mass incarceration

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But if the movement that emerges to end mass incarceration does not meaningfully address the racial divisions and resentments that gave rise to mass incarceration, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders, including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color, the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago.

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The federal court system has effectively immunized the current system from challenges on the grounds of racial bias, much as earlier systems of control were protected and endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court. The parallels do not end there, however. Mass incarceration, like Jim Crow, helps to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, the stigma of criminality functions in much the same way that the stigma of race once did. It justifies a legal, social, and economic boundary between “us” and “them.” Chapter 5 also explores some of the differences among slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, most significantly the fact that mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable—unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy—while earlier systems of control were designed to exploit and control black labor.

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If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago.

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

Bruce Western concluded from a careful analysis of the causes of mass incarceration that “law-and-order politics grew out of reaction to the gains of the civil rights movement and anxieties about rising crime rates among white voters.” Incarceration grew fastest in those states where jobless rates were highest. And while political parties were hardly identical, their actions were not so different that changing the results of some elections would have changed the outcome of mass incarceration very much.7 The costs of mass incarceration are not confined to the black community. It takes resources to process and house so many prisoners.

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Teamwork is a form of social capital—which is the key to preschool education for low-wage communities.34 Good education, improving both human and social capital, is a tall order for the low-wage sector, and it goes against the grain of politics in a dual economy. The threat of mass incarceration hangs over black and Latino communities, and the presence of hostile militarized police makes investments in social capital even harder. Far more resources need to be allocated to urban education to make progress, but none will be forthcoming soon. Instead, poor education will keep black and brown communities down, providing more opportunities for mass incarceration. And mass incarceration will contain the people operating without social capital in prison. The money that should go to schools will go to prisons instead.

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To eliminate this pattern, we need to work on several fronts at the same time. We need to end mass incarceration and differential rates of arrests and convictions of black men by local and state police and judges. We need also to improve education for the children of felons and allow freed felons to rejoin the workforce. And we need to rethink our urban policies to pursue the integrated housing that has so far eluded us. The first two recommendations are two sides of the same coin. American education cannot be universal until mass incarceration is abandoned. And mass incarceration will not be an inevitable result of growing up in a poor neighborhood until urban public education equals the quality of suburban schools.

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

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

Michelle Alexander has taken some criticism for asserting, in her book The New Jim Crow, the connections between slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Honestly, I was one of the skeptics. But having finished this research, I really have to applaud Alexander’s attempt to connect mass incarceration with American history. I don’t totally agree with the book (I think linking crime and black struggle is even older than she does, for instance), but I think The New Jim Crow pursues the right line of questioning. I don’t think mass incarceration happens without the rise in crime. But there are all kinds of ways one can respond to a crime surge. Mass incarceration is appropriate only if you already believe that certain people weren’t really fit for freedom in the first place

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The American population most discriminated against is also its most incarcerated—and the incarceration of so many African Americans, the mark of criminality, justifies everything they endure after. Mass incarceration is, ultimately, a problem of troublesome entanglements. To war seriously against the disparity in unfreedom requires a war against a disparity in resources. And to war against a disparity in resources is to confront a history in which both the plunder and the mass incarceration of blacks are accepted commonplaces. Our current debate over criminal-justice reform pretends that it is possible to disentangle ourselves without significantly disturbing the other aspects of our lives, that one can extract the thread of mass incarceration from the larger tapestry of racist American policy.

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— BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME OBSCURED another piece that, if not born from chasing Baldwin, was still important to me. The Atlantic prided itself on tackling the “big” issues of the day, and mass incarceration was, and is, perhaps the preeminent moral domestic issue of our time. By then I had earned enough trust from my editors that I could declare my interest and go. For much of the time I was finishing Between the World and Me, I was reporting another story that sought to understand the specific ways in which mass incarceration had hurt black families. I was excited about this story because I believed that “family” had been ceded to moral scolds who cared more about shaming people than actually helping families.

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

Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, rather than reducing the burden of racialized policing, this new professionalization movement merely enhanced police power and led directly to the development of SWAT teams and mass incarceration. Policing Today The past few decades have seen a dramatic expansion in the scope and intensity of police activity. More police than ever before are engaged in more enforcement of more laws, resulting in astronomical levels of incarceration, economic exploitation, and abuse. This expansion mirrors the rise of mass incarceration. It began with the War on Crime rhetoric of the 1960s and continued to develop and intensify until today, with support from both political parties.

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As Michelle Alexander has put it, We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is. This system is better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals … Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent and control crime. But if mass incarceration is understood as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.43 The most damning example of this is the War on Drugs, in which millions of mostly black and brown people have been ground through the criminal justice system, their lives destroyed and their communities destabilized, without reduction in the use or availability of drugs.

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Conclusion 1Northern California Patch, “Public Q&A Meeting Set This Evening to Discuss New Santa Clara Co. Jail,” September 22, 2016. 2Judith Greene et al., Ending Mass Incarceration: Charting a New Justice Re-Investment, Justice Strategies, 2013. 3“Agenda to Build Black Futures,” Black Youth Project 100, agendatobuildblackfutures.org. 4“Platform,” The Movement for Black Lives, policy.m461.org. This eBook is licensed to Edward Betts, edward@4angle.com on 06/08/2020 Further Reading Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2013. Apuzzo, Matt and Adam Goldman. Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Their work shows how AI can be adapted to changing social conditions while still serving the aims we encountered earlier. This chapter examines AI’s adaptation through discussions of mass incarceration in the United States. Mass incarceration is a system predicated on white supremacy, shaped by global capital and the imperial aims of the state—the nexus of the agendas AI has served. Yet through years of activist struggles, the discourse on this system has shifted. Mass incarceration can thus illuminate the commitments of critical AI experts, the limitations of their critique, and the adaptability of AI as a technology of power. As historian Robin D.

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Kelley has argued, social struggles can “generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions,” and the “most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression.”2 Activists resisting mass incarceration continually produce such knowledge, and in recent decades they have had to confront the links between computing and incarceration. There has been the emergence of “predictive policing,” which is presented as a data-driven way to keep communities safe, as well the rise of so-called algorithmic sentencing, which according to the New York Times is “seen as a way to dispense justice in a more efficient way that relies more on numerical evidence than personal judgments.”3 All this made computing a major issue in the struggle against mass incarceration. When activists examine the roles of computing in mass incarceration, as we will see in this chapter, their analyses grow outward.

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They pen pieces for the largest media outlets; their reports are featured in venues like the Wall Street Journal; they participate in exclusive gatherings of CEOs and political elites. The community organizers considered in this chapter, by contrast, do not swim in these circles—they are oppressed by them. The struggles over mass incarceration bring out these distinct epistemologies and commitments. I examine these conflicting epistemologies and commitments by comparing how activists and critical AI experts analyze two facets of mass incarceration: the deportation of migrants and predictive policing. ACTIVISTS TACKLE INCARCERATION AND COMPUTING Social movements have scrutinized the U.S. carceral state for years, including its brutal treatment of migrants.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Nor were many members of the Democratic or Republican parties, nor the legions of young urban professionals—increasingly known (and mocked) as “Yuppies”—flocking to big cities to enjoy economic opportunity and cosmopolitan culture.104 Across the exuberant neoliberal 1990s, the mass incarceration of America’s young black men commanded remarkably little attention. Nevertheless, the scale of mass incarceration introduced a stress point into the neoliberal order. All political orders have contradictions built into them, all possess vulnerabilities that need to be managed. Neoliberals “managed” the mass incarceration problem across the 1990s. But managing a contradiction is not the same as resolving it. How many people could be excluded from a life of market freedom before the celebration of that market freedom would come to be tarnished, and perhaps repudiated?

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(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 342–379. 49.On the rise of the carceral state, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Heather Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010), 703–734; Heather Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2010); Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Hinton, America on Fire; Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Robert T.

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As his presidency became associated with market freedom on the one hand, it encouraged a revolt against civil rights advances on the other. A disturbing discourse arose in the 1980s depicting poor blacks as part of an “underclass” that was neither capable nor deserving of participation in the market economy that Reagan was so intent on creating. These were the years in which a program of mass incarceration took shape, one intent on removing hundreds of thousands and then millions of individuals, disproportionately minority, from ordinary economic activity and regular processes of market exchange. Successful experiments in freedom, the apostles of Reaganism seemed to be suggesting, depended on the denial of liberty to those unable (allegedly) to handle its privileges and responsibilities.

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

Whether ‘foreign hordes’ threatening the sanctity of the European border, or immigrant textile workers in Thailand being subject to hyper-exploitation and abuse, racial hierarchies are an essential component of the control of surplus populations.144 When the co-optation of the surplus into a disciplined excess workforce has failed, the state can always resort to simply locking up, excluding and brutalising large sections of the surplus population. Across the world, mass incarceration has been increasing as the size of prison populations rise in both absolute and relative terms.145 Moreover, there is a significant racial component to this – most notably in the mass incarceration of the US black population, but also of Muslims in much of Europe, Aboriginals in Canada, and the detention and deportation of foreign migrants around the world.146 These systems of mass incarceration must be understood to extend beyond prisons, as they encompass an entire network of laws, courts, policies, habits and rules that work to subjugate a group of people.147 Mass incarceration is a system of social control aimed primarily at surplus populations rather than at crime.

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For instance, middle-class and upper-class black populations are largely left alone,151 and the vast majority of the prison population consists of the ‘working or workless poor’.152 Likewise, the disparities in incarceration between races are outpaced by the disparities in terms of class,153 and the rise of mass black incarceration coincides with the decline in employment for that same population.154 In fact, the racial nature of mass incarceration in America stems ‘exclusively’ from the wildly disproportionate locking up of lower-class black populations.155 Mass incarceration has therefore become a means to manage and control this surplus that has been excluded from the labour market and left in poverty. Spatially concentrated in inner-city ghettos, these groups became an easy target of state control.

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Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism’, Race & Class 40: 2–3 (1998–99), p. 172. 153.Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration’, p. 44. 154.Derek Neal and Armin Rick, The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress After Smith and Welch, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014, at nber.org, p. 2. 155.Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration’, p. 43. 156.Wacquant, ‘From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the “Race” Question in America’, New Left Review II/13 (January–February 2002), p. 42. 157.Ibid., p. 53; Alexander, New Jim Crow, p. 219. 158.Wacquant, ‘From Slavery to Mass Incarceration’, pp. 57–8; Rocamadur, ‘The Feral Underclass Hits the Streets: On the English Riots and Other Ordeals’, Sic 2 (2014), at communisation.net, p. 104 n. 10. 159.Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steve Redburn, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2014), p. 258; Neal and Rick, Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress, p. 34. 160.The mechanics of getting unions and social movements to adapt to new goals must necessarily be worked out in practice and in the context of local conditions.

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

* According to a 2014 study of the age of mass incarceration, big increases in sentence length have “no material deterrent effect” on crime and do not reduce the crime rate. See The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences, a study by the National Research Council of the National Academies, 2014, p 140. Additionally, the violent-crime rate peaked in 1991 and was already on its way down by 1994. * A Black Lives Matter activist, confronting Hillary Clinton about her husband’s crime policies in August of 2015, used the unfortunate words “unintended consequences” to describe mass incarceration. In fact, it was widely known at the time that the consequence of the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity was the mass incarceration of black drug users.

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Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton’s administration that deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave. He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him.

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Those who do acknowledge Clinton’s part in the Big Clampdown either depict it as a great success in the fight against crime—which it was not*—or else describe it in superficial Washington terms: He got a great big law passed through Congress, thus proving that he could be an effective bipartisan leader. Besides, in rhetorical terms, Bill Clinton has always been a steadfast opponent of mass incarceration. In 1991, he said he thought it was awful that “we are now the number one nation in the world in the percentage of people we put in prison.” In 1995, two weeks before he signed the crack/cocaine law, he declared that blacks are right to think something is terribly wrong … when there are more African American men in our correction system than in our colleges; when almost one in three African American men in their twenties are either in jail, on parole or otherwise under the supervision of the criminal system.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

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

World Prison Brief, “United States of America,” Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, accessed December 12, 2020, www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america. 2. John Pfaff, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 2. 3. Ibid., 150. 4. Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 2006), 33, cited in Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 6. 5. Pfaff, Locked In, 42. 6. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 101. 7. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Federal Justice Statistics Program, 2019 (preliminary); National Corrections Reporting Program, 2018; National Prisoner Statistics, 2019; and Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016. 8.

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“If we released everyone in prison in 2013 whose top charge was a drug offense,” notes criminologist John Pfaff, “the white percentage would rise by one point (from 35 to 36 percent), the black percentage would fall by one point (from 38 to 37 percent), and the Hispanic percentage wouldn’t change.” While racial disparity may explain some of the difference in enforcement between white and black people, the disparity between white and Latino people is driven by Latinos tending to deal outdoors.21 Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass incarceration. New York is proof. For ten years after Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the state legislature increased penalties for drug use beginning in 1973, the number of people in prison for drugs hardly changed. Then, in 1984, the number of people incarcerated for drug crimes started to rise sharply due to violence associated with the crack epidemic.

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I thought it was going to die down, but in fact, it just kept banging away.”49 Over the next several years, Ethan developed the scholarly case for decriminalization and harm reduction. In 1992 he organized eighteen leading scholars to coauthor a major piece in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ethan started “bringing together people involved in marijuana legalization, psychedelics, the racist aspects of the drug war, mass incarceration, including people on the European and Australian side,” he said.50 Then the movement was infused with new funding. “Around the summer of ’92 I get a phone call from George Soros,” Ethan said. “We had lunch and hit it off. He didn’t know what harm reduction was. He was coming at this because he saw how open society ideals were being violated.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

When all else fails, they sell blood plasma, up to twice a week, for $30 or $40 each time. The second theme of this book is that suffering in working-class America was not inevitable but rather reflects decades of social-policy mistakes and often gratuitous cruelty: the war on drugs that led to mass incarceration, indifference to the loss of blue-collar jobs, insufficient health-care coverage, embrace of a highly unequal education system, tax giveaways to tycoons, zillionaire-friendly court decisions, acceptance of growing inequality, and systematic underinvestment in children and community services such as drug treatment.

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It’s worth quoting at length from his report: Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century. Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done. It is difficult to imagine a more self-defeating strategy. Federal, state, county and city governments incur vast costs in running jails and prisons. Sometimes these costs are “recovered” from the prisoners, thus fuelling the latter’s cycle of poverty and desperation.

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Whereas government historically had helped struggling Americans with measures like the GI Bill of Rights, it retreated just as disappearing jobs, proliferating drug use and disintegrating families increased the need for social services. The churches, schools and community organizations could not respond adequately when faced with these dark new forces, so government officials instinctively lashed back with mass incarceration that only compounded the problems. In medieval Europe, villages responded to inexplicable crop failures from the “Little Ice Age” by burning witches; in the twenty-first century, we built prisons instead. Neither was a successful strategy. Increasingly, government not only refused to help but also seemed to adopt petty cruelty as a principle of governance.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The effort to privilege the political will of the minority over the majority begins with controlling the vote.3 Our divided country’s political battle over voting—who is allowed to vote—and representation is not new: in framing the Constitution, representatives from the southern states succeeded in enhancing their own representation by demanding that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a free man, even though the slaves themselves couldn’t vote.4 But with the recent growth in partisanship, this battle has taken another ugly turn. The Republicans have sought to disenfranchise those who they think might not support them. In fact, the country has had a long history of disenfranchisement: one of the most vivid examples of this is not allowing convicted felons to vote, which occurs in many states. Mass incarceration may have had many motives,5 but clearly one of its effects has been mass disenfranchisement: some 7.4 percent of African Americans—2.2 million in total—were unable to vote in the 2016 election because of these state laws preventing voting.6 In some Republican-dominated states,7 there is also an attempt to control the vote by making it more difficult for working people to register or to make it to the polling booth.

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Drive through California’s Central Valley and see the migrant laborers bent in the farm fields: they live in double-wide trailers, drink polluted water, suffer from elevated disease rates, and are politically powerless.12 Many are from generations of laborers who have shuttled back and forth across the border—there is no path toward political rights for them. To some degree, the picture is reminiscent of the cotton fields of the antebellum South. Worse still, our political and economic systems work together to maintain these extremes of injustice: mass incarceration provides cheap convict labor and ensures that large numbers of people who might vote Democratic are denied the vote; temporary migrant labor, without a path to citizenship, ensures that these workers’ grievances can’t be aired in the political process, at least not by themselves. These individuals are temporary migrants, even though they may come back year after year, and the US is their only source of livelihood, because we have not allowed them to be permanent residents, for that would lead to citizenship and voice.

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We would get better performance if we showed more respect (instead of the constant bashing of teachers and their unions, which has become fashionable among certain educational reform circles), recruited better teachers by paying them better wages (ending the legacy of gender discrimination that has long plagued the profession), and provided better working conditions, including, in many cases, smaller classes.43 Discrimination One of the real cancers on American society is its racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination. We are just waking up to its pervasiveness and its persistence, shown most recently in the graphic evidence of police brutality and the statistics on mass incarceration. Discrimination is a moral issue, but it has economic consequences. Like any cancer, it undermines our vitality. Those who suffer from discrimination often never are able to live up to their potential, and this constitutes a waste of the country’s most important economic resource, our citizens.

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

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

Privately run prisons: Peter Kerwin, “Study Finds Private Prisons Keep Inmates Longer, Without Reducing Future Crime,” University of Wisconsin-Madison News, June 10, 2015, http://​news.​wisc.​edu/​study-​finds-​private-​prisons-​keep-​inmates-​longer-​without-​reducing-​future-​crime/. private prisons make profits only when running at high capacity: Julia Bowling, “Do Private Prison Contracts Fuel Mass Incarceration?,” Brennan Center for Justice Blog, September 20, 2013, www.​brennancenter.​org/​blog/​do-​private-​prison-​contracts-​fuel-​mass-​incarceration. Michigan economics professor: Allison Schrager, “In America, Mass Incarceration Has Caused More Crime Than It’s Prevented,” Quartz, July 22, 2015, http://​qz.​com/​458675/​in-​america-​mass-​incarceration-​has-​caused-​more-​crime-​than-​its-​prevented/. San Diego police used this facial recognition program: Timothy Williams, “Facial Recognition Software Moves from Overseas Wars to Local Police,” New York Times, August 12, 2015, www.​nytimes.​com/​2015/​08/​13/​us/​facial-​recognition-​software-​moves-​from-​overseas-​wars-​to-​local-​police.​html.

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That would be a step toward democracy. In this march through a virtual lifetime, we’ve visited school and college, the courts and the workplace, even the voting booth. Along the way, we’ve witnessed the destruction caused by WMDs. Promising efficiency and fairness, they distort higher education, drive up debt, spur mass incarceration, pummel the poor at nearly every juncture, and undermine democracy. It might seem like the logical response is to disarm these weapons, one by one. The problem is that they’re feeding on each other. Poor people are more likely to have bad credit and live in high-crime neighborhoods, surrounded by other poor people.

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For example, a model might be programmed to make sure that various ethnicities or income levels are represented within groups of voters or consumers. Or it could highlight cases in which people in certain zip codes pay twice the average for certain services. These approximations may be crude, especially at first, but they’re essential. Mathematical models should be our tools, not our masters. The achievement gap, mass incarceration, and voter apathy are big, nationwide problems that no free market nor mathematical algorithm will fix. So the first step is to get a grip on our techno-utopia, that unbounded and unwarranted hope in what algorithms and technology can accomplish. Before asking them to do better, we have to admit they can’t do everything.

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

In the essay quoted above, deBoer discusses the irony that the “everyone’s a cop” quality of Internet discourse is advancing even as the United States finally begins to turn away from the mass-incarceration policies imposed in response to the crime wave that ravaged American cities from the 1970s through the 1990s. But this is not an irony, nor is it even a coincidence. It’s just the evolution of elite strategies of control, elite responses to the potential downsides of a hyperindividualist, hedonistic culture. Mass incarceration as practiced by politicians of both parties was the first stage of that evolution, a desperate and flailing and often-brutal attempt to use state power to deal with the anarchic consequences of the 1960s, the sexual revolution and the drug culture and the decline of moralistic institutions.

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Who needs churches and two-parent families and the old American puritanism, in other words, when you can have a culture that preaches “If it feels good, do it,” and then puts the people who take that message too literally in prison? Extending that cynicism to the present era, you might say that mass incarceration became less necessary once virtual entertainments were invented to keep kids from broken homes indoors and take the edge off their physical and sexual aggression—and also once a surveillance state developed that made crime less likely to pay, escape from law enforcement more difficult, the outlaw life much harder to sustain. A similar point can be made about sex and pregnancy and childbearing as well. Just as we used mass incarceration as a strategy for managing crime, beginning in the 1970s we used abortion to manage teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births, substituting the vacuum pump for shotgun marriages and sexual restraint.

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You might also extend this argument to foreign policy, and to the way our system deals with the threat of terrorism, Islamic and otherwise. The wars that immediately followed 9/11, the invade-and-occupy-and-nation-build strategy that came to grief in Iraq and Afghanistan, were an analogue to the mass-incarceration era’s blunt-force approach to the dangers unleashed by late-modern discontents. The turn toward drone warfare and surgical assassinations from the Obama era onward, meanwhile, is a lower-cost and less-violent approach, and therefore perhaps a more sustainable one—using technological breakthroughs, virtual warfare (for the soldiers at our end, not the targets at the other), and the awesome power of surveillance to hunt down enough terrorists that even if their deaths encourage new recruits, their organizations are too harried to ever bring their war back to our shores.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

The United States and Britain have become global leaders in the privatized prisons and detention industries, through which millions of people have passed without any deterrent effect on criminality. Needless to say, this system has enriched favored companies such as Serco, G4S, and Corrections Corporation of America. I investigate in both countries how lobbying, ideology, and a punishment ethos have colluded to produce one of the most destructive experiments in modern times: mass incarceration. Australia has privatized all of its detention centers for asylum seekers, which are now run by multinational companies. Few other countries have so comprehensively outsourced such facilities to such a small group of companies, and with so little government oversight or media scrutiny. In its remote facilities, I investigated the reality of this privatized world and its effects on refugees and staff, and what they say about a supposedly civilized nation.

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Paul Krugman, New York Times, 2012 America incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than any other country in the world. It operates a system that demonizes and stigmatizes African-Americans and immigrants on an unprecedented scale, resembling a social experiment in population control. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, US writer Michelle Alexander explained that the “war on drugs” had crippled entire communities. In thirty years, the prison population had soared from 300,000 to more than two million. Meanwhile, the globally expansionist and violent “war on terror” that followed 9/11 brought greater division and repression at home.

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In Washington DC, our nation’s capitol [sic], it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.”1 These facts are mirrored across the country. The Vera Institute of Justice released a study in late 2014 that found mass incarceration to be “one of the major public health challenges facing the United States,” due to millions of people suffering acute physical and mental problems both in prison and once they were free. “The land of the free has become a country of prisons,” Human Rights Watch noted in 2014, issuing a report that outlined the absurd number of Americans facing jail time for minor and nonviolent crimes.2 The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik assessed that there were “more black men in the grip of the criminal justice system—in prison, on probation or on parole—than were in slavery [in 1850].

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

“On Black Pittsburgh (II),” PPG, August 31, 1981; “Thornburgh Signs Mandatory-Sentencing Bill,” WOR, March 9, 1982; Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, “A Strategy to Alleviate Overcrowding in Pennsylvania’s Prisons and Jails,” January 1985, box 1, folder 6, MMDP; “New Prison Won’t Ease Crowding Much,” PPG, September 20, 1988; Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, “A Strategy to Alleviate Overcrowding in Pennsylvania’s Prisons and Jails,” January 1985, box 1, folder 6, MMDP; “Allegheny County Jail Reviewed,” WOR, April 18, 1980; “Prison System under Siege,” Allegheny Times, December 17, 1989; Borough of Homestead arrest records, January 15, 1986, box 1, folder 46, MMDP; Parsons, From Asylum to Prison. On the rise of mass incarceration, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 38.

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The institutions of social policy constructed between the 1930s and the 1960s worked to shunt the social crisis of deindustrialization into the health care system. At the bottom of the labor market, waged care work proliferated, responding to the process of industrial decline. In historical perspective, the process appears in close parallel to the rise of mass incarceration. Like the expansion of the prison system in the final decades of the twentieth century, the rise of the health care industry offered an economic fix to the social crisis brought about by deindustrialization, channeling public expenditure and state power into the management of surplus population, generating employment, profits, and social stability.40 In this light, the relationship between the midcentury “egalitarian” period and our own time looks quite different.

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Like the expansion of the prison system in the final decades of the twentieth century, the rise of the health care industry offered an economic fix to the social crisis brought about by deindustrialization, channeling public expenditure and state power into the management of surplus population, generating employment, profits, and social stability.40 In this light, the relationship between the midcentury “egalitarian” period and our own time looks quite different. It was postwar liberalism that created the public-private welfare state that remains with us; that accepted the exclusion of huge categories of workers from social protection; that laid the groundwork for mass incarceration; that elevated the heteropatriarchal nuclear family into the only acceptable form of working-class household; that established widespread racial segregation in housing; that turned to financial markets to help policymakers govern through fiscal crisis; and that established a pluralist regime for labor law that could be captured by employers.41 Still traveling down this continuous historical path, we would be wrong to see the early twenty-first century as a return to the Gilded Age.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

We need a food delivery system that ends hunger and food insecurity; promotes small regional farms; supports urban farming initiatives; and offers new employment opportunities through the growth, harvesting, and distribution of food. If we do this one right, America can demonstrate its ability to tackle and solve complex human problems. 6. Prisons & Mass Incarceration: Mass incarceration of minorities bankrupts the country; creates permanent, second-class citizenship; and locks formerly incarcerated individuals into on-the-street, economic concentration camps. Potentially salvageable people have been victims of the 20-year, race-based “War on Drugs” and a criminal criminal justice system.

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To be sure, we recognize that weak family structures often contribute to generations of poverty, but we also recognize that weak families are deeply shaped and molded by larger social, economic, and historical forces. You can’t put out a fire with gasoline. You can’t rectify an injustice with more injustices. As Michelle Alexander brilliantly illustrates in her award-winning work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a new racial caste and control system was designed as the criminal justice system after the elimination of America’s Jim Crow laws. The number of people behind bars has grown from 300,000 in the 1970s to more than 2.5 million today, and almost half—846,000, or 40.2 percent—of the prison occupiers are African American.

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A Universal Food Delivery System would support and work to expedite all local, national, and international efforts aimed at delivering fresh, canned, and packaged produce to the hungry and, in the process, create sustainable, living-wage jobs for Americans currently underemployed or unemployed. PRISONS AND MASS INCARCERATION There’s another injustice against the poor seems to be growing in America. A November 2011 Wall Street Journal report confirmed that debtor prisons are making a comeback.100 Borrowers who can’t or don’t pay their debts are now being sent to jail. Credit card companies have become very efficient at having arrest warrants issued for debts if the accused doesn’t show up in court.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Glenn Whitaker

BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, fixed income, impulse control, incognito mode, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, medical residency, microaggression, microbiome, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, Rat Park, rent control, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Torches of Freedom, twin studies, WeWork, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

“Incarceration, Substance Abuse, and Addiction,” Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, https://www.prisonerhealth.org/educational-resources/factsheets-2/incarceration-substance-abuse-and-addiction/;“The Fallout Legal Consequences of Alcoholism,” American Addiction Centers, June 18, 2019, https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcoholism-treatment/legal-consequences. 319That the Rehab: Arjun Sethi and Cate Graziani, “Stop the Treatment Industrial Complex,” Politico, March 9, 2016, https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/03/stop-the-treatment-industrial-complex-000061; Dan Munro, “Inside the $35 Billion Addiction Treatment Industry,” Forbes, April 27, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2015/04/27/inside-the-35-billion-addiction-treatment-industry/#7a16304917dc. 31980 percent of them: “Mass Incarceration,” ACLU, https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration; Christopher Wren, “Drugs or Alcohol Linked to 80% of Inmates,” New York Times, January 9, 1998; “The Drug War, Mass Incarceration, and Race,” Drug Policy Alliance, January 2018, http://www.drugpolicy.org/sites/default/files/drug-war-mass-incarceration-and-race_01_18_0.pdf. 319The American War on Drugs: Alexander S. Dawson, The Peyote Effect (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 44–54; Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry, 75–87; Frederic Block, “Racism’s Hidden History in the War on Drugs,” HuffPost, March 5, 2013; Dale Gieringer, “The Opium Exclusion Act of 1909,” Counterpunch, February 6, 2009, https://www.counterpunch.org/2009/02/06/the-opium-exclusion-act-of-1909/. 320all drug use illicit around the globe: Fernando Esquivel-Suárez, “The Global War on Drugs,” Global South Studies, https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-issues/global-war-drugs; Graham Boyd, “The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow,” ACLU Blog, July–August 2001, https://www.aclu.org/other/drug-war-new-jim-crow; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2010). 320underwrites anti-blackness: T.

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,“Prevalence of Alcohol Dependence Among US Adult Drinkers, 2009–2011,” Preventing Chronic Disease 11 (2014): 140329, http://dx.doi.org/10.5888/pcd11.140329. 85“I believe the person”: Koch quoted in Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers (New York: Anchor Press, 1974), 231. 85Today around 20 percent: W. Sawyer and P. Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 19, 2019, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html?c=pie&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIvJWj7Ii-4gIVGIrICh3HjgrfEAAYASAAEgLmEfD_BwE. 85around 3.3 million people: “Management of Substance Abuse,” World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/facts/alcohol/en. 85450,000 people died: World Drug Report 2018: Executive Summary Conclusions and Policy Implications, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Sales No.

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.: Center for Behavioral Statistics and Study, 2017), 22, https://www.dasis.samhsa.gov/dasis2/nssats/2016_nssats_rpt.pdf. 119our criminal justice system: Kara Dansky, “Jail Doesn’t Help Addicts. Let’s Stop Sending Them There,” ACLU Blog, October 17, 2014, https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/jail-doesnt-help-addicts-lets-stop-sending-them-there; “Incarceration, Substance Abuse, and Addiction,” Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, n.d., https://www.prisonerhealth.org/educational-resources/factsheets-2/incarceration-substance-abuse-and-addiction/. 119medical doctors go to: Jan Hoffman, “Most Doctors Are Ill-Equipped to Deal with the Opioid Epidemic.

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

Prisons are the “new residential schools”36 and the “late modern ‘plantations’”37 with Indigenous and Black women as some of the fastest-growing incarcerated populations. Black women in the US are incarcerated at twice the rate as white women.38 Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration “functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control,” as she details the trajectory between slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, three primary anti-Black systems of control.39 Lisa Monchalin similarly argues that the incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada is not merely an issue of “overrepresentation” but a pillar of gendered settler-carceral governance.40 Settler colonialism is not only a pipeline to prisons but also a gendered carceral system itself, structured through land dispossession, imposition of the Indian Act disenfranchising tens of thousands of Indigenous women and regulating the Indian status and band membership of many more, and state removal of Indigenous children from their families.

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The laws also implemented expedited removal (fast-tracked deportation proceedings with limited judicial oversight), imposed criminal penalties for unauthorized entry and reentry, and made detention and deportation retroactively mandatory for certain criminal convictions.70 Within six years, detentions tripled, with the number of female detainees quadrupling.71 Deportations shot up by 37 percent after the passage of these laws, averaging 150,000 annually.72 Tanya Maria Golash-Boza argues that mass deportation, normalized since the passage of these 1996 laws, is a form of racial governance enforced through expulsion of surplus labor.73 The convergence of “tough on crime” and “tough on immigration” sustains racialized control, while also ensuring a compliant labor force through the containment of surplus labor that exists alongside the outsourcing of maquiladora labor and the insourcing of migrant labor. Mass incarceration and mass deportation within neoliberalism thus serve as key techniques of conterminous social and labor control. Clinton’s punitive 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act intensified neoliberal impoverishment by linking race, immigration, welfare, and criminal law regimes.

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A meaningful no borders politics requires an end to forced displacement caused by the brutalities of conquest, the voraciousness of capital, and the wreckages of climate change. We must wage resistance to displacement and immobility in all its forms: drone warfare, military occupations, policing agencies, mass incarceration, reservations, ghettos, gentrification, capitalist trade agreements, special economic zones, sweatshops, land grabs, resource extraction, and temporary labor programs. Dismantling borders requires that we abandon capitalism, which has only given us the merciless expropriation of land and exploitation of labor.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

Proposals for mens rea reforms are openly sponsored and championed by the Koch Industries, working in collaboration first with staff in the Obama administration, and now with the Trump team. The reason why Obama staffers jumped enthusiastically at the cross-partisan effort was the hope of passing other criminal justice reforms aimed at improving the problem of mass incarceration in America. Cleverly, right-wing supporters couched their attempts to introduce new ‘excusable ignorance’ provisions in a language of human and civil rights, insisting that at a time of mass incarceration, legal reforms are needed to ensure fewer wrongful convictions occur and reduce the cost of maintaining large prison populations. Critics of the Koch brothers, on the other hand, have pointed out the irony of the timing of the Kochs’ sudden interest in the civil rights of black Americans.

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Today, Koch-backed groups have been at the forefront of voter suppression efforts which make it harder in practice for people from communities of colour to vote. ‘It would seem prudent to view Koch support for criminal justice reform with a skeptical eye,’ Graves suggests.13 THAT’S ILLEGAL?! Why are the Koch brothers so interested all of a sudden in the problem of mass incarceration in America? The holy grail they’re after is something that could give them a sort of corporate ‘get out of jail’ free card in perpetuity for environmental crimes and work-related deaths. Their aim is to relax federal law that can penalize large corporations for cost-cutting measures that lead to severe environmental degradation and the death of workers even if companies don’t intend to break the law.

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This point has been stressed by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an NGO lobbying for criminal reform of inequities which particularly affect African Americans and other ethnic and racial minority groups. They have suggested that mens rea reform legislation is ‘not likely have an appreciable effect on “over-criminalization” or “mass incarceration” because their provisions will not likely impact drug and immigration offenses, which comprise the vast majority of federal prosecutions.’17 THE SNOWMOBILE FALLACY One of the problems with proposed mens rea reforms is something that could be considered the ‘snowmobile fallacy,’ after a touchstone example used by corporate lobbyists who are trying to relax current federal legislation.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

These policies have done far more to compromise the financial status of Black and Latino families, and it is within communities of color that the deepest service cuts have been inflicted. Moreover, the flip side of neoliberal economic policies that exile whole segments of the population from the formal economy has been an explosion of the state apparatus aimed at control and containment: militarized police, fortressed borders, immigration detention, and mass incarceration. The forty years since the neoliberal revolution began have seen the number of people behind bars in the United States increase by approximately 500 percent—a phenomenon, once again, that disproportionately affects Black and brown people, though whites are most certainly swept up in the system as well.

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For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when they’re on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when they’re back at camp. By some estimates, California saves about a billion dollars a year through this program—a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change. I Don’t Feel Hot—Do You Feel Hot? The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administration’s determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.

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It was the collective memory of past shocks that made Spain resistant to new ones. 9/11 and the Perils of Official Forgetting When two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York and another plowed into the Pentagon, on September 11, 2001, they hit a country which lacked the kind of shared memory of trauma that existed in Spain and Argentina. That’s not to say US history is unmarked by repeated traumas. The United States was founded in domestic state terror, from the genocide of Indigenous peoples to slavery through to lynching and mass incarceration; trauma has been ever-present right up to this day. Moreover, very frequently, shocks and crises have been handmaidens to the worst abuses. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the promise of land redistribution as economic reparation to freed slaves was promptly betrayed. The financial crisis of 1873, known as the Great Panic, further entrenched the excuse that the economy was too ravaged and the country too divided—and instead of reparations came a reign of terror against freed slaves in the South.

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

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

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Prison, of course, cost even more: “Annual Determination of Average Cost of Incarceration,” Federal Register, April 30, 2018, https://www.federalregister.gov/​documents/​2018/​04/​30/​2018-09062/​annual-determination-of-average-cost-of-incarceration. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT more than $3 billion per year: Kara Gotsch and Vinay Basti, “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons,” The Sentencing Project, August 2, 2018, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “They are reckless criminals”: Christopher Rowland, “Prescription Opioids Destroyed Families. Now, Victims Worry Addiction Stigma May Keep Them from Getting Justice,” The Washington Post, December 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/​business/​economy/​prescription-opioids-destroyed-families-now-victims-worry-addiction-stigma-may-keep-them-from-getting-justice/​2019/​12/​02/​02f51c9e-0642-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html.

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In The War for Kindness, Jamil Zaki cites cases in which white cops defend a marauding colleague, instead of reporting or shaming him, because they feel for him. Maybe they trained with him; maybe they are concerned about his family. These tribal instincts lead us to defend our own and hammer on others. The same dynamic is at work when a judicial system headed by the in-group punches down on perceived outsiders—in our case, people of color—with mass incarceration or even execution. So empathy, while essential, cannot right social wrongs. Instead, consider a personal policy of due process. This can translate into giving people the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. Perhaps they didn’t mean to do it. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding. And usually, when a person errs, nobody feels it more deeply than they do.

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See also poverty shame responses to the Lucerne Hotel shelter, 121–24 homophobia, 111 Hopi shame clowns, 3–5, 6 I Ikeida, Vosot, 209 incarceration, 89, 206. See also criminal justice system economic exploitation of parolees, 68–73 Oscar Jones’s story and the question of forgiveness, 214–15 masking in prison settings, 157 mass incarceration and racial inequities, 42–43, 44–45, 89, 213 incel community, 135–45, 148–49 dynamics and beliefs of, 138–45 origins of, 137 Elliot Rodger’s actions and influence, 136–37 India: Gandhi’s Salt March, 173–76 individual choice/personal responsibility tropes, 9–10, 88, 203.

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“Demographics of the U.S. Military,” Council on Foreign Relations, updated July 13, 2020, accessed March 27, 2022, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military. 12.  Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022, Prison Policy Initiative, press release, March 14, 2022, accessed March 27, 2022, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html. 13.  Sawyer and Wagner, Mass Incarceration. 14.  National Partnership for Pretrial Justice (website), accessed May 17, 2021, https://www.pretrialpartnership.org/. 15.  Gina Clayton et al., Because She’s Powerful: The Political Isolation and Resistance of Women with Incarcerated Loved Ones (Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif.: Essie Justice Group, 2018), 95. 16.  

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This means that in a nation that employs over 1.3 million active military personnel, 84 percent of whom are men, more than a million families are coping with, supporting, and absorbing the effects of an armed global superpower in very real emotional ways, at home.11 It also means that in a nation with an incarcerated population of 1.9 million people, there are millions of families and loved ones invisibly coping with, supporting, and absorbing the ripple effects of a punishing system on individuals, families, and communities.12 Gina Clayton-Johnson, the founder of Essie Justice Group, told me that when the United States invested in four decades of mass incarceration, it effectively invested in social isolation and the rupturing of communities. Incarceration rates have exploded in the last four decades in large part because of harsh drug laws especially targeting Black communities and communities of color.13 While nine out of ten incarcerated people are men, those bearing the brunt of such aggressive policies are often entire communities held together by women.

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That half a million people sit in American jails every day without a conviction because of not being able to make bail means women on the outside are forced into making impossible choices.14 Paying rent or paying for a loved one’s bail was just one of many agonizing decisions women had to face, said Clayton-Johnson, whose organization is among those advocating an end to the cash bail system. “These decisions are more than just cold calculations of plusses and minuses. They are hugely emotional decisions women are expected to take on,” she said. These burdens take a toll. A report15 published by her organization to document what was happening to women as a result of mass incarceration found that 70 percent of women with incarcerated loved ones were the primary wage earners in their family. It further found that 86 percent of them said the impact of having a loved one incarcerated had a severe or extreme effect on their emotional and mental health, and 63 percent said that their physical health had been significantly or extremely affected.

I Can't Breathe by Matt Taibbi

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Ken Thompson, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Snapchat, War on Poverty

“He called it ‘felony money, misdemeanor time.’ ” — Eric Garner may have created a lot of his own problems, but he was also the victim of bad luck and atrocious timing. In the eighties and early nineties, when he was beginning to deal drugs, the crack dealer had become public enemy number one. Garner also happened to ply his trade in the worst possible place: New York State, ground zero for the mass incarceration movement. New York’s then governor Mario Cuomo spent the eighties and early nineties funding more than thirty new prisons using a loophole in an urban development law that, perversely, had been intended to create jobs in inner cities. It was also the era of the infamous 100:1 laws, when long mandatory sentences kicked in for selling crack in weights 100 times smaller than the weights required to send a powder-cocaine dealer away.

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From the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to the West Side Highway to Columbus Circle to the Williamsburg Bridge to spots all over Harlem, the South Bronx, and Staten Island, major roads, highways, and commercial centers were closed off by furious protesters. Some of these crowds were spontaneous, and some weren’t. A dozen or more organizations, from Black Lives Matter to Copwatch to the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (a front group for the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA), had sprung to action. Many of these groups actively disliked, even detested, one another and, behind the scenes, began vying with one another to seize a role as leaders. Mostly, though, people just went out onto the streets spontaneously, massing in places like Union Square and Times Square and using intel from social media to seek out confrontations with the roving squads of police that set up in places like Rockefeller Center, the Seventy-ninth Street off-ramp of the West Side Highway, and Mount Sinai Hospital up in Spanish Harlem.

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— A large part of the tension between protesters and police lay in the explosive and impossibly complicated argument about race that had long divided the whole country. On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap. On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

In a revolving-door story that would become moustache-twirling fodder in books, documentaries, and television series, the drug’s FDA approval officer, Dr. Curtis Wright, went to work for Purdue soon after, earning $379,000 a year. And the cowed politicians who followed Nixon and Reagan—especially President Bill Clinton, with the help of then-Senator Joseph R. Biden—continued to amplify mass incarceration. It was a cynical attempt to claw back centrist White voters with the notion that Democrats could be tough on crime, too. By 2007, policing and imprisonment had become what financial gurus were calling a “superb growth industry.” Syndicated financial columnist Malcolm Berko encouraged his readers who dabbled in stocks to invest in private companies dedicated to incarceration.

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By drawing such a bold line of demarcation between licit and illicit, policy makers demonized one group of drug users while medicalizing another without recognizing the overlap. “There was a failure to take the risk of addiction seriously in [the legal drug] markets because addiction had been coded” as something that only happened illicitly in poor and minority communities, Herzberg said. In other words, the mass incarceration of Black people who use drugs and the overpromotion of OxyContin for rural Whites were two sides of the same very racialized coin. We’re familiar with the terrible costs borne by the Black and Brown communities targeted by the War on Drugs. But the opioid crisis revealed that even the people for whom the system was built—people who had privileged access to medical care—paid an awful price, too.

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A Tennessee congressman derided David’s question-dodging by quoting Upton Sinclair: “A man has difficulty understanding something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.” Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley recited Richard Sackler’s oft-quoted “hammer on the abusers” deflection and blamed him for predatory practices that decimated minority communities already strained by mass incarceration. “Your family’s rhetoric fuels the stigma and harmful policies that have denied people in need of the resources they require to overcome their addiction. We do not need another failed war on drugs. What we need is a reckoning and accountability for drug companies who put profits over people and rob us of lives and the freedom of our loved ones.”

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

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

statewide corrections behemoth that returns: Author interview, Anthony West, chief operations officer, Virginia CARES, July 14, 2017. likens the war on drugs to a system: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). Alexander’s thesis was further delineated by a 2017 book by scholar John F. Pfaff, in which he argues that the incarceration spike was fueled more by elected local prosecutors, the vast majority of them white men who operate behind a veil of secrecy and aggressively forge plea deals in 95 percent of cases: Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Mass Reform (New York: Basic Books, 2017). shift in public spending from health and welfare programs: “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S.

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During the two years he’d spent there, he said, he spent his time working out, studying Arabic and Swahili, and reading the works of Guy Johnson, Eric Jerome Dickey, and Maya Angelou. On my way to the prison, I’d been listening to the audiobook of Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow, I told him, the seminal book on mass incarceration that likens the War on Drugs to a system of racial control comparable to slavery and Jim Crow. “I’ve read The New Jim Crow twice,” Ronnie said. He’d also read lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s majestic Just Mercy, a memoir about his work against the racial bias and economic inequities inherent in the criminal justice system, which included efforts on behalf of falsely accused death row inmates.

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See also rehabilitation programs addiction medicine, 127, 213, 221, 270, 272 ADHD, 17, 112, 116, 124, 128, 133–35, 140, 155 Affordable Care Act, 206, 228, 276, 277 Afghanistan, 195 African Americans: and drug addiction stereotypes, 126, 127; and heroin distribution, 153, 159, 198; heroin use of, 106, 108–9, 130, 172; and mass incarceration, 252–53; and pain treatment, 253–54; poverty of, 275; as voters, 280 AIDS, 207, 284 Alcoholics Anonymous, 197, 216, 219, 224, 240, 286–87 alcohol use: and ADHD medications, 134; deaths associated with, 16, 150, 151; and family risk for addiction, 127; and heroin use, 24, 111, 142, 143, 144, 164; and laudanum, 21; and medication-assisted treatment, 217; and OxyContin, 51 Alexander, Michelle, 252–53 American Academy of Pain Medicine, 66–67 American Medical Association, 25, 271 American Pain Society, 66–67 Americans with Disabilities Act, 295 amphetamines, 116, 117 Anderson, Tony, 118 Andruscavage, Lisa, 210 Appalachia: drug diversion in, 18–19, 35, 147–48; and I-81, 10, 111–12, 129, 146, 152; opioid epidemic in, 8, 9–10, 15–18, 30, 32, 43, 57–58, 128–29, 150, 206–7, 217, 250–51, 273–74, 281, 282, 287, 290–96; and Purdue Pharma marketing, 52–53; and War on Poverty, 18, 43, 53 Appalachian Pain Foundation, 45–46 Ashcraft, Bobby Lee, Jr., 91 Asian Americans, 280 Ausness, Richard, 72, 267–68 Avruch, David, 291 Azer, Alex M., II, 220 Bailey, Dwight, 41–42 Banks, Colton, 138, 139–43, 145, 185, 191 Banks, Drenna, 138–43 Bassford, Andrew, 96, 132–33, 193–95, 251 Baucus, Max, 67 Bayer Laboratories, 10, 23–25, 218 Baylis, Bobby, 204–5, 234, 236–37, 241, 242, 245, 300 benzodiazepines, 35, 134, 213 Bickel, Warren, 106–7, 301–2 Bisch, Ed, 58, 61–63, 70–72, 79, 85, 88, 90–91 Bisch, Eddie, 58, 88 Bolstridge, Jesse: addiction of, 7, 8, 112–13, 114, 115, 175–76, 177; death of, 5, 9, 12, 107, 111, 172–73, 177, 183, 185, 252, 265; as football player, 6, 112, 157; grave of, 6–7, 10, 265–66, 268; and heroin distribution, 154–55; heroin use of, 155, 173, 175–76, 177; and rehabilitation, 155, 173–77; Ritalin prescription of, 17, 112, 155 Bradley Free Clinic, 232 Bristol Recovery Center, 292 Brownlee, John L., 73–74, 77–79, 80, 81–86, 96, 99 buprenorphine: and drug diversion, 213, 214, 286, 290; and medication-assisted treatment, 130, 144, 173, 210, 211–13, 215–19, 221, 222, 224, 228, 301, 302 Burke, Don, 284–85 Burroughs, William S., 22, 59 Burton, John, 28–29, 135, 242 Bush, George H.

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

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

The girl will not be safe if the police are defunded, but the boy will not be safe unless the police are reformed. In the 1990s, America tilted one way. We adopted draconian punishment rules like “Three Strikes and You’re Out” because of terrible crimes committed by people who should never have been on the streets. But those policies punished “not wisely but too well.” The mass incarceration of young men shows not only a lack of humanity but also stupidity. A smarter society should be able to target its punishments toward those who truly endanger the community. As we embark on a quest to reform criminal justice, we must heed the advice of Robert Heinlein and Milton Friedman: “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

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The rise of Zoom will not endanger urban life as a whole, but it increases the risk facing any individual city. It creates the perilous possibility that long-simmering urban problems may lead to a cycle of decline. We visit these urban problems in the next sections: underperforming urban schools, police violence, and mass incarceration. We turn first to the battles over gentrification that reflect the larger crisis of urban affordability. Chapter 8 THE BATTLE FOR BOYLE HEIGHTS AND THE CLOSING OF THE METROPOLITAN FRONTIER At 2:35 p.m. on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani told CNN that “I want the people of New York to be an example to the rest of the country and the rest of the world that terrorism can’t stop us.”

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There are other suspects for the drop in crime, including increasing numbers of police (especially in New York City), changing police strategies, fewer drug-related gang conflicts, legalized abortion, and reduced exposure of children to lead. Some even argue that video games led to less crime. Mass incarceration can impact crime through three distinct channels. First, prisons can deter crime, as longer sentences may make criminals warier of risking arrest. Second, prisons can incapacitate crime-prone individuals. Ida Ballasiotes certainly did not believe that Gene Kane and Earl Shriner could be scared straight, but she did believe that if they were locked up, they would do less harm.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

“Here may be seen husbands separated from their wives, only by the width of the room, and children from their parents, one or both, witnessing the driving of the bargain that is to tear them asunder for ever, yet not a word of lamentation or anguish must escape from them; nor when the deed is consummated, dare they bid one another good-bye, or take one last embrace.” * * * —— In the United States, there developed two parallel worlds existing on the same plane with flagrant double standards to emphasize the purposeful injustices built into the system. Presaging the disparities that led to mass incarceration in our era, the abolitionist minister William Goodell observed the quandary of black people in antebellum America. “He is accounted criminal for acts which are deemed innocent in others,” Goodell wrote in 1853, “punished with a severity from which all others are exempted. He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by the law, and can know law only as an enemy.”

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The crack cocaine epidemic of that era was dismissed as an urban crime problem rather than addressed as a social and health crisis, considered a black problem rather than a human one. The response was to criminalize addiction when the abusers were subordinate caste, which swelled the rate of mass incarceration, broke up families, and left the country ill-equipped for the incoming tragedy of opioid addiction. Caste assumptions created devastation on both sides of the caste divide and have made for a less generous society overall. Exclusion costs lives, up and down the hierarchy. The physician Jonathan M.

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Many observers in the dominant caste were comforted by the bailiff’s gesture, which they saw as an act of loving, maternal compassion. Many in the subordinate caste saw it as a demeaning fetishization of a dominant-caste woman who was being extended comfort and leniency that are denied African-Americans, who are treated more harshly in an era of mass incarceration and in society over all. Was the bailiff showing empathy for a fellow officer? Was she patting her down, as some thought, and if so, why did she not wear gloves or have the convict stand, and why stroke only her hair? Was the bailiff channeling the convict’s pain, responding to ancient cues to protect the upper caste at all times, thus fulfilling the unspoken role assigned the subordinate caste for generations?

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman

ghettoisation, informal economy, mass incarceration, payday loans, traffic fines, two and twenty, unemployed young men, working poor

The hour-long ride gave me some distance from the chaos and emergencies of 6th Street, and a chance to think about what I was seeing. I was also learning for the first time about mass incarceration. With Devah Pager and Bruce Western both in the Sociology Department at the time, the corridors of Wallace Hall were a hotbed of activity on the causes and consequences of the prison boom. After muddling through a slew of topics and themes, I came to see, through Devah and Bruce’s influence and Mitch Duneier’s guidance, that my project could be framed as an on-the-ground look at mass incarceration and its accompanying systems of policing and surveillance. I was documenting the massive expansion of criminal justice intervention into the lives of poor Black families in the United States.

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Wacquant’s theoretical and empirical work on the expanding US penal system and its significance for American politics and race relations was a significant inspiration for this volume, and can be sampled in “The New Peculiar Institution: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” Theoretical Criminology 4, no. 3 (2000): 377–88; “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 95–133; Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 11. Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4–5. 12. Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), especially 191. 13. Of the 217 households surveyed by Chuck and me in 2007. 14. In these eighteen months of daily fieldwork, there were only five days in which I observed no police activity. 15.

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Here I have omitted my small interjections, such as “yep,” “uh huh,” and “sure is” as well as other unrelated comments, such as those directed at the cat that had jumped up on the table. 6. See the appendix for a detailed account of Chuck’s death. 7. I typed this conversation into my phone while it was happening—the quotes should be taken only as a close approximation. CONCLUSION 1. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 95–133. 2. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979). 3. Vagrancy laws have resurfaced recently in the form of “quality of life” policing.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

Instead of having access to private doctors and world-class care at Kaiser Permanente, she and her brothers now had to go to the public county hospital. Her dad was never able to rebound to his previous salary, instead relying on a series of low-paying jobs at auto-repair franchises like Midas. Cullors describes the connection between deindustrialization and mass incarceration as happening “fast, fast, fast.” Her neighborhood, Van Nuys, was poor in the 1990s, and right next door to the affluent community of Sherman Oaks, which made Van Nuys susceptible to gentrification and its black residents undesirable. “The neighborhood became super-surveilled and super-policed.

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Liss’s goal for NVM is to create an active membership organization whose engagement goes beyond clicking on an email voicing an opinion on legislation. With twenty thousand people signed up on the email list, the organization has gotten a bird’s-eye view of the challenges it faces in bridging alliances across race. When it has sent out pro-immigration emails, it has gotten push-back from some members. When it has sent out emails about mass incarceration, it has gotten push-back from some members. But Liss won’t be deterred. In September 2015, New Virginia Majority brought together two hundred activists from across the state to ratify a common state agenda, which will provide alignment and shared goals across organizations working in Virginia.

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John Kasarda, “Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 501, no.1 (1990): pp. 26–47. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Mary D. Edsall and Thomas B. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 12–13. 47. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: New Press, 2012), p. 52. 48. Ibid., p. 49. 49. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, pp. 49–50. During Reagan’s first term, FBI antidrug funding rose from $8 million to $95 million. Between 1981 and 1991, Department of Defense antidrug funding surged from $33 million to over $1 billion in 1991, and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s antidrug spending grew from $86 million to $1 billion—all while drug-treatment funding at federal agencies was cut by more than three-quarters. 50.

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

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

In the United States, presumably the most successful example of neoliberalism, the welfare system has been dismantled—especially AFDC, which affects women with dependent children.15 Thus female-headed families have been completely pauperized, and working class women must now hold more than one job to survive. Meanwhile the number of women in jail has continued to increase, and a policy of mass incarceration has prevailed that is consistent with the return of plantation-type economies also in the heartland of industrialism. Women’s Struggle and the International Feminist Movement What are the implications of this situation for the international feminist movements? The immediate answer is that feminists should not only support the cancellation of the “Third World debt” but engage in a campaign for a policy of reparations, returning to communities devastated by “adjustment” the resources taken away from them.

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In reality, the destruction of human life on a large scale has been a structural component of capitalism from its inception, as the necessary counterpart of the accumulation of labor power, which is inevitably a violent process. The recurrent “reproduction crises” that we have witnessed in Africa over the last decades are rooted in this dialectic of labor accumulation and destruction. Also the expansion of noncontractual labor and of other phenomena that may seem like abominations in a “modern world”—such as mass incarceration, the traffic in blood, organs and other human parts—should be understood in this context. Capitalism fosters a permanent reproduction crisis. If this has not been more apparent in our lifetimes, at least in many parts of the Global North, it is because the human catastrophes it has caused have been most often externalized, confined to the colonies, and rationalized as an effect of cultural backwardness or attachment to misguided traditions and “tribalism.”

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Most significantly, we are witnessing the development of a homeless, itinerant workforce, compelled to nomadism, always on the move, on trucks, trailers, buses, looking for work wherever an opportunity appears, a destiny once reserved in the United States to seasonal agricultural workers chasing crops, like birds of passage, across the country. Along with impoverishment, unemployment, overwork, homelessness, and debt has gone the increasing criminalization of the working class, through a mass incarceration policy recalling the seventeenth century Grand Confinement, and the formation of an ex-lege proletariat made of undocumented immigrant workers, students defaulting on their loans, producers or sellers of illicit goods, sex workers. It is a multitude of proletarians, existing and laboring in the shadow, reminding us that the production of populations without rights—slaves, indentured servants, peons, convicts, sans papiers—remains a structural necessity of capital accumulation.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

All those new prisons and one hundred thousand cops he proudly put on the streets in the mid-1990s were expensive. As Alexander wrote, “the Clinton administration didn’t reduce the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine. By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps.” Prioritizing penal and policing budgets while simultaneously reducing welfare created, in ways implicit and explicit, a population ever more vulnerable not just to hunger, but also to viruses and pandemics.

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Disability as a precursor to increased viral risk need not be preordained. People who have trouble breathing or need immune system treatment could have their health protected with the ability to work from home, accessible mental health care, guaranteed housing to keep them off the street, freedom from mass incarceration, and the right to live near friends and family (with the help of home aides, if needed) in small settings, instead of being hidden away in a care center. COVID-19 removed so much touch from our lives that, after learning Ward had died, I found myself thinking about how transgressively queer people had maintained intimacy with people who could not care for themselves in the early years of AIDS.

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COVID-19 hot spot Rikers Island jail: Nick Pinto, “If Coronavirus Deaths Start Piling Up in Rikers Island Jails, We’ll Know Who to Blame,” Intercept, March 23, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/03/23/coronavirus-rikers-jail-de-blasio-cuomo/. including Harry Truman: Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Truman, Lyndon Johnson: Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). “action to end the AIDS crisis”: ACT UP, last modified 2019, https://actupny.org/. according to the New York Times: Philip Hilts, “Clinton’s Director of Policy on AIDS Resigns Under Fire,” New York Times, July 9, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/09/us/clinton-s-director-of-policy-on-aids-resigns-under-fire.html.

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Felons and ex-offenders inhabit their own sphere in the welfare state, and they are typically denied eligibility for public housing, food stamps, or, in some states, licenses to be bus drivers or hairdressers. As I’ve suggested, to comprehend the political economy of the ghetto we must consider the manner in which the mass incarceration of black men has removed potential fathers, partners, and wage earners from their community. Urban poverty cannot be understood without incorporating the prison. This was as true in our past as it is now, when the punishment for poverty—codified in an array of antivagrancy and anti-tramping laws in the North as well as the black codes of the South—was debtor’s prison, the work farm, or indentured servitude, just as jail or expulsion from the city is today punishment for loitering, begging, sleeping in public places, or other public displays of need.55 It is useful to remember that the Thirteenth Amendment did not abolish slavery: it explicitly retained involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

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Brown, Leslie Scheuler-Whitaker, and Shannon Collier-Tenison, “Welfare Reform on American Indian Reservations: Initial Experience of Service Providers and Recipients on Reservations in Arizona,” Social Policy Journal 1, no. 1 (2002): 83. 18 Mimi Abramovitz, “Challenging the Myths of Welfare Reform from a Woman’s Perspective,” Social Justice 21, no. 1 (spring 1994): 17–21. 19 Jodi-Levin Epstein, “Welfare, Women, and Health: The Role of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families,” Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003. 20 Richard M. Tolman and Jody Raphael, “A Review of Research on Welfare and Domestic Violence,” Journal of Social Issues 56, no. 4 (2000): 655–82. 21 Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 22 For an examination of these issues in the wake of 1996’s welfare reform, see Sharon Hays, Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 23 Virginia E. Schein, Working from the Margins: Voices of Mothers in Poverty (Ithaca, NY: ILR/Cornell University Press, 1995), 88–89. 24 In Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage, 1997), 75–76. 25 Lisa Featherstone, “Down and Out in Discount America,” The Nation, January 3, 2005. 26 Jill Duerr Berrick, Faces of Poverty: Portraits of Women and Children on Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995 [1997]), 83. 27 Kathleen Mullan Harris, “Work and Welfare Among Single Mothers in Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 2 (September 1993): 317–52. 28 Mary E.

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Donald, “Dependents and Delinquents,” Journal of Negro History 6, no. 4 (October 1921): 458–70; see also Stephen Pimpare, The New Victorians: Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages (New York: The New Press, 2004), chap. 6. 56 Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 199; David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New York: The New Press, 1999). 57 David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), 39. 58 Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, “Punishment and Democracy: Disenfranchisement of Nonincarcerated Felons in the United States,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 3 (September 2004): 491–505; Angela Behrens, Christopher Uggen, and Jeff Manza, “Ballot Manipulation and the ‘Menace of Negro Domination’: Racial Threat and Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States, 1850–2002,” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 3 (November 2003): 559–605.

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

When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues. Internal disagreement was rare.74 It is difficult to imagine a culture that is more antithetical to the mission of a university.75 The Power of Common Humanity Today Michelle Alexander, in her best-selling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,76 illustrates what happens to the millions of black men dragged into the criminal justice system—often for possession or use of small amounts of marijuana. They are released into a society where they struggle to find jobs, are disqualified from state benefits, and sometimes face the loss of the right to vote, leading to an “undercaste” in American society that is in some ways reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.

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In books like Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces77 and FIRE cofounder Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,78 libertarians have expressed opposition to both overpolicing and the excesses of the war on drugs. The conservative group Right on Crime opposes overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and the drug war.79 There are opportunities for real cooperation on serious but potentially solvable issues.80 For activists seeking reform, the lesson is to find common ground. Marches and rallies are good for energizing your “team,” but as Columbia University professor of humanities Mark Lilla points out in his book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, they are not enough to bring about lasting change.

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.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). New York, NY: Academic Press. Adams, J. S., & Rosenbaum, W. B. (1962). The relationship of worker productivity to cognitive dissonance about wage inequities. Journal of Applied Psychology, 69, 161–164. Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press. Almas, I., Cappelen, A. W., Sorensen, E. O., & Tungodden, B. (2010). Fairness and the development of inequality acceptance. Science, 328, 1176–1178. Anderson, L., Lewis, G., Araya, R., Elgie, R., Harrison, G., Proudfoot, J., . . .

Policing the Open Road by Sarah A. Seo

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, jitney, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, strikebreaker, the built environment, traffic fines, War on Poverty

Figures are hard to come by, but one early report indicated that in the sixteen smallest states, the number of officers as a percentage of the population nearly doubled from 1910 to 1930. In addition to adding manpower, municipalities unified the police function and increased the police’s discretionary authority. Courts then sanctioned that accumulation and concentration of power. The most glaring part of this history, considering that it culminated with mass incarceration by century’s end, is race. Today, it would be improbable that Mrs. Bates, a white woman sitting in the passenger seat next to her husband of social standing, would be killed in a police shooting, a tragedy that now falls mostly on minority drivers. The statistics bearing this out, as well as stories like Sandra Bland’s, not only reveal a problem of discrimination and implicit bias; they also raise a troubling question about our laws that have actually enabled racialized policing.10 Contrary to what one might expect, the social and legal developments that made the systematic policing of minorities possible did not originate with an intention to do so.

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But by enabling discretionary policing, the Fourth Amendment had also created opportunities for racial profiling.62 If the profusion of car cases since Carroll v. United States manifested an area of constitutional law without a coherent theory of jurisprudence, then the car cases decided in the era of mass incarceration betrayed a Fourth Amendment without a theory of justice. To be sure, the Supreme Court in Whren did recognize discriminatory policing as a constitutional issue. “We of course agree with petitioners,” the opinion stated, “that the Constitution prohibits selective enforcement of the law based on considerations such as race.”

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On Judge Simeone, see “Remembering Joe Simeone,” Saint Louis University School of Law, May 5, 2015, https://perma.cc/2C3K-NAGW. 13. Franklin E. Zimring, “Continuity and Change in the American Gun Debate,” in Guns, Crime, and Punishment in America, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 29–30; see also Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Michael W. Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). On gun control laws in the 1930s, see Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: W.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Oscar Handlin and Lilian Handlin, “America and Its Discontents: A Great Society Legacy,” American Scholar (Winter 1995): 15–37, at 34. 27. Katz, The Underclass Debate, 16–18. 28. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 178. 29. Horowitz, “New Deal to New Federalism,” 145. 30. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 162–163. 31. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 48. 32. Jennifer Hoschchild, What’s Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 278. 33. Ibid., 175, 253. 34. Ibid., 190, 255. 35. Maurice A. St. Pierre, “Reaganomics and Its Implications for African-American Family Life,” Journal of Black Studies vol. 21 no. 3 (Mar., 1991): 325–340. 36.

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Jessica Pishko, “Locked Up for Being Poor,” The Atlantic, February 25, 2015, available online at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/02/locked-up-for-being-poor/386069/, accessed August 10, 2015; Campbell Robertson, “A City Where Policing, Discrimination and Raising Revenue Went Hand in Hand,”New York Times, March 4, 2015, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/us/us-details-a-persistent-pattern-of-police-discrimination-in-a-small-missouri-city.html?_r=0, accessed August 10, 2015; “A Modern System of Debtor Prisons,” New York Times, March 28, 2016, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/opinion/a-modern-system-of-debtor-prisons.html, accessed June 18, 2016. 64. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 147–148, 192. 65. Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, and Jamiles Lartey, “Black People Killed by Police Twice as Likely to Be Unarmed as White People,” Guardian, June 1, 2015, available online at http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/black-americans-killed-by-police-analysis, accessed June 2, 2015. 66.

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Robert Alexander Kraig, “The 1912 Election and the Rhetorical Foundations of the Liberal State,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs vol. 3 no. 3 (2000): 363–395. 100. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: Or the Two Nations (Aylesbury, UK: Penguin Books, 1981), first published 1845, 422. Select Bibliography Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010. Alstott, Anne, and Bruce Ackerman. The Stakeholder Society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Alter, Jonathan. The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Bailey, Martha J., and Nicolas J.

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

African Americans who live alone, Marsh argues, are “not just a phenomenon of early adulthood,” but are instead “on a trajectory to becoming the most prominent household within the black middle class if not the entire black community.”2 What’s driving this increase? Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that two major social changes—the dramatic disappearance of industrial jobs once occupied by African American men, and the subsequent mass incarceration of men from these same communities—has generated a rising class of “unmarriageable males” and thereby reduced the intraracial marriage market. But this is not the entire story. For decades, marriages between black men and white women have been more common than marriages between white men and black women, and in the 2000s they were more than twice as common.

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Storr, who was careful to note that solitude can take a constructive or destructive course depending on the way it’s used, reports that “many of the world’s greatest thinkers have not reared families or formed close personal ties.” Storr, Solitude, p. 1. 4. On the reluctance of employers to hire men with criminal records, particularly African Americans, see Devah Pager, Marked: Crime, Race, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 5. See Porter and O’Donnell, “Facing Middle Age”; and Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, “Women, Men, and the New Economics of Marriage.” 6. The University of Wisconsin sociologist Alice Goffman makes a similar observation in her ethnographic study of young black men with criminal records in Philadelphia: “Suspicious even of those closest to them, young men cultivate unpredictability or altogether avoid institutions, places, and relations on which they formerly relied.”

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Journal of Design History 18 (2005), no. 1: 99–114. Owen, David. “Green Manhattan: Why New York Is the Greenest City in the U.S.” The New Yorker, October 18, 2004. Packaged Facts. “Singles in the U.S.: The New Nuclear Family.” Rockville, Md., 2007. Pager, Devah. Marked: Crime, Race, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Park, Young Jin. “The Rise of One-Person Householders and their Recent Characteristics in Korea.” Korea Journal of Population and Development 23 (1994), no. 1: 117–29. Parkes, C. Murray, B. Benjamin, and R. G. Fitzgerald. “Broken Heart: A Statistical Study of Increased Mortality Among Widowers.”

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

The resulting deeply conservative judiciary has relentlessly chipped away at the major laws sustaining the victories of labor and civil rights, overturning hard-fought, key provisions of affirmative action and voting-rights protections. Moreover, along with austerity and privatization, conservative courts have facilitated a vertically integrated for-profit prison system, resulting in the mass incarceration of African Americans, detention centers overflowing with Latinos, and massive profits for the putrid penal system’s corporate shareholders.9 The corporate class also created their version of a popular front, seizing the cultural apparatus through such rulings as the Federal Communications Commission’s Clinton-era decision to allow multinationals to outright own the means of communication.

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A bifurcated union and community alliance, which is what Richard Trumka promoted at the quadrennial convention of the AFL-CIO in 2013, will not be as effective, because the groups Trumka proposed to ally with and that most unions do engage are too weak themselves to make any real difference. Maintaining the bifurcation that has existed for the past forty years also denies agency to today’s heavily female workforce. Women have long understood that issues such as child care, good housing, quality schools, clean drinking water, safe streets, and an end to mass incarceration and police violence are every bit as important as higher wages to the well-being of workers and their families. Understanding how to frame a more integrated approach that covers these needs requires further clarity about, and a little history of, the differences between mobilizing and organizing.

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He sums it up on page 11 of Rules for Radicals: “In the end [this is] a conviction—a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions.” Yet that power has resulted in genocide against Native Americans; centuries of slavery; today’s mass incarceration of people of color; right-wing opposition to immigrant rights, taxes, and government; and the ongoing denial that unpaid homemaking is as hard as most wage work. None of this easily squares with Alinsky’s simple “conviction” that those who have the power to act will almost always act wisely and well.

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

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. The Architecture League exhibition helped the project gain recognition of the larger arts and architecture community, and was included in the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008.

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Brian Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective, 2009, 129–148. 20 Ibid. 21 Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 22 Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance. 23 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012). 24 DataMade, “Chicago's Million Dollar Blocks,” January 7, 2019, https://chicagosmilliondollarblocks.com/. 25 Laura Kurgan, director of the Spatial Information Design lab and the principal investigator (PI) for the grant, brought this diverse group together. 26 Australian law Reform Comission, “How Does Justice Reinvestment Work?”

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PLA Notes 39, no. 2 (2000): 10–13. Alessa, Ali, and Miad Faezipour. “A Review of Influenza Detection and Prediction through Social Networking Sites.” Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling 15 (February 1, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12976-017-0074-5. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2012. “All the Stops.” Bklynr. Accessed January 10, 2019. https://www.bklynr.com/all-the-stops/. Altay, Nezih, and Melissa Labonte. “Challenges in Humanitarian Information Management and Exchange: Evidence from Haiti.” Disasters 38, no. s1 (2014): S50–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12052.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Even wrongly convicted and nonviolent offenders sometimes find themselves sentenced to death by guard brutality, inmate violence, or unsanitary conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the health crisis in American prisons: as of April 2021, three thousand incarcerated people died of COVID-19.40 In today’s era of mass incarceration, both liberals and conservatives are questioning the massive resources that the United States is allocating to maintain its role as the incarceration capital of the world. According to the American Action Forum, the United States spends nearly $300 billion annually policing communities and incarcerating 2.2 million people.41 The societal costs—lost earnings, adverse health effects, and damage to families—are triple the direct costs, bringing the total annual burden of America’s criminal justice system to $1.2 trillion.

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Over time, harms become normalized, inferiority becomes internalized, and social norms become embedded in interpersonal, institutional, and structural relationships as systems of oppression. That culture of disrepair can be seen in America’s lackluster response to harm caused by genocide, settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. That paradigm also applies to other systems of oppression. For example, my colleague Allen helped me understand that a rape culture developed in the United States less because of the actions of individual rapists and more because of the way institutions responded when such harms were perpetrated.

…

At the time, land sold for three to five dollars per acre.23 Black people never got their promised forty acres and a mule, but white enslavers got that and then some.24 Genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery are not the only places where the United States can repair harm through reparations. Other transgressions include Jim Crow restrictions, mass incarceration, and Puerto Rico’s continued treatment as an American colony, which is a glaring example of how colonialism is not a relic of America’s past but very much part of its present. Some of the rich white men I know see reparations as a bridge too far, favoring instead a national truth and reconciliation process they hope would bring the country together.

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

Such coalitions don’t necessarily require a less ideological Congress. Indeed, the progress of ideological purism, whether of the anti-statist or egalitarian variety, can facilitate new political groupings. Consider, for example, criminal justice reform, where many conservatives have become more skeptical of mass incarceration precisely because they have gone further in an anti-statist direction.42 Something similar can occur with respect to finance and intellectual property, where anti-statism has led some conservatives to see crony capitalism where once they saw support for business. Ideological purists on both poles may find more friends at the other extreme than they can cobble together on their own team.

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., Derthick and Quirk, The Politics of Deregulation. 40.For the origins of this ungainly term for a liberal-libertarian synthesis, see Brink Lindsey, “Liberaltarians,” New Republic, December 4, 2006, http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/liberaltarians. 41.John Aldrich and David Rohde, “The Transition to Republican Rule in the House: Implications for Theories of Congressional Government,” Political Science Quarterly (Winter 1997–98): 541–67. 42.David Dagan and Steven Teles, Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned against Mass Incarceration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 43.Heather Hurlburt and Chayenne Polimedio, “Can Transpartisan Coalitions Overcome Polarization? Lessons from Four Case Studies,” New America, April 2016, https://na-production.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/final_transpartisan.pdf. INDEX Acemoglu, Daron, 8 Adele, 81 Admati, Anat, 58 affluence, 91, 110–11, 118, 122, 124, 140–47 agenda-setting, 132–36, 204n9 agglomeration, economies of, 114, 118 American Bar Association, 107 American Dental Association, 105 American Medical Association, 102–3 Americans with Disabilities Act, 28 anticompetitive collusion,184n1 antitrust legislation, 11, 13, 166, 171 artificial scarcity, 17, 19, 32–33, 120, 184n1 assets bubbles and, 35–55, 190n19 management of, 38 “Tobin’s Q” and, 19–20, 22–23 valuation of, 49 authoritarianism, 3, 8, 179 Avent, Ryan, 119 Bailey, James,186n14 bailouts, 52–53, 55–56, 175 Baker, Dean, 12 Baldwin, Pater, 78 banking.

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

We have to have voters make demands of their representatives in Congress. Together, we will constitute a wave that will swamp the influence of big money, corporate media, and other establishment players who are invested in maintaining the status quo. What do big organizing goals look like? Make public college free. End the drug war and stop the mass incarceration of black and brown people. Let everyone enroll in Medicare and make health care truly universal. Pursue an industrial policy that seeks to put everyone to work in the best jobs possible. None of these are crazy things to ask for. And it’s not crazy to ask for them all at once. In fact, all of those things are the status quo in almost every high- and middle-income country in the world.

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He outlined the radical solutions our moment calls for, not the tepid incrementalist compromises that most politicians think are all that is feasible. Bernie didn’t talk about education tax credits or even debt-free college. He demanded free college tuition. He didn’t advocate for complicated health insurance schemes, he said “health care is a human right.” Bernie called for an end to mass incarceration, not incremental changes in sentencing laws. He had no ten-point plan to regulate fracking to the point that it wouldn’t be feasible in most places in the United States. He simply said we should ban fracking. When it came to the deportation of children, he couldn’t have been clearer.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, among black men born in 1960, high school dropouts have a 59 percent chance of going to prison at some point in their lives, whereas college graduates have a 5 percent chance. See James Forman Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” 25 (on file with author). See also Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman, “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 621 (2009): 221–42. fallen by roughly a third: The share of households has fallen from 61 percent to just under 50 percent, and the share of income has fallen from 62 percent to 43 percent.

…

Most conspicuously, the nearly 20 million people who have been imprisoned or carry a felony conviction—up from just 2.5 million in 1960—are excluded from all but the most marginal forms of employment and condemned to live under the gloomy shadow of the association between work and honor. This group is constructed through any number of racial biases, including in policing, criminal procedure, and the substantive criminal law, and it includes nonwhites and especially African Americans in such disproportion that mass incarceration and its consequences have been called the New Jim Crow. The meritocratic idea that industry confers honor sheds a revealing new light on the workings of this caste order beyond the prison. Where prior convictions preclude subsequent employment, meritocratic inequality performs an astonishing inversion of the American race order.

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According to one researcher’s statistics, incarceration has quadrupled within the past forty years. Sarah Shannon et al., “The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People with Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010,” Demography 54, no. 5 (October 2017): 1804–5, Table 1. the New Jim Crow: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). middle-class sexual habits: In the late eighteenth century, aristocratic society began rejecting puritanism. See Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

Discrimination takes new forms; racial profiling remains rampant in many American cities, including through the stop-and-frisk policies that became standard practice in New York. Our incarceration rate is the world’s highest, although there are signs, finally, that fiscally strapped states are starting to see the folly, if not the inhumanity, of wasting so much human capital through mass incarceration. Almost 40 percent of prisoners are black. This tragedy has been documented powerfully by Michelle Alexander and other legal scholars. The raw numbers tell much of the story: There has been no significant closing of the gap between the income of African-Americans (or Hispanics) and white Americans the last 30 years.

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The essays in this part prepare the way to those in the next, where we look at the causes of this growing inequality. Notes 1. Some have suggested that this is not just an accident but a continuation of policies of discrimination that have long plagued the United States. See, in particular, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012). 2. See, for instance, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, OUR NATIONAL MYTH* PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS USED soaring language to reaffirm America’s commitment to the dream of equality of opportunity: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

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Soaring tuitions and declining incomes have resulted in larger debt burdens. Those with only a high school diploma have seen their incomes decline by 13 percent over the past 35 years. Where justice is concerned, there is also a yawning divide. In the eyes of the rest of the world and a significant part of its own population, mass incarceration has come to define America—a country, it bears repeating, with about 5 percent of the world’s population but around a fourth of the world’s prisoners. Justice has become a commodity, affordable to only a few. While Wall Street executives used their high-retainer lawyers to ensure that their ranks were not held accountable for the misdeeds that the crisis in 2008 so graphically revealed, the banks abused our legal system to foreclose on mortgages and evict people, some of whom did not even owe money.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam

assortative mating, business cycle, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, full employment, George Akerlof, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, index card, jobless men, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, school choice, selection bias, Socratic dialogue, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the built environment, the strength of weak ties, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, white flight, working poor

More than half of all black children born to less educated parents in 1990 experienced parental imprisonment.57 This period of exploding incarceration is precisely the period in which single-parent families became more and more common in the less educated, lower-income stratum of the population. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but mass incarceration has certainly removed a very large number of young fathers from poor neighborhoods, and the effects of their absence, on white and nonwhite kids alike, are known to be traumatic, leaving long-lasting scars. They certainly did in David’s life in Ohio and Joe’s life in Oregon. Paternal incarceration (independent of other facts about a child’s background, like the parents’ education and income and race) is a strong predictor of bad educational outcomes, like getting poor grades and dropping out of school.

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Nicole Shoenberger, “Young Men’s Contact with Criminal Justice System,” National Center for Family & Marriage Research FP-12-01, accessed April 24, 2012, http://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/documents/FP/FP-12-01.pdf. See also Bryan L. Sykes and Becky Pettit, “Mass Incarceration, Family Complexity, and the Reproduction of Childhood Disadvantage,” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 654 (July 2014): 127–49. 57. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 151–69; Christopher Wildeman, “Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of Childhood Disadvantage,” Demography 46 (2009): 265–80. 58.

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On the effects of parental incarceration on children’s mental health, see Kristin Turney, “Stress Proliferation Across Generations? Examining the Relationship Between Parental Incarceration and Childhood Health,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 55 (September 2014): 302–19; and Sykes and Pettit, “Mass Incarceration, Family Complexity, and the Reproduction of Childhood Disadvantage. 59. For a careful summary of these studies, see McLanahan and Percheski, “Family Structure and the Reproduction of Inequalities.” 60. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Wendy Sigle-Rushton and Sara McLanahan, “Father Absence and Child Wellbeing: A Critical Review,” in The Future of the Family, eds.

Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks

autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deindustrialization, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, housing crisis, Housing First, IBM and the Holocaust, income inequality, job automation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, payday loans, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sparse data, statistical model, strikebreaker, underbanked, universal basic income, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, zero-sum game

And while the unhoused often became part of Occupy encampments, the movement struggled to embrace their leadership and center their issues. The affirmation of all Black lives at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement has helped to bridge class divides and to mobilize an extraordinary cross-section of people to fight against police brutality, end mass incarceration, and build strong and loving communities. The movement’s founders, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors, are clear that the movement condemns all state violence, not just police violence. As part of its reparations platform, The Movement for Black Lives—a collective of 50 organizations including the Black Lives Matter Network—calls for the establishment of an unconditional and guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people.

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Scientific charity policed the lives of poor and working-class people for two generations, with brutal results. Today, the digital poorhouse uses its high-tech tools to infer and predict: to police events that haven’t even happened yet. In my most pessimistic moments, I fear that we are winning the fight against mass incarceration at just the historical moment when the digital poorhouse makes the physical institution of the prison less necessary. Corporations already anticipate the immense cost savings of building a digital prison state without walls. A 2012 Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu report titled Public Sector, Disrupted, for example, sees “transforming criminal justice with electronic monitoring” as an “opportunity for disruptive innovation” in government services.

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

I couldn’t see how a serious discussion of actual disaster capitalism could avoid getting blended with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism. Pipikism had thwarted me. The Green New Reset? More disturbingly, the forces of farcicalization in the Mirror World also seemed to be undercutting nascent and fragile attempts to actually address many of the real crises we face, from climate breakdown to mass incarceration to the ruinously exploitative working conditions that the pandemic laid bare. It seems so distant now, but there were a few months in 2020—a good half a year—when there had been a widespread belief that the pandemic might be a catalyst for a great many of the structural changes our societies had been collectively procrastinating and avoiding.

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Their story completely ignores the fact that in that summer of 2020, despite mask mandates and social distancing rules, millions of people took to the streets, day after day, night after night, to rise up against police murders of Black people, and to demand a radical reallocation of resources away from mass incarceration and militarized policing and toward educational, housing, and health infrastructure and services that would begin to close the wealth and investment gaps that treat Black communities as de facto second class, even if legalized segregation has ended. If you were a person concerned that Covid marked the dawn of a new age of CCP-inspired mass obedience, surely it would be worth mentioning that the largest protests in the history of the United States happened in the Covid era, with millions of people willing to face clouds of tear gas and streams of pepper spray to exercise their rights to speech, assembly, and dissent.

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So cutting-edge, scholars have shown, that the systems developed to transport, insure, depreciate, track, control, and extract maximum wealth from this coerced labor shaped many aspects of modern accounting and human resources management. And as Rinaldo Walcott, a scholar of race and gender, writes in his manifesto On Property, “The ideas forged in the plantation economy continue to shape our social relations.” Among those social relations are modern policing, mass surveillance, and mass incarceration. On what else does the claim to exceptionalism rest? The fact that European Jewry was so deeply assimilated and embedded in European culture, so committed to being “civilized,” as it was defined on the continent at the time. Many of those killed were even rich. But what of the established Japanese families sent to internment camps in the United States and Canada in this same period?

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

See the chapter called ‘Big is not small’. 32 This is sometimes known as the contingent theory of history. 33 Also remembering that explorer and biologist Alfred Russel Wallace was coming to similar conclusions to Darwin about evolution through natural selection. 34 For the Beatles, it was a bus. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard met on platform 2 of Dartford station. Is public transport the regularity? 35 Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman, ‘The Black Family and Mass Incarceration’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 621, 2009, pp. 221–242. 36 J. Freund et al., ‘Association Between Exploratory Activity and Social Individuality in Genetically Identical Mice Living in the Same Enriched Environment’, Neuroscience, vol. 309, 2015, pp. 140–152; and J.

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McShane et al. ‘Abandon Statistical Significance’, The American Statistician, forthcoming. 9 Unpublished research by the Winton Centre for Evidence and Risk Communication. 10 See the Hamilton Project, Policy Memo, May 2014. Their source: Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman, ‘The Black Family and Mass Incarceration’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 621, 2009, pp. 221–242. Since then, the incarceration rate has fallen for all groups, but the disparity between black and white may have grown. 11 Tim Harford’s book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, London, Little, Brown, 2011 makes a good case for trying to embrace disruption in business and elsewhere. 12 Andrew Gelman and Thomas Basbøll, ‘When Do Stories Work?’

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, mass incarceration, medical residency, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, RAND corporation, school choice, Silicon Valley

The charts showing the relationship between age and criminality are from Alfred Blumstein, “Prisons: A Policy Challenge,” in Crime: Public Policies for Crime Control, James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersilia, eds. (ICS Press, 2002), 451–82. Todd Clear’s book on the effects of mass incarceration on poor places is Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (Oxford University Press, 2007). You can find Clear’s hard-to-get-published paper “Backfire: When Incarceration Increases Crime” in the Journal of the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Research Consortium 3 (1996): 1–10. There is an entire library of studies on the effects of Three Strikes on California’s crime rate.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

In the sense that blackness is often absented from what is theorized and who is cited, it is ever present in the subjection of black motorists to a disproportionate number of traffic stops (driving while black), stop-and-frisk policing practices that subject black and Latino pedestrians in New York City and other urban spaces to just that, CCTV and urban renewal projects that displace those living in black city spaces, and mass incarceration in the United States where, for example, black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four are imprisoned at a rate seven times higher than white men of that age group, and the various exclusions and other matters where blackness meets surveillance and then reveals the ongoing racisms of unfinished emancipation.30 Unfinished emancipation suggests that slavery matters and the archive of transatlantic slavery must be engaged if we are to create a surveillance studies that grapples with its constitutive genealogies, where the archive of slavery is taken up in a way that does not replicate the racial schema that spawned it and that it reproduced, but at the same time does not erase its violence.

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Pearson International Airport, 157–59 Lévesque, Maroussia, 157–59 Lewis, Jason Edward, 157–59 Li, Zhou, and Geng (study), 112–13 London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 45, 47–49 Long, Edward, 95–97 Lose Your Mother (Hartman), 99 Lott, Eric, 81 Louis XV, 36 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 44 lynching, 38, 67–68, 105, 179n56 Lyon, David, 13, 17–18, 24, 26, 40–41, 76, 121, 143 Macey, David, 165n7 Mad TV, 151 Magnet, Shoshana, 146 Maison des Esclaves, 45 Malcolm in the Middle (TV show), 151 Malcolm X, 3 “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (Spillers), 93 mammy figures, 57–58, 150, 187n63 Mann, Steve, 18, 20–21 Mantracker (TV show), 63–69, 174n1, 174n6 A Map to the Door of No Return (Brand), 31, 45 Marley, Bob, 45, 50, 172n92 Marman, DeShon, 139–40, 156 Marmillion, Valsin Bozonier, 90, 102 Marriot, David, 68 Martin, Erik, 167n51 The Martyrs and the Fugitive (Platt), 96 Marx, Gary T., 14–15 Marxism, 1–2 mash-ups, 124–29 mass incarceration, 10, 13, 40, 67–68 Mathieson, Thomas, 38–39, 174n4 maximum-security society, 15–16 Mayer, Jillian, 163 Mayfield, Brandon, 115, 181n90 McAllistair, Marvin, 81 McClintock, Anne, 97–98 McKittrick, Katherine, 37, 67, 79–80 McVeillance, 20 Mendieta, Eduardo, 183n122 Men in Black (film), 92, 119–22 Mercer, Kobena, 138–39 microresistances, 6 Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie, 99 Middle Passage, 42, 45, 172n92 migration.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Edsall, “Clinton Stuns Rainbow Coalition,” Washington Post, July 14, 1992, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/06/14/clinton-stuns-rainbow-coalition/02d7564f-5472-4081-b6b2-2fe5b849fa60/. 34. Rashawn Ray and William A. Galston, “Did the 1994 crime bill cause mass incarceration?,” Brookings Institution, August 28, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/28/did-the-1994-crime-bill-cause-mass-incarceration/. 35. “Barack Obama’s Remarks to the Democratic National Convention,” July 24, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/politics/campaign/barack-obamas-remarks-to-the-democratic-national.html. 36. Jonathan V. Last, “Michelle’s America,” Weekly Standard, February 18, 2008, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/michelles-america. 37.

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

In the latest British Crime Survey, overall crime was up 5 per cent over the year, with acquisitive crimes of theft from the person and domestic burglary both rising, by 25 per cent and 1 per cent respectively.50 So the evidence suggests that there are wider forces at work to explain the ebb and flow of crime in Britain. Yet Labour has the security crisis ignored this evidence and claimed instead that its policy of mass incarceration has worked, even though it is an approach that has brought our prison system to the brink of meltdown. In 1996, 61,114 people were in prison but in July 2008, it was over 83,000. The number of women in prison has nearly doubled, from 2,672 in 1997 to 4,565 in August 2008. We have the highest rate of young people in prison in Europe.51 Yet there is no evidence this is cutting crime: two thirds of people sent to prison re-offend within two years, compared to half of those given a community sentence.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

Hajjar stresses that the Israeli state’s description of the status of the West Bank and Gaza as sui generis, in order to assert that IHL does not actually apply, is legally indistinguishable from US claims that such law was inapplicable to the invasion of Afghanistan because it was a ‘failed state’.49 She also underlines that both the US and Israeli states have often argued that the statelessness of their enemies automatically means they have no rights whatsoever under IHL. In both cases, it is a legal trick that has been used to legitimize mass incarceration without trial. Moreover, both states have used national laws to authorize legal practices that contravene the norms and rules of IHL, a form of ‘domesticating’ international law for questionable purposes.50 ISRAEL AND THE ‘PALESTINIANIZATION’ OF IRAQ In late 2003, as the US military’s task in Iraq quickly morphed from the relatively simple challenge of destroying an infinitely inferior state military to the challenge of pacifying complex urban insurgencies, Israel’s direct involvement in shaping the doctrine, weaponry and military thinking of US occupying forces grew dramatically – with corresponding pay-offs for the Israeli economy.

…

Such partitioning of Iraqi cities and urban districts by US forces inevitably echo the erection of massive concrete barriers in the West Bank and the increasingly militarized borders and ‘shoot to kill’ zones in and around Gaza. Check-points, buffer zones, enforced identity cards, collective punishments, mass incarcerations without trial, imprisonment of suspects’ relatives, and associated bulldozings of landscapes and buildings deemed to be sheltering enemies – all smack of direct imitation of Israeli policy (whilst also echoing earlier counterinsurgency wars in Algeria, Vietnam, and elsewhere). Such similarities have not been lost on Iraq’s urban residents as they encounter these familiar but shocking new ‘security’ geographies.

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Under these conditions, the work of an artist like Boeskov becomes a rare chance to actually play the governance game, by opening up a public space for refusing, contesting and challenging these new tracking and recording regimes’.74 COLLABORATION Finally, and perhaps most important, countergeographic strategies which attempt to undermine the new military urbanism must work beyond new assertions of cosmopolitanism or democracy75 They must engage and collaborate with, rather than merely speaking on behalf of, those on the receiving end of urbicidal violence, the ruthless imposition of neoliberal fundamentalism, and the spread of mass incarceration.76 It is necessary to work against the habitual silencing of the non-Western Other because, as we have seen in this book, acts of silencing are often combined with representations that legitimatize the power to penetrate and reorder societies en masse, from afar, through war, through ‘modernization (or, indeed, demodernization), or through the violent imposition of ‘democracy’ or ‘civilization’.

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

Over the past decade, promises to reduce immigration and strengthen borders have been a vote winner even for liberal governments in progressive democracies. Meanwhile, populist, nationalist leaders have become ever more draconian in their dealings with foreign workers and refugees. From the mass incarceration of Mexicans in the US, to the hostile environment of Brexit Britain, to the weaponization of Middle Eastern refugees by Belarus in the winter of 2021, the issue of migration has been shaped into a public threat – a crisis – and this has given rise to anti-immigration movements and far-right political parties.

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Kung peoples Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh Kyrgyzstan Lagos Lake Chad Lammy, David land ownership language/linguistics; language classes for new arrivals; and nation state Laos Las Vegas Latin America: Amazon region; first nation states in; fragile social systems in; impact of climate emergency; mega-El Niño (1997–8); migrants in Parla, Spain; rivers fed by glaciers; rural to urban migration League of Nations Leipzig liberalism Libya Lima livestock farming: by drone; feeding of animals; impact of drought; inhumane treatment of animals; insects as feed; land and water used for; meat and dairy subsidies; need for huge reduction in Ljubljana, Slovenia locust plagues London Macau Maillard chemical reaction maize production, global Malacca Straits Malaysia Maldives Mali Manchester Mangroves Marijuana marine life: fish populations; impact of global warming; starved of oxygen by algae marshes Mayan civilization Mayors Migration Council McCarthy, Kate McCay, Adam McConnell, Ed Medellín, Colombia media, prejudice against migrants Mediterranean Mekong River Melbourne, Pixel Building Merkel, Angela Mesopotamia Met Office, UK, methane Mexico Mexico City Miami Micronesians Middle East migrant cities: the Arctic as new region for; charter cities option; and circulation of community resources; ‘climate haven’ cities; creation of entirely new cities; as cultural factories; environmental sustainability; evidence of decline of tribalism in; expanding existing cities; in the new north; planning future cities; repurposing/adaptation of; successful urban development/planning in; as synergistic; training for rural migrants; water-management infrastructure migrants/immigrants: arrival in family groups; ‘Bangla’ communities in London; contribution to global GDP; creation of active markets by; distinction between refugees and; dominant hostile narratives of in West; ‘economic migrant’ term; evidence of decline in hostility towards; harnessing potential of; immigrant inclusion programmes; as indentured labour; internal migration; Boris Johnson’s language on; language classes for; levels of patriotism of; living in slums/shanty towns; mentoring and support for; as percentage of global population; racist and prejudicial tropes about; returning to origin countries; seasonal; situations of appalling abuse/danger; state-sponsored support needed for migration: and advantageous genetic modifications; barriers to today; as benefitting everyone; controlled by city authorities; as deeply interwoven with cooperation; and diversified genes/culture; evidence of decline of anti-immigrant feeling; free movement ends in twentieth century; and historic climate change; historical; human displacement at record levels; inherited routes and channels; and mental illness; as not reduced by aid; reluctance to move; and skin colour; of stuff/resources; as survival strategy used widely in nature; as valid and essential part of human nature; world’s major cities created by migration, arguments against/fears around: fears around crime and violence; and jobs; long evolutionary roots to prejudice; in the media; populist politicians; pressure on inadequate host services; prospect of radical change; resting on true/pure national identity idea; security/terrorism issues; and welfare systems migration, climate-driven: Covid cooperation as hopeful example; due to flooding; and geopolitical mindset; global agreement on pathways needed; hypothetical scenarios/models enabling; as inevitable; Kiribati’s ‘migration with dignity’ programme; mass movement already under way; move to higher elevations; national and regional relocation schemes; need for strong nation-states; need to plan practically now; numbers affected today; predicted future numbers; and Refugee Convention (1951); risk of domination by wealthy elites; as solution not problem; speed of movement of climate niches; water issues to be main driver migration, urban; access to health and education; community sponsorship models; family retention of farmland; and intensive infrastructure development; as most effective route out of poverty; population fall due to; role of business in migrant integration; from rural areas; successful management of; as unplanned and iterative; in the West (1850–1910); and workforce shortages in global north Miller, David mineral supples/extraction mining industry Mongla (Bangladesh) Mongolian steppes Morocco Mumbai, mussels Myanmar Nairobi Nansen, Fridtjof nation state: Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’; claims that country is ‘too full’; first created by revolutionaries; and genetic variation; and geopolitical mindset; and language; leases/purchases of territory by; model as often failing; nationality as arbitrary line drawn on map; need for reinvention of; as norm after First World War; and system of borders; translocation of existing nation states National Health Service (UK) national identity: and anti-immigrant feeling; and bureaucracy; creation of first nation states; ethnic and cultural pluralism as the norm; evidence of decline of tribalism; feelings of loss of/decline; and ideology of nationalism; lack of political meaning before end of eighteenth century; nation state as norm after First World War; need to change immigration narrative; patriotism of welcomed migrants; predicated on mythology of homogeneity; and supranational identity; transition to pan-species identity Nauru Neanderthals negative emissions technologies Netherlands; Delta Programme; Energiesprong house insulation Neukölln (Berlin) New Orleans New Story (nonprofit) New York City; ‘Big U’ seawall project; NYCID programme New Zealand; Managed Retreat and Climate Adaptation Act Newtok, Alaska Nicaragua Niger, West Africa Nigeria nitrogen Noem, Kristi nomadic pastoralism Nordic nations Normans North Korea Northern Ireland Northwest Passage Norway Notre Dame, University of, Global Adaptation Initiative nuclear power; fusion reactor technology Nusantara (Borneo) Nuuk (Greenland) Obayashi (Japanese firm) oceans/seas: acidification; as energy source in north; and enhanced weathering techniques; global warming absorbed by; impact of 4° C-hotter world; impact of carbon emissions; jellyfish explosions; long-distance migratory voyages; marine heatwaves; and migratory raiders; Miocene Era sea levels; North Atlantic currents; Northwest Passage; nutrient and oxygen circulation; ocean fertilization; release of carbon dioxide; rise in sea levels; sea grasses; sourcing food from; toxic algae blooms oil industry OmniTrax (US freight company) Ottoman Turks Overjeria, Bolivian village Paine, Thomas Pakistan Palaeo-Eskimos, Canadian palaeontology Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paris climate meeting (2015) Parla (near Madrid) passports Patagonia Patel, Priti patriotism Pearl River Delta Peatlands people-traffickers Peri, Giovanni permafrost, infrastructure built on Persian Gulf Peru Pfizer vaccine Philippines; nurses from Philistines Photios of Constantinople Phuket, Thailand Phytoplankton plains/steppes plants/vegetation: destruction of by wildfires; genetic tools to help adaptation; grass verge areas; heat damage to crops; during last ice age; move to plant-based diet; planted to increase crop yields; replanting of; rooftop vegetation/gardens plastic waste Pleistocene epoch Poland political and socioeconomic systems: in Africa; benefits to democracy of migration; cooperation during Covid upheaval; corporate food system; democracy based on inclusiveness; development of governance systems; end of multinational empires; erosion in the powers of global bodies; failure over decarbonization; far-right political parties/groups; fossil fuels as embedded in; geopolitical constraints; geopolitical implications of farming’s shift north; global institutions with enforceable powers needed; and ideal temperature question; inequality as failure of policy; institutional bias over skin-colour; institutional trust levels; international diplomacy; move from feudalism to centralized monarchy; nation-state model spreads; need for global planning over migration; need for redistributive policies; need for strong nation-states; new regional unions option; pledge of ‘strong borders’ as vote-winner; possible new political institutions/structures; post-war institutions and inequality; strong/stable institutions in north; translocation of existing nation states; and transnational rivers/’water towers’; vested interests in the rich world; Westphalian state system pollinators pollution Polynesians populist politicians Portugal postcolonial diaspora poverty see inequality and poverty Próspera ZEDE (embryonic charter city) Prussia Puerto Rico Putin, Vladimir Pygmies Qatar race and ethnicity: and anti-immigrant feeling; deliberately prejudicial policies; and demographic change; European colonialism; fallacy of biological ‘race’; heat related inequalities; unconscious bias in society; white supremacists rain gardens rainfall: altering patterns of; captured by roof gardens/storage; seeding of clouds rare earth metals Raworth, Kate, Doughnut Economics, recycling Refugee Convention (1951) refugees: from Afghanistan; barred from working; Burmese Rohingya in Bangladesh; climate change not in legal definition of; distinction between migrants and; EU seeks quota system for; hostile rhetoric towards; judgemental terms used about; and Nansen passports; privately sponsored; from Syrian crisis (2015–16) see also asylum-seekers renewable power production: as adding to, not replacing, fossil fuels; artificial light delivered by LEDs; hybrid hydro-solar power concept; hydroelectric plants; as leading job creator; and net zero targets; phenomenal rise in; refrigerant units in global south; solar-powered closed-cycle farming; storage technology; zero-carbon new-builds Republic of the Congo restoring our planet’s habitability; biodiversity loss; ‘blue carbon’; climate change-biodiversity loss as linked; cooling of global temperatures; decarbonizing measures; enhanced weathering techniques; future repopulation of abandoned regions; genetic tools to help species adapt; as global, labour-intensive task; natural restoration after human abandonment; nature guardianship in tropical regions; need for speed; negative emissions technologies; ocean fertilization; paying communities to protect ecosystems; regenerative agriculture; replanting of vegetation; solar radiation reduction tools, see also geoengineering retail services rice; SRI cultivation process rivers: drying out of; fed by glaciers; heavier rainfall as increasing flows; lack of in Gulf region; pollution discharged into; transnational Roatan, Caribbean island of Rocky Mountains Rome, ancient Romer, Paul Rotterdam rural living: and depopulation crisis; flight from drought/heat hit areas; impact of flooding; massive abandonment of in coming decades; migration to urban areas; and population expansion in Africa; remittances from urban migrants; as single largest killer today; and water scarcity Russell, Bertrand Russia: and charter cities model; depopulation crisis; economic benefits from global heating; economic sanctions on; expansion of agriculture in; infrastructure built on permafrost; invasion of Ukraine (2022); mega-heatwave (2010); migrant workforce in east; as potential area for charter cities; small-scale modular nuclear reactors in; water resources in Rwanda: Hutus and Tutsis in; special protective zones in; and UK asylum-seeker plan Salla, Finnish town of sanitation Saudi Arabia Saunders, Doug Sawiris, Naguib Scandinavia scientific discovery Scotland sea grasses Seasteading movement Seven Dials, London sex industry Shanghai sharing/circular economy Shenzhen Shyaam a-Mbul Siberia silicates Silicon Valley Silk Road Singapore sinkholes Skellefteå, Sweden slavery Slovenia slum dwellers; conditions at Kutupalong refugee camp; in Lagos; in Lima; and urban heat island effect; vulnerability to flooding social class/hierarchies: and anti-migrant attitudes; barriers erected against migration of the poorest; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; development of; and gentrification; middle class migrants; myth of meritocracy; prejudice as often defensive fear-based reaction social networks; benefits of trade; cities as focal points for trade; Dunbar number; entangled ancestries/identities; forged by migrants; and knowledge flow; loss due to gentrification; migrants in family groups; and mistrust of outsiders; need for inclusive governance; and reluctance to migrate; in slum areas; social clustering of migrants; synergy created by; and unjust hierarchies; welcoming of strangers to social services see welfare systems and social services socioeconomic system see political and socioeconomic systems soil: ‘biochar’ use in; biomatter decay in; as carbon store; impact of heat on; impact of wildfires on; integrated soil-system management in China; and overuse of fertilizers; and perennial cereals; use of silicates in solar power Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative South Dakota South Korea Southern Ocean Soviet Union soya production Spain Spitalfields, London stateless persons Sudan sulphate cooling concept Sumerian civilization Sunak, Rishi Sweden Switzerland Syrian crisis (2015–16) Tabasco, Mexican state of Tabassum, Marina Tahiti Tajikistan Tanzania Tasmania textiles industry Thailand Thepdet, Supranee thermal wallpaper Thiel, Peter Thirty Years War Thwaites Glacier Tokyo Toltecs Tong, Anote Tourism trade and commerce; cities as focal points for networks; free movement of goods; free trade; global trade deals; origins and development of transport infrastructure: aviation; decarbonizing of; electric-powered vehicles; equitable access to; in global south; and limitations of battery weight; problems due to extreme heat; sail power as due a revival; in successful migrant cities; use of foot or pedal trees: American chestnut trees; cycles of burn and recovery; as ‘emissions offset’; giant sequoias; ‘green wall’ tree-planting projects; vine-like lianas Trestor, Anne Marie tropical regions: benefit of solar cooling idea; impact of climate emergency; nature guardianship in; population rise in Trump, Donald Tsipras, Alexis tundra Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu UAE Uganda Ukraine: maize exports; Russian invasion of (2022) United Kingdom: ageing population in; anti-immigrant feeling in; Brexit; Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962); and Covid pandemic; destruction of peatlands in; flood defences in London; historical migration to; history of granting asylum; ‘hostile environment’ policy; impact of climate emergency; and inevitability of change; low statutory sick pay level; migratory shift to southeast; planned fusion reactors; planning laws; renewable power production; Rwanda proposal for asylum-seekers; slow processing of asylum claims; small boats in English channel; wet-farming in United Nations: Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (2018); HCR; Human Rights Council; International Labour Organization; International Organization for Migration; and Nansen Passport concept; suggested new global migration body United States: Chinese Exclusion Act (1882); ‘climate-proof’ cities in; as created from global migrants; dam removal in; demographic change in; and depopulation crisis; and extreme La Niña events; and future climate problems; Green New Deal; heat related inequalities; Homestead Act; immigrant-founded companies; impact of climate emergency; indigenous communities; and inevitability of change; lack of universal healthcare in; leases/purchases of territory by; low spending on social services; mass incarceration of Mexicans in; meat industry in; migration to since 1980s; and mineral extraction; municipal codes; net zero commitment; nineteenth century migration to; patriotism of migrants; refugee children in detention camps; resettlement project in Louisiana; rural to urban migration; seeding of clouds in; Trump’s work visa restrictions; ‘urban visas’ in; yield gap in university towns urban development/planning: Bijlmermeer (outside Amsterdam); and elderly populations; and inclusive government policies; machizukuri process in Tokyo; need for integrated high-rise/low-rise; new canals/water features to combat heat; parks/squares/public spaces; planning and zoning laws; slum clearance programmes; social capital investment in cities USAID Uttarakhand, Indian state Uzbekistan Venezuela Venice Vermont Vietnam Vikings war/violent conflict: over water scarcity; triggered by climate upheaval water, fresh: circulated, cleaned, stored and reused; closed-circuit water recycling; conflict triggered by scarcity; crop irrigation; desalination techniques; drip-irrigation systems; evaporative losses; geopolitics of water control; held in glaciers; impact of heat on supplies; importance of new water policies; inland lake systems; need for urban underground reservoirs; new waterways and river diversions; pumping of groundwater; purified sewage recycled; as resource anxiety of this century; running dry of aquifers; salination of groundwater; used for livestock; water pricing/tax policies Waterloo, Ontario weather systems: cyclonic storms in Bay of Bengal; El Niño events; extreme La Niña events; extreme weather events; Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ); monsoon regions; trade winds welfare systems and social services: access to in migrant cities; and arguments against migration; and bureaucracy; despair and anger of ‘left behind’ natives; intensive infrastructure development needed; low spending on in USA; migrant access to; migration as benefitting social care systems; punitive restrictions on new migrants Westphalia, Peace of (1648) Whales wheat production, global Wilson, E.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

(The media’s habit of treating those economic concerns as an exclusively “white” issue is maddening given that by any measure the effects of deindustrialization have come down hardest on the rustbelt’s black population. See Malaika Jabali’s work on Wisconsin in 2016.) Nonetheless, it’s hard not to imagine that Clinton’s repellent history on issues like the mass incarceration of “superpredators” didn’t play a role in adding to the disgust and indifference that resulted in non-white voter turnout being much lower than it was in 2012, or that at least a few voters in Dearborn didn’t care that Sanders was less likely than Clinton to kill their relatives in future drone strikes.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

(This cannot, of course, happen in the Cobb–Douglas production function so beloved by macroