yuji Ogihara et al., “Are Common Names Becoming Less Common? The Rise in Uniqueness and Individualism in Japan,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1490, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01490; Michael E.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

But the combination of messianic leaders and corporate puppet masters, culture wars, fear of the outside world, and self-doubt about its leadership make a new domestic consensus unlikely. America’s foreign policy elite is utterly divorced from citizens’ concerns as well: Leaders are keen for the United States to fight more wars, push for free trade, and allow mass immigration, while the majority of Americans want fewer military interventions, less foreign aid, immigration restrictions, and some form of protectionism for American jobs and industries.39 The era of the “Great Society” seemed to end definitively with President Reagan, never to return again. America has lost its momentum, and it cannot turn things around simply because it wants to—especially because it no longer seems to know what it wants.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

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

However, if the Muslim population of the UK were to continue growing at an annual rate of 6.7 per cent (as it did between 2004 and 2008), its share of the total UK population would rise from just under 4 per cent in 2008 to 8 per cent in 2020, to 15 per cent in 2030 and to 28 per cent in 2040, finally passing 50 per cent in 2050.95 Mass immigration is not necessarily the solvent of a civilization, if the migrants embrace, and are encouraged to embrace, the values of the civilization to which they are moving. But in cases where immigrant communities are not successfully assimilated and then become prey to radical ideologues, the consequences can be profoundly destabilizing.96 The crucial thing is not sheer numbers so much as the extent to which some Muslim communities have been penetrated by Islamist organizations like the Arab Muslim Brotherhood, the Pakistani Jama’at-i Islami, the Saudi-financed Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth.


pages: 621 words: 157,263

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, public intellectual, Simon Kuznets, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Progressive industrialisation and urbanisation forces them to learn the lessons of their social situation and in concentrating them, makes them aware of their power. ‘The closer the workers are associated with industry the more advanced they are.’ (However, Engels also observes the radicalising effect of mass immigration, as among the Irish.) The workers face their situation in different ways. Some succumb to it, allowing themselves to be demoralised: but the increase in drunkenness, vice, crime and irrational spending is a social phenomenon, the creation of capitalism, and not to be explained by the weakness and shiftlessness of individuals.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

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

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

The share of women aged sixteen and over in the labor force grew from 34 percent in 1950 to 60 percent in 2000. The share of men of the same age groups in the labor force fell from 86 percent to 75 percent—and was expected to continue to fall in the coming decades. The other big change in the face of the labor force was the resumption of mass immigration after the repeal of the 1920s immigration acts in 1965. The new immigrants were very different from the immigrants of the era before 1920: a far higher proportion of them came from Asia and Latin America than from Europe. A higher proportion of them were educated. Before 1920, most European immigrants came from the land.


pages: 535 words: 144,827

1939: A People's History by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, false flag, full employment, guns versus butter model, intentional community, mass immigration, rising living standards, the market place, women in the workforce

But meanwhile: There is an underlying current of suspicion and anxiety about alien immigration on any big scale. Below the surface – and I am only telling the House the experience of the Home Office – there is the making of a definite anti-Jewish movement . . . I have to be careful to avoid anything in the nature of mass immigration that would lead to the growth of a movement that we all wish to see suppressed.52 Beyond vague talk of speeding up the processing of visa applications and possibly settling fugitive German Jews in remote parts of the Empire, there was no sign of an urgent rescue operation being mounted by Britain alone.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

That question is impossible to answer without some understanding of Americans themselves, a group whose composition was changing quickly. The 1870 census counted about thirty-eight million people in the United States. In the next three decades, twelve million more would arrive. While earlier “waves” of mass immigration had come largely from Britain, Ireland, and northern Europe, many of the Catholic and Jewish immigrants who made up the “flood” of the late nineteenth century came from central, eastern, and southern Europe. Even the rural and agricultural districts of these regions had strong coffee-drinking cultures, which had spread around the Mediterranean basin and north through contacts with the Ottoman Empire.


pages: 699 words: 192,704

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Unlimited land, cheap obedient labour, security from blacks and whites alike—these were essentials of the lekker lewe‚ and all three the British Empire seemed determined to deny them. So it came about that in the late years of the 1830s the Boers, the first refugees of Victoria’s empire, undertook the hegira of their race, the Great Trek—a mass migration of frontier people, perhaps 10,000 souls, out of the eastern Cape into the unexploited high veld of the interior, where they could pick their own land and be themselves. They were escaping in fact from the modern world, with all its new notions of equality and reason, but on the face of it they were simply trying to get away from the British.


When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures by Richard D. Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, business climate, business process, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, Easter island, global village, haute cuisine, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Kōnosuke Matsushita, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open borders, profit maximization, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The dominance of Hindus in British India led to the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In the 1940s the League gained popular support for the idea of a separate state of Pakistan in Muslim-majority areas. When India achieved independence in 1947, it was partitioned into India and Pakistan. The resulting mass migration and communal violence claimed over 500,000 lives. Muslim Pakistan was divided into two parts: East Bengal and West Pakistan, which were 1,600 kilometers (about 1,000 miles) apart. Pakistan was faced with enormous political and administrative problems, including East Pakistan’s claim for greater autonomy.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

It also championed the welfare of African Americans by sponsoring African American regiments, lobbying for equal pay and bounties, and favoring a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery and the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau.49 From the outset, however, the Union League Club was equally interested in local affairs. The political authority of the upper class within New York City had eroded in recent decades, due to electoral reforms such as the institution of universal white male suffrage and social changes such as the creation of a coherent working class and the mass migration of Irish and Germans. The Tammany Society, a local affiliate of the national Democratic Party that spoke for ethnic and working-class constituencies, and similar organizations had gained muscle, and representatives of ethnic and working-class interests had attained power in the Common Council, the legislative branch of the municipal government.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

The streets surrounded Central Park, an 80-acre green expanse incorporating an artificial lake. Model homes and architectural drawings showed an enticing, affordable version of the American Dream. By January 1959, there were 65 homes in California City. But this influx of people did not herald a mass migration. As the years went by, a trickle of families established homes, but for the most part, the carefully laid out streets remained quiet and empty. Mendelsohn bailed on his planned city in 1969, selling it to a Denver-based sugar and mining company. By 1990, the population was hovering at just over 6,000.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The complicated layers of state administration made it especially difficult to manage such rapid urban growth. This administrative weakness had been in full view during India’s Partition, that intense, bloody amputation of the Indian subcontinent which saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands from the northwest into India. While this mass migration led to the creation of new urban spaces that resettled these people—such as Faridabad, Kalyani and Nilokheri—the bureaucracy impeded the growth of these cities, throttling any strategy for planned growth with its “everything in triplicate” sentiment and its snail-like pace. L. C. Jain, former member of the planning commission who participated in the building of Faridabad, tells me, “We had angry refugees, trigger-happy Pathans, and chaos at the government level.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs launched an appeal on September 29 requesting roughly $20.23 million to assist an estimated one million people impacted by what the U.N. describes as the country’s worst drought in four decades … Yehia proposes to use money from the appeal to provide seed and technical assistance to 15,000 small-holding farmers in northeast Syria in an effort to preserve the social and economic fabric of this rural, agricultural community. If UNFAO efforts fail, Yehia predicts mass migration from the northeast, which could act as a multiplier on social and economic pressures already at play and undermine stability … Yehia does not believe that the [government of Bashar al-Assad] will allow any Syrian citizen to starve … However, Yehia told us that the Syrian minister of agriculture … stated publicly that economic and social fallout from the drought was “beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.”


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

He hoped to drive growth toward China’s impoverished interior provinces, narrowing the noxious inequality between them and the coast. In 2001, on the eve of joining the WTO, Jiang instructed his own people to “Go Out” into the world. What began as a race to lock up natural resources has evolved into a mass migration of traders and tourists to the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, where there are as many as a million Chinese on the ground in mining, construction, farming, and any other sector they can dominate. So what will China do with hundreds of new airports and dozens of aerotropoli? It will go west, go out, and go global.


pages: 573 words: 180,065

On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads by Tim Cope

feminist movement, global pandemic, illegal immigration, Iridium satellite, mass immigration, trade route

Those early pioneers had been war-hardened Oirat Mongols, who, like waves of nomads before them, had been prompted by conflict in their Inner Asian homeland to pick up and ride out across the steppe in search of new beginnings. More specifically, the powerful empire ruled by the Oirats, known as Zhungaria, had begun to decline by the turn of the seventeenth century, and one Oirat tribe, the Torghuts, had sent scouts west to locate a refuge for their people.2 As early as 1608, encampments on the vanguard of this mass migration were spotted along the Zhem River. By the 1640s Kalmyks had driven out the nomadic Nogais from the Caspian steppe and established their own khanate, the center of which was located around the Lower Volga.3 In Zhungaria their Oirat brethren would mount a resurgence and hold power until the mid-eighteenth century, but the Oirats who had migrated to the Caspian steppe generally became known as the Kalmyks.


pages: 661 words: 187,613

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, elephant in my pajamas, finite state, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, natural language processing, out of africa, phenotype, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Saturday Night Live, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Yogi Berra

Though people modify their language every generation, the extent of these changes is slight: vastly more sounds are preserved than mutated, more constructions analyzed properly than reanalyzed. Because of this overall conservatism, some patterns of vocabulary, sound, and grammar survive for millennia. They serve as the fossilized tracks of mass migrations in the remote past, clues to how human beings spread out over the earth to end up where we find them today. How far back can we trace the language of this book, modern American English? Surprisingly far, perhaps five or even nine thousand years. Our knowledge of where our language has come from is considerably more precise than the recollection of Dave Barry’s Mr.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

In spring 2009 Obama created a new cybersecurity position at the White House to help coordinate between the various government agencies handling our cyber defense and to advise the American companies most vulnerable to an attack. In a speech announcing the moves, Obama warned Americans that the mass migration to the web held “great promise but also great peril.” For the first time, Obama spoke of his own brush with cyberattacks: hackers had breached his campaign offices and those of his 2008 presidential rival, John McCain. “Hackers gained access to emails and a range of campaign files, from policy position papers to travel plans,” he said.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

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

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

When in power, the populist nationalists tend to be more interested in the symbolism of governance and hot-button cultural issues than the rather mundane and complex task of delivering public services. Analysts disagree on the precise cause of resurgent populist nationalism. One explanation is that it is a cultural backlash against modernity—particularly mass migration, multiculturalism, and the spread of progressive values such as same-sex marriage. Political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have argued that “the orthogonal pull of cultural politics generates tensions and divisions within mainstream parties, as well as allowing new opportunities for populist leaders on the left and right to mobilize electoral support.”27 A second explanation is economic.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

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

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

In a Republican Party that now embraced internationalism, Buchanan identified as a nationalist. He regarded treaties and alliances with suspicion, fearful that they would erode American sovereignty. His party celebrated free trade, but to Buchanan it was a sellout of the American worker. So was mass immigration, which Buchanan proposed to combat with an impenetrable wall along the Mexican border and a five-year moratorium on legal immigration. When word of Buchanan’s interest in the race spread in November, Bush’s press secretary cracked a joke. “We’ve already had one Buchanan,” Marlin Fitzwater said, referring to James Buchanan, one of history’s least well-regarded presidents.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

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

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

(Nor have Europe and Japan’s demographically driven slowdowns resulted in any sudden uptick in American growth, showing again that America does best when everyone does well.) Finally, there is something not merely untrue, but wholly depressing, even un-American, about the idea that the nation can only compete when the rest of the world is in ruins. The Fifth Wall America did enjoy one immediate benefit of European chaos: the mass immigration of highly talented Europeans to the safety of the States. Immigration continued rising in gross terms for decades, though much of it was illegal, and happened under the Boomers. Whether immigration has been good, bad, or indifferent overall is largely beyond the scope of this book, though of course to the extent untrained migrants are an initial drain, the remediation of good schooling might help.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The rising tide of people’s wages gives additional weight to the view that the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was a time when much technological change was of the enabling sort. As Gordon notes: Some part of the explanation of rapid real wage increases before 1940, particularly between 1920 and 1940, may be attributable to the end of mass immigration and the encouragement of labor unions by New Deal legislation. But ultimately it was technological change that drove real wages higher. Part of this was compositional—new machines that pulled, pushed, carried, and lifted shifted the composition of employment away from the common laborer to operatives doing specialized albeit repetitive tasks and to new layers of supervisors, engineers, and repairmen to plan the layout of the machines, train new workers, and tend the machines.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

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

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

In the United States, migration within the country as well as immigration from outside have tended to be constants throughout the country’s history—unlike in the United Kingdom, whose modern demographic diversification only truly began with the Second World War and the postwar dissolution of the British empire. The embrace of mass immigration from the European Union produced further rapid change in both the composition and the size of the population in the 2000s. In America, however, demographic change did take on a new character beginning in the 1960s. Specifically, it began to go hand in hand with generational change. Consider that baby boomers, the generation of Americans born between World War II and the mid-1960s, are 82 percent white.


Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

The idea was to strengthen the socialist world overall, economically in individual countries and politically via a strong diplomatic network and interdependencies. Rightly or wrongly, the plan was never to transition the GDR to an immigration society, akin to those the Western nations were becoming. To project ideals of ethnic and cultural diversity, arising from mass immigration to capitalist nations, on to the GDR would be anachronistic and misleading. The internationalist ideology of socialism combined with the economic challenges of the GDR and led to a desire to build a global market of like-minded countries. The concept of ‘peoples’ friendship’ was more than a platitude.


Nepal Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land reform, load shedding, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

Nepal later regained some additional land (including the city of Nepalganj) as a reward for assisting the British in the 1857 Indian Uprising. Most of the Terai was heavily forested until the late 1950s. There were scattered settlements and the indigenous Tharu people were widely dispersed through the region. In 1954, drainage programs and DDT spraying markedly reduced the incidence of malaria, enabling mass migration from India and the hills. Fertile soils and easy accessibility led to rapid development. Today, the Tharu are one of the most disadvantaged groups in Nepal, and huge areas of the forest have been cleared for farmland. Nevertheless, patches of wilderness remain, conserved in a series of national parks and community forests.


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

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

Not even a recruiting visit during an especially cold and rainy February day dampened his excitement at the prospect of going to Stanford and working in microelectronics. Six months later, the twenty-three-year-old and his wife, Deedee, were packing up their car and driving out West.5 * * * — Burt McMurtry and his bride joined a mass migration of some five million people who came to California in the 1950s, an exodus that included some of the best engineers in the country making their way to the twenty-square-mile patch of South Bay countryside. Most were just like him. They were in their twenties and early thirties, nearly all white and male.


pages: 685 words: 203,431

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, plutocrats, science of happiness, Socratic dialogue, the market place, the scientific method

The dispersion had begun many centuries before the fall of the Holy City; through Tyre and Sidon and other ports the Jews had spread abroad into every nook of the Mediterranean—to Athens and Antioch, to Alexandria and Carthage, to Rome and Marseilles, and even to distant Spain. After the destruction of the Temple the dispersion became almost a mass migration. Ultimately the movement followed two streams: one along the Danube and the Rhine, and thence later into Poland and Russia; the other into Spain and Portugal with the conquering Moors (711 A.D.) In Central Europe the Jews distinguished themselves as merchants and financiers; in the Peninsula they absorbed gladly the mathematical, medical and philosophical lore of the Arabs, and developed their own culture in the great schools of Cordova, Barcelona and Seville.


pages: 508 words: 192,524

The autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X; Alex Haley

desegregation, fail fast, Gregor Mendel, index card, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, rent control, Rosa Parks, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems. Twenty-two million black men! They have given America four hundred years of toil; they have bled and died in every battle since the Revolution; they were in America before the Pilgrims, and long before the mass immigrations-and they are still today at the bottom of everything! Why, twenty-two million black people should tomorrow give a dollar apiece to build a skyscraper lobby building in Washington, D.C. Every morning, every legislator should receive a communication about what the black man in America expects and wants and needs.


Sweden by Becky Ohlsen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, car-free, centre right, clean water, financial independence, glass ceiling, haute couture, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, period drama, place-making, post-work, retail therapy, starchitect, the built environment, white picket fence

Some 200 languages are now spoken in the country, as well as variations on the standard – the hip-hop crowd, for example, speak a vivid mishmash of slang, Swedish and foreign phrases that’s been dubbed ‘Rinkeby Swedish’ after an immigrant-heavy Stockholm suburb. Sweden first opened its borders to mass immigration during WWII. At the time it was a closed society, and new arrivals were initially expected to assimilate and essentially ‘become Swedish’. In 1975 Parliament adopted a new set of policies that emphasised the freedom to preserve and celebrate traditional native cultures. * * * Read the news from the underground (mostly in Swedish) at www.sweden.indymedia.org


pages: 564 words: 182,946

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 by Frederick Taylor

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, the market place, young professional, éminence grise

The 4 / THE BERLIN WALL other expressed the lasting spirit of the non-German people who lived here until this time. These people were gradually Germanised but remained, in some mysterious way that would frustrate later theorists of racial purity, not pure ‘Aryan’ in the Nazi sense. This was the Berlin ‘mix’, reinforced by mass immigrations from the eastern and southern regions of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the capital of the united Germany became one of the great boom towns of the continent. At the beginning the expansion of the twin settlement was gradual. There was no fertile hinterland, but Berlin-Cölln’s location was sufficiently convenient that it grew steadily on the basis of the Baltic riverborne trade with landlocked central Europe.


Sweden Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, G4S, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, walkable city, white picket fence, WikiLeaks

Resistance to immigration by fringe groups and far-right political parties has led to some ugly clashes; demonstrations by white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups have become increasingly visible. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven made a public statement against the rise of neo-Nazi movements in Sweden in 2017, calling on Swedes not to tolerate fascist views. Sweden first opened its borders to mass immigration during WWII. At the time it was a closed society, and new arrivals were initially expected to assimilate and ‘become Swedish’. But in 1975 parliament adopted a new set of policies that formally recognised the freedom to preserve and celebrate traditional native cultures. Sweden has been a leader in welcoming immigrants and refugees from Middle Eastern and African countries.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Connections across large open spaces have brought together peoples, religions and civilizations in stimulating ways. Sometimes this has been through individual encounters, as travellers, including pilgrims and merchants, found themselves visiting alien environments; sometimes it has been the result of mass migrations that have changed the character of regions; sometimes it has been the result as much of the movement of goods as of people, when the inhabitants of distant lands saw, admired, and imported or copied the art works of another culture, or read its literature, or were taken aback by some rare and precious item that opened their eyes to its existence.

An uninhabited island had been transformed into a centre of exchange, but its people could only survive by trading the tortoiseshell and incense they produced for foodstuffs from Arabia, India or Africa. The greatest change occurred when the inhabitants became Christian, some time around the fourth century; and Socotra remained largely or partly Christian until the seventeenth century. This conversion (assuming it was that, and not a mass migration) took place at a time when the southern Red Sea was becoming the scene of bitter confrontation between the Jews, who had converted the kings of south-west Arabia, and the Christians, whose power was based across the water at Axum in Ethiopia. As Axum flourished, it attracted trade from across the Red Sea and sent its own merchants overseas to sell ivory and other prestige products of the Ethiopian highlands, and to buy incense and spices for the Axumite court; over a hundred Indian coins of the late third century have been found at the monastery of Däbrä Damo in Ethiopia (though there is a mysterious complication: the monastery was only founded a few centuries later).


pages: 789 words: 213,716

The uplift war by David Brin

Great Leap Forward, machine translation, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, out of africa, space junk, trade route

And most of the “moderate” Galactics were so slow and judicious that there was little hope of persuading one of those clans to intervene. Uthacalthing had hoped to fool the Thennanin into doing the job instead—pitting Earth’s enemies against each other. The plan had worked beyond Uthacalthing’s expectations because of one factor her father had not know of. The gorillas. Had their mass migration to the Ceremonial Mound been triggered by the s’ustru’thoon exchange, as she had earlier thought? Or was the Institute’s Grand Examiner correct to declare that fate itself arranged for this new client race to be at the right time and place to choose? Somehow, Athaclena felt sure there was more to it than anyone knew, or perhaps ever would know.


pages: 773 words: 214,465

The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

battle of ideas, clean water, dematerialisation, disinformation, invisible hand, mass immigration, megastructure, quantum entanglement

Left them in the last year of the Starflyer War. No subsequent information. Nothing: no residency listing on any planetary cybersphere, no records of rejuvenation treatment, no bodyloss certificate. She simply dropped out of sight.” Aaron shook himself and canceled the projection. “Easy enough at the time. There was a mass migration from the Lost23 worlds which the Primes had invaded. After that, it got even more chaotic.” “Coincidence?” “The Raiel are not known for their lies. Maybe Qatux did marry her. She certainly looks the emotional type.” “That’s not quite how I’d describe her,” Corrie-Lyn muttered. “And how did she get to Far Away?


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

Part I Dispatches from the First America This woodcut illustration showing Christopher Columbus going ashore on Hispaniola was published in a 1494 translation of his letter describing his arrival in the New World. Chapter 1 HEAVEN AND HELL The history of Cuba begins where American history begins. History, of course, has more than one meaning. It refers to events of the past—war and peace, scientific breakthroughs and mass migrations, the collapse of a civilization, the liberation of a people. But history also refers to the stories that people tell about those pasts. History in the first sense refers to what happened; in the second, to what is said to have happened. Cuban history begins as American history does in the second sense of the word: history as narrative, as one telling of many possible ones, invariably grander and necessarily smaller than the other kind of history—history as it is lived.1 For both Cuba and the United States, this second kind of history—history-as-narrative—often begins in 1492 with the epic miscalculation of a Genoese navigator Americans know as Christopher Columbus.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Tribalism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and class consciousness all rested on a primitive fear of the stranger. The "enlargement of political units" in the modern world was an eminently desirable development, since it broke down the "emotional feeling of the solidarity of the group" and led people "to recognize equal rights for all individuals." The mass migrations of modern times, culminating in the latest wave of immigration to the United States, had the same effect. The "masses in our modern city populations," having known nothing of the "conservative influence of a home in which parents and children lived a common life," had escaped the "unconscious control of traditional ideas."


pages: 693 words: 204,042

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anthropocene, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, Black-Scholes formula, Burning Man, central bank independence, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, East Village, full employment, gentrification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hive mind, income inequality, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, liquidity trap, Mason jar, mass immigration, megastructure, microbiome, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, Planet Labs, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rent-seeking, Social Justice Warrior, the built environment, too big to fail

explained the Federal Writers Project, 1938 Words her biographer claimed first appeared in print in the prose of Dorothy Parker: art moderne, ball of fire, with bells on, bellyacher, birdbrain, boy-meets-girl, chocolate bar, daisy chain, face lift, high society, mess around, nostalgic, one-night stand, pain in the neck, make a pass, doesn’t have a prayer, queer, scaredy-cat, shoot, the sky’s the limit, to twist someone’s arm, what the hell, and wisecrack. Hard to believe. New Yorkese is the common speech of early-nineteenth-century Cork, transplanted during the mass immigration of the south Irish two hundred years ago. Also hard to believe. f) Franklin So the building super, Vlade the derailer, came over one morning when he was pulling my bug out of the rafters of his ever-more-crowded boathouse, leering in what appeared to be his attempt at a friendly smile.


pages: 612 words: 200,406

The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 by Pierre Berton

banking crisis, business climate, California gold rush, centre right, Columbine, company town, death from overwork, financial independence, God and Mammon, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, transcontinental railway, unbiased observer, young professional

The first Chinese to work on any railway were imported by that colourful and gargantuan innovator Charles Crocker, the ex-peddler, ex-miner, and ex-trader who built the Central Pacific. Crocker, realizing that Irish-Americans were not in sufficient supply to complete the railroad, had first tried to arrange the mass immigration of Mexican peons. When this plan was aborted he turned, in desperation, to the Chinese, who were at the time working the old California placer claims, growing vegetables in market gardens, operating laundries, or serving as houseboys. Few believed that these small, frail people were tough enough to stand the back-breaking labour that would be required in the high Sierras, but Crocker reasoned that any race that could construct the Great Wall of China could also build a railroad.


pages: 740 words: 227,963

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, card file, cotton gin, desegregation, Ford Model T, Gunnar Myrdal, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, labor-force participation, Mason jar, mass immigration, medical residency, Rosa Parks, strikebreaker, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Works Progress Administration

It was a statistically measurable demographic phenomenon marked by unabated outflows of black émigrés that lasted roughly from 1915 to 1975. It peaked during the war years, swept a good portion of all the black people alive in the United States at the time into a river that carried them to all points north and west. Like other mass migrations, it was not a haphazard unfurling of lost souls but a calculable and fairly ordered resettlement of people along the most direct route to what they perceived as freedom, based on railroad and bus lines. The migration streams were so predictable that by the end of the Migration, and, to a lesser degree, even now, one can tell where a black northerner’s family was from just by the city the person grew up in—a good portion of blacks in Detroit, for instance, having roots in Tennessee, Alabama, western Georgia, or the Florida panhandle because the historic rail lines connected those places during the Migration years.


pages: 927 words: 236,812

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

Typically for the National Socialist power structure, he held a multitude of positions, as head of an office for environmental planning, as director of an academic agricultural institute, a position at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and he was also head of an SS planning department for settlement in the east. He was responsible for co-ordinating teams of German academics and agrarian experts, who worked on the details of the plan. A mass migration of Germans into the east was expected, one-third being designated to work in agriculture, made efficient by the application of modern technological advances, especially in plant and gene technology.102 The rest would provide a support network of craftsmen and commercial and public servants. They would live in agricultural towns in German-style houses, surrounded by German plants and trees.


pages: 1,057 words: 239,915

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

The third key point to establish is that America’s own entry into modernity, presumed in such a simple way by most accounts of twentieth-century international politics, was every bit as violent, unsettling and ambiguous as that of any of the other states in the world system. Indeed, given the underlying fissures within a formerly colonial society, originating in the triangular Atlantic slave trade, expanded by means of the violent appropriation of the West, peopled by a mass migration from Europe, often under traumatic circumstances, and then kept in perpetual motion by the surging force of capitalist development, America’s problems with modernity were profound. Out of the effort to come to terms with this wrenching nineteenth-century experience emerged an ideology that was common to both sides of the American party divide, namely exceptionalism.58 In an age of unabashed nationalism, it was not Americans’ belief in the exceptional destiny of their nation that was the issue.


Lonely Planet Eastern Europe by Lonely Planet, Mark Baker, Tamara Sheward, Anita Isalska, Hugh McNaughtan, Lorna Parkes, Greg Bloom, Marc Di Duca, Peter Dragicevich, Tom Masters, Leonid Ragozin, Tim Richards, Simon Richmond

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, low cost airline, mass immigration, pre–internet, Steve Jobs, the High Line, Transnistria, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

oMuseum of the History of Polish JewsMUSEUM (Polin; GOOGLE MAP ; %22 471 0301; www.polin.pl; ul Anielewicza 6; adult/concession 25/15zł, incl temporary exhibits 30/20zł; h10am-6pm Mon, Wed-Fri & Sun, to 8pm Sat; j4, 15, 18 or 35 along ul Marszałkowska) This exceptional museum's permanent exhibition opened in late 2014. Impressive multimedia exhibits document 1000 years of Jewish history in Poland, from accounts of the earliest Jewish traders in the region through waves of mass migration, progress and pogroms, all the way to WWII and the destruction of Europe's largest Jewish community. It's worth booking online first, and you can hire an audioguide (10zł) to get the most out of the many rooms of displays, interactive maps, photos and videos. Praga oNeon MuseumMUSEUM (Muzeum Neonów; GOOGLE MAP ; %665 711635; www.neonmuzeum.org; ul Mińska 25; adult/concession 10/8zł; h12-5pm Wed-Sun; j22 from al Jerozolimskie) Situated within the cool Soho Factory complex of old industrial buildings housing designers and artists, this museum is devoted to the preservation of the iconic neon signs of the communist era.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

People in Wisconsin don’t even know where Gambia is.”1043 Monkeypox is caused by a virus closely related to human smallpox, but currently has only a fraction of the lethality.1044 Human-to-human transmission has been known to occur, however, and there is concern that monkeypox could evolve into a more “successful human pathogen.”1045 The CDC editorialized that the U.S. monkeypox outbreak “highlights the public health threat posed by importation, for commercial purposes, of exotic pets into the United States.”1046 “As long as humans are going to associate in a close way with exotic animals,” said the dean of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, “they’re going to be at risk.”1047 Pigs Barking Blood As H5N1 was emerging in Hong Kong in 1997, more than ten million acres of virgin forest were burning in Borneo and Sumatra. The resulting haze is thought to have caused a mass migration of fruit bats searching for food. Forced out of the forests and into areas of human cultivation, some of these “flying foxes” nested in mango trees overlying huge Malaysian pig farms. The fruit bats dribbled urine and half-eaten fruit slobbered with saliva into the pig pens.1048 The bat urine and saliva were both later found to contain a virus1049—named the Nipah virus, after the village with the first human fatality.


pages: 1,510 words: 218,417

Lonely Planet Norway (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Donna Wheeler

car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, energy security, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, low cost airline, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, North Sea oil, place-making, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal

More than that, it brought to the forefront a debate that had been simmering for a long time. In 1970, just 1.5% of people living in Norway were immigrants. Now, one out of every eight residents of Norway was either born overseas or was born to two immigrant parents. This radical demographic shift has changed the way that Norwegians think about their country. On the one hand, mass immigration is a central pillar in Norway's own national story – in the dark days of the 19th century, Norwegians emigrated in their thousands to escape hardship. Later, the fabulous oil wealth of the late 20th century nurtured the deeply held belief that Norway, as one of the richest countries on earth, had to serve as an example of a responsible and tolerant global citizen, and modern Norwegians are rightfully proud of their tolerance and generosity in assisting troubled countries get back on their feet.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

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

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

Besides, this particular victory would clearly bring great problems, the worse for having been so widely unforeseen by the bureaucracies that had come into existence in the era of détente in the 1970s. Yugoslavia, the very model of Communism-with-a-human-face brotherhood-of-peoples, exploded, and the unification of Germany brought headaches of unemployment and mass migration to the prosperous places of the West. After a year or two of patriotic euphoria, the European countries of the former bloc were mainly taken over by variants of reformed Communists, now generally learning to talk another wooden language, that of ‘Europe’; their young migrated, their agriculture generally languished, particularly when European regulations were used to suppress the old-fashioned ways with, say, ham or smoked fish or wine that might have let them be competitive.


pages: 734 words: 244,010

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

When even the four horsemen are laid low by the apocalypse, it will be rats that scavenge their remains, rats that will swarm like lemmings over the ruins of civilisation. And, by the way, lemmings are rodents, too -- northern voles who, for reasons that are not entirely clear, build up their populations to plague proportions in so-called 'lemming years', and then indulge in frantic -- though not wantonly suicidal as is falsely alleged -- mass migrations. Rodents are gnawing machines. They have a pair of very prominent incisor teeth at the front, perpetually growing to replace massive wear and tear. The gnawing masseter muscles are especially well developed in rodents. They don't have canine teeth, and the large gap or diastema that separates their incisors from their back teeth improves the efficiency of their gnawing.


The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola, Rand Fishkin

AltaVista, barriers to entry, bounce rate, Build a better mousetrap, business intelligence, cloud computing, content marketing, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, linked data, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, optical character recognition, PageRank, performance metric, Quicken Loans, risk tolerance, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Steven Levy, text mining, the long tail, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, web application, wikimedia commons

Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s vision of thin-client computing may yet come to pass, but in the form of a pervasive Google “operating system” and its associated, extensive suite of applications. Widespread adoption by users of cloud-based (rather than desktop) software and seemingly limitless data storage, all supplied for free by Google, will usher in a new era of personalized advertising within these apps. Google is actively advancing the mass migration of desktop computing to the cloud, with initiatives such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google App Engine, and Google Cloud Connect. These types of services encourage users to entrust their valuable data to the Google cloud. This brings them many benefits, but also raises concerns around privacy, security, uptime, and data integrity.


The Rough Guide to Wales by Rough Guides

back-to-the-land, country house hotel, land reform, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, trade route

GAIN © WE© HAVE© INCLUDED© MANY© OF© THESE© WITHIN© THE© BODY© OF© THE©'UIDE ©AND©SOME©FURTHER©ONES©ARE©LISTED© BELOW© ]"MUFSOBUJWF /FX"HFBOEHSFFO8BMFT 0OSSIBLY« MORE« THAN« ANY« OTHER« PART« OF« "RITAIN « 7ALES« n« THE« MID« AND« WEST« IN« PARTICULAR«n«HAS«BECOME«SOMETHING«OF«A«HAVEN«FOR«THOSE«SEARCHING«FOR«ALTERNATIVE« LIFESTYLES«4HIS«PROCESS«DATES«BACK«NEARLY«A«CENTURY «BUT«IT«WAS«THE«S«THAT«SAW« MASS«MIGRATION«WEST «SOMETHING«THAT«HAS«CONTINUED«UNABATED«SINCE«0ERMANENT« TESTIMONIALS« TO« THIS« INCLUDE« THE« #ENTRE« FOR« !LTERNATIVE« 4ECHNOLOGY« #!4 « NEAR« -ACHYNLLETH «NOW«ONE«OF«THE«AREAS«MOST«VISITED«ATTRACTIONS «AND«4IPI«6ALLEY «NEAR« 4ALLEY «A«PERMANENT«COMMUNITY«IN«.ATIVE«!MERICAN«TIPIS«WHO«RUN«A«REGULAR«PUBLIC« SWEAT«LODGE«"OTH«INSTITUTIONS«WERE«FOUNDED«IN«THE«IDEALISTIC«MID S«AND«HAVE« PROSPERED«THROUGH«LESS«HAPPY«TIMES«&OR«THE«MOST«PART «ITS«BEEN«A«FAIRLY«SMOOTH« PROCESS «ALTHOUGH«ANTAGONISM«BETWEEN«.EW«!


pages: 768 words: 252,874

A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman

British Empire, classic study, deep learning, liberation theology, mass immigration, place-making, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

Of these, some four million were under Russian rule. By comparison, the Jewish population of western Europe and the United States had grown much less, with the exception of New York, where 80,000 Jews had settled: an influx of German and Polish Jews into the thriving city doubled the size of the Jewish population between 1860 and 1880. Mass migration from the east over the following thirty years led to complete upheaval. Between 1881 and 1914 about a third of the Jews of eastern Europe moved to central and western Europe and the United States, partly in fear of persecution and partly for economic betterment. By 1914 immigrant Jews outnumbered the settled Jewish community in Britain by five to one, and 1.3 million Jews (of whom a million were in New York) had settled in the United States.


pages: 796 words: 242,660

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

It was said of a certain tradesman in London, that if he could not descend from the ancient race of gentlemen, from which he came, he would begin a new race who should be as good Gentlemen as any that went before them Centuries earlier the aristocracy had emerged in English society, a class that assumed rights over others by birth – an aristocracy that spread from the family of monarchs. Here Defoe was concerned with a new aristocracy, a mass migration from the bottom up. But he disliked much of what he saw. He travelled about Britain observing the old order of the island. But he did so with the sharp sense of the successful tradesman he was and that his father had been before him. What he saw was the beginning of a new revolution, the Industrial Revolution.


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The very same organisation which in a murder case would merely use moral suasion turned into an inexorable State agency during a buffalo drive. However…coercive measures extended considerably beyond the hunt: the soldiers also forcibly restrained braves intent on starting war parties that were deemed inopportune by the chief; directed mass migrations; supervised the crowds at a major festival; and might otherwise maintain law and order.46 ‘During a large part of the year,’ Lowie continued, ‘the tribe simply did not exist as such; and the families or minor unions of familiars that jointly sought a living required no special disciplinary organization.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), WEB Du Bois, who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), eloquently describes the racial dilemmas of politics and culture facing early-20th- century America. Meanwhile, with its continent unscarred and its industry bulked up by WWII, the American homeland entered an era of growing affluence. In the 1950s, a mass migration left the inner cities for the suburbs, where affordable single-family homes sprang up. Americans drove cheap cars using cheap gas over brand-new interstate highways. They relaxed with the comforts of modern technology, swooned over TV, and got busy, giving birth to a ‘baby boom.’ Middle-class whites did, anyway.

The city is ‘Minnesota Nice’ in action. History Timber was the city’s first boom industry, and water-powered sawmills rose along the Mississippi River in the mid-1800s. Wheat from the prairies also needed to be processed, so flour mills churned into the next big business. The population boomed in the late 19th century with mass immigration, especially from Scandinavia and Germany. Today Minneapolis’ Nordic heritage is evident, whereas twin city St Paul is more German and Irish-Catholic. Sights & Activities The Mississippi River flows northeast of downtown. Despite the name, Uptown is actually southwest of downtown, with Hennepin Ave as its main axis.


pages: 870 words: 259,362

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

It was not in any sense a measure centrally concerned with matters of immigration; and nor was it really about the colonies. Although in practice it sanctioned what over the next 14 years would be a very liberal immigration regime, it was (again to quote Hansen), ‘never intended to sanction a mass migration of new Commonwealth citizens to the United Kingdom’ – and, crucially, ‘nowhere in parliamentary debate, the Press, or private papers was the possibility that substantial numbers could exercise their right to reside permanently in the UK discussed’. Significantly, with cross-party support and little public interest, the bill’s passage was smooth and quick.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

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

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

‘Will it not be a terrible disgrace to our name and record if . . . we allow one fifth of the population of the globe . . . to fall into chaos and into carnage?’17 When these warnings were not heeded, pandemonium broke loose in the subcontinent. Communities that had been stable for so long erupted with violence as families that had lived in towns and villages for centuries embarked on one of the largest mass migrations in human history. At least 11 million people moved across the new borders of the Punjab and Bengal.18 The British in the meantime drew up detailed evacuation plans to try to limit the number of their own nationals likely to be caught up in the fighting.19 This concern did not extend to the local population.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

The Younger Dryas makes every episode of global cooling since then seem barely worth the effort of putting a sweater on. The consequences of an event on the scale of the Younger Dryas anytime in the last few thousand years are too horrible to think about for long. The world’s harvests would have failed year after year after year. Hundreds of millions would have starved. Mass migration would have emptied much of Europe, North America, and Central Asia. The resulting wars, state failures, and epidemics would have dwarfed anything known. It would have been as if the five horsemen of the apocalypse had traded their steeds for tanks. A shrunken, shivering population would have ended up clustered in villages around the Lucky Latitudes, praying for rain and scratching a meager living from the dry soil.


Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

This successful experiment encouraged others to invest in sheep, and by the turn of the century nearly two million animals grazed the territory. The area’s commercial and pastoral empires were built on the backs of international immigrant labor, including English, Irish, Scots, Croats, French, Germans, Spaniards, Italians and others. Many locals trace their family origins to these diverse settlers. Today evidence of this mass migration can be seen in the street names throughout town and on headstones in the cemetery. Church services are still held in English, while the many mansions created by the wealthy are now hotels, banks and museums. Sights & Activities Plaza Muñoz Gamero, also known as the Plaza de Armas, is the center of town.


Lonely Planet Norway by Lonely Planet

carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, centre right, energy security, G4S, GPS: selective availability, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, low cost airline, mass immigration, North Sea oil, place-making, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence

The attack brought to the forefront a debate that had been simmering for a long time. In 1970 just 1.5% of people living in Norway were immigrants. Now, nearly one in six Norwegians were either born overseas or were born to two immigrant parents. This radical demographic shift has changed the way that Norwegians think about their country. On the one hand, mass immigration is a central pillar in Norway's own national story – in the dark days of the 19th century, Norwegians emigrated in their thousands to escape hardship. Later, the fabulous oil wealth of the late 20th century nurtured the deeply held belief that Norway, as one of the richest countries on earth, had to serve as an example of a responsible and tolerant global citizen, and modern Norwegians are rightfully proud of their tolerance and generosity in assisting troubled countries get back on their feet.


The Rough Guide to Morocco by Rough Guides

colonial exploitation, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, place-making, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban renewal, walkable city

You’ll know when the king is in residence by the number of soldiers and police here. Facing the palace, the laneway to the right off Place Hassan II is Rue al Qods, the main street of the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter that was created as late as 1807. The Medina The Medina dates back to the fifteenth century, following the mass migration to North Africa of persecuted Muslims and Jews from Andalusian Spain. The refugees brought with them the most refined sophistication of Moorish Andalusia, reflected in the architecture of the UNESCO heritage-listed Medina, and even their houses, with tiled lintels and wrought-iron balconies, seem much more akin to the old Arab quarters of Cordoba and Seville than those of Moroccan towns.


In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

Meals were taken at long tables in the warm afternoon sun.‘These typical descendants of typical colonists, who spoke the antique German of Württemberg from Schiller's day, returned to Hitler's Germany as to the Promised Land.’ In the end, almost half a million German-speaking Europeans took part in this mass migration, and 200,000 of them were assigned a new home in Eastern Europe. On Friday, 27 March, 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary: Starting with Lublin, the Jews are now being pushed east out of the General Government. A rather barbaric method, too grisly to mention, is applied, and not much is left of the Jews themselves.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The majority of British people did not want the arrival of large numbers of blacks and Asians, just as they did not want an end to capital punishment, or deep British involvement in the European Union, or many of the other things the political elite has opted for. At no stage was there a measured and frank assessment of the likely scale of immigration led by party leaders, voluntarily, in front of the electorate. And while allowing this change by default, the main parties did very little to ensure that mass immigration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent was successful. West Indians got none of the help and forethought lavished on the demobilized Poles, or even the less adequate help given to the Ugandan Asians. There was no attempt to create mixed communities, or avoid mini-ghettos. Race relations legislation did come, but late and only to balance new restrictions: it simply castigated racialism in the white working-class community, rather than trying to understand it.


pages: 1,123 words: 328,357

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

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

There are so many that they threaten to overwhelm us. We are the one open country. We want to make asylum a European problem, but so far it is mostly ours.’ This was fair comment. Not only was the Federal Republic still confronting the challenge of absorbing 16.5 million East Germans, it also faced mass-migration of several hundred thousand ethnic Germans from the Russian Volga region. On top came the tidal wave of foreign refugees and political asylum-seekers from Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Russia – amounting to almost half a million people in 1992 alone.[184] The German president then told Bush that the other big problem was right-wing protest ‘about national identity, in the context of EC integration’.


Frommer's Israel by Robert Ullian

airport security, British Empire, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Mount Scopus, place-making, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

Approximately 180,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims remained in Israel and became citizens of the newly formed state, with rights that were promised to be guaranteed in Israel’s declaration of independence. At the same time, more than 300,000 Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps throughout Europe poured into Israel, followed immediately by mass immigrations of the Jewish communities of Yemen and Iraq; and afterward by hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Egypt, North Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. The population of Israel now stands at 7,200,000: Approximately 5,400,000 Israeli citizens are Jewish; 1,450,000 are Arab Christians and Muslims; and 300,000 are of other backgrounds.


pages: 1,145 words: 310,655

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

He believed this had occurred because Israel had finally managed to present young people with a challenge. Another speaker located this challenge in the sands of the Sinai, the rocks of the Golan, and the walls of Jerusalem—“our stolen land, which the IDF has restored to us.” Victory appeared as a return to the early days of the first Zionist pioneers, including a renewal of mass immigration—the only chance to overcome the “demographic problem.” But the idea of settling the territories did not draw the Jews of the world to Israel. Everyone was aware that most of the volunteers would eventually go home. “I read beautiful letters from America, written by young men who had visited here,” Eshkol told the generals.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

On leaving their boats many of the new arrivals would bend down and kiss the ground in thanks for arriving in a country where they were free to practise their religion, and they were then greeted by Jewish welfare workers from the nearby Jewish Temporary Shelter at 84 Leman Street, set up by the Rothschild family to remove the uncouth manners and alien ways of the refugees. ‘We have now a new Poland on our hands in East London. Our first business is to humanise our Jewish immigrants and then to Anglicise them,’ Rothschild once explained. Mass immigration from Russia eased off after the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act, which allowed the authorities to turn back immigrants they thought to be ‘undesirable’. Entrance to former St Katharine’s Dock St Katharine’s, the dock closest to the City of London, was built by Thomas Telford in the 1820s and replaced the warren of crowded alleyways with names such as Cat’s Hole and Dark Entry that were home to some 11,000 people, few of whom received any compensation for being forced out.


pages: 1,263 words: 371,402

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

They’d started in the old United States, in North America, but had found many of their converts later in Europe, especially the former Soviet republics. Ironically, it was the technology the Plain Christians feared that allowed the survival of their religion. When biocomputers created the singular new intelligence that made space travel possible, they sunk all their resources into a mass migration out to the first marginally habitable planet no one else wanted, a primitive place with surface water and just enough ocean-algae-cognate to produce breathable levels of oxygen. Everything beyond that was rock and sand and struggle, a desert for the devout. Publicly they claimed to keep their buildings austere and luxuryless as penance; the truth was that terraforming went slowly and poorly, and plain was all they could manage.


pages: 1,208 words: 364,966

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, friendly fire, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, open economy, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, the long tail, Yom Kippur War

It was written by Moshe Aumann of the Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East and its 24 pages are sprinkled with quotations stretching back a hundred years – from Mark Twain and Lamartine to Lord Milner and the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission – all of which assert that Palestine was a land of brigandage, destitution and desert before the mass immigration of Jews in the late 1930s. Aumann, for example, quoted Mark Twain’s account of his visit to the Holy Land in 1867 in which the American writer spoke of ‘desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent mournful expanse … We never saw a human being on the whole route.’


The Rough Guide to Brazil by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, bike sharing, car-free, clean water, Day of the Dead, digital nomad, haute cuisine, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, land tenure, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Scientific racism, sexual politics, spice trade, Stephen Fry, sustainable-tourism, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, éminence grise

Besides sheer numbers, the mass influx of people had a tremendous impact on the character of the city, breaking up the existing social stratification and taking economic and political power away from the traditional elite groups much earlier than in other Brazilian cities. Despite an attempt to bring over share-croppers from Prussia (Germany) in the 1840s, mass immigration didn’t begin until the late 1870s. Initially, conditions on arrival were dire, and many immigrants succumbed to malaria or yellow fever while waiting in Santos to be transferred inland to work on the coffee plantations. In response to criticisms, the government opened the Hospedaria dos Imigrantes in 1887, a hostel in the eastern suburb of Brás, now converted to a museum.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Taylor, Alan M . 1 9 9 2 a . " T h r e e Phases o f Argentine E c o n o m i c G r o w t h . " Part o f a P h . D . thesis at H a r v a r d U n i v . T y p e s c r i p t . . 1 9 9 2 b . "External Dependence, D e m o g r a p h i c B u r d e n s , and Argentine E c o ­ n o m i c D e c l i n e after t h e Belle Epoque,"J. Econ. Hist, 5 2 ( D e c e m b e r ) , 9 0 7 - 3 6 . . 1 9 9 4 . "Mass Migration to Distant Southern Shores: Argentina and Australia, 1 8 7 0 - 1 9 3 9 , " in H a t t o n a n d W i l l i a m s o n , e d s . , Migration, pp. 9 1 - 1 1 5 . T e i c h , M i k u l â s , a n d R o y P o r t e r , e d s . 1 9 9 6 . The Industrial Revolution in National Context: Europe and the USA.


Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

World War II br ought heavy industr y to California, in the form of munitions In 1848, California ’s non–N ative American population was ar ound 7,000. That same y ear, flakes of gold w ere disco vered by wor kers building a sawmill along the American River. Word of the find spr ead quickly, bringing more than 300,000 men and women into California between 1849 and 1851, one of the largest mass migrations in American histor y. Of course, very few pr ospectors unear thed a gold mine, and within 15 y ears the gold had dissipated, though many of the ne w residents remained. I n fact, much of the mining equipment and G old R ush–era buildings remain today and ar e on display thr oughout the Gold Country.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Middle-class Irish and Italians moved out to the suburbs, like whites everywhere. The handsome wood-frame Victorians in which they were raised fell to decrepitude. Hippies who came to San Francisco with flowers in their hair planted roots in the decaying old neighborhoods. They were joined by a mass migration of gays and lesbians, impelled to settle in San Francisco almost as if according to the biblical precept of the “city of refuge,” where those falling afoul of the priestly code could live in peace. One remarkable consequence of this was that, where “rust belt” cities like Cleveland rotted, San Francisco was revitalized.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

This Altaic influence is more evident in northern Chinese with their larger and broader frames and rounder faces, compared to their slighter and thinner southern Han Chinese counterparts, who are physically more similar to the southeast Asian type. Shanghai Chinese for example are notably more southern in appearance; with their rounder faces, Beijing Chinese are quite typically northern Chinese. With mass migration to the cities from rural areas and the increased frequency of marriage between Chinese from different parts of the land, these physical differences are likely to diminish slightly over time. The Han Chinese display further stark differences in their rich panoply of dialects, which fragments China into a frequently baffling linguistic mosaic, although the promotion of Mandarin (Hanyu – or ‘language of the Han’) has blurred this considerably.


Lonely Planet France by Lonely Planet Publications

banking crisis, bike sharing, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, double helix, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, urban renewal, urban sprawl, V2 rocket

Tap Water » Safe to drink, as is water spouting from fountains flagged ‘eau potable’. » If the sign says ‘eau non potable’, don’t drink it! » Save money by ordering une carafe d’eau (a jug of free tap water). Top of section History The history of France could be said to be a microcosm of the history of much of Europe. As elsewhere, its beginnings involved the mass migration of a nomadic people (the peripatetic Celts), the subjugation by and – dare we say? – the civilising influence of the Romans, and the rise of a local nobility. Christianity would bring a degree of unity, but perhaps nowhere else would such a strongly independent church continue to coexist under a powerful central authority.


pages: 1,909 words: 531,728

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

Montevideo With a population of around 1.6 million, over fifteen times larger than the second city of Paysandú, Montevideo is Uruguay’s political, economic and transport hub. Founded in 1726 as a fortress against Portuguese encroachment on the northern shore of the Río de la Plata, it had an excellent trading position and, following a turbulent and often violent early history, its growth was rapid. The nineteenth century saw mass immigration from Europe – mostly Italy and Spain – that has resulted in a vibrant mix of architectural styles and a cosmopolitan atmosphere. More relaxed, but less affluent than its Argentine neighbour, the Uruguayan capital has nevertheless seen an economic improvement in recent years, and wisely invested in its culture, infrastructure and beaches.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

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

The European Union would steadily grind to a halt if it did not reform its governing institutions as part of the drive towards widening and deepening. According to one pessimistic observer, Europe would only be persuaded to integrate further if faced by extreme catastrophe—that is, by scenes of genocide, by mass migration, or by war.44 By the same line of reasoning, monetary union would only be achieved through the collapse of the existing monetary regime: and political union through the manifest failure of political policies. ‘Europe One’ might only be driven to accept ‘Europe Two’, if‘Europe Three’ reverted to form.


Parks Directory of the United States by Darren L. Smith, Kay Gill

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Asilomar, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donner party, El Camino Real, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hernando de Soto, indoor plumbing, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Southern State Parkway, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

State St, Suite 200 Salt Lake City, UT 84145 801-741-1012 - Phone 801-741-1102 - Fax Web: www.nps.gov/cali National Park Service PO Box 728 Santa Fe, NM 87504 505-988-6888 - Phone Web: www.elcaminorealtx.com Length: 2,600 miles. Established: October 18, 2004. Description: This network of routes in Texas and Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries connected Mexico City and various provincial Length: 5,665 miles. Established: August 3, 1992. Description: Trail was the route of the greatest mass migration in See pages 24-25 for map of National Trails. 222 5. NATIONAL TRAILS capitals and mission outposts. Along it, Spanish and Mexican influences moved northeastward. As the Old San Antonio Road, after Mexican independence in 1821, this route brought American immigrants south and west into what became the Texas Republic, the anexation of which precipitated the MexicanAmerican War of the late 1840’s.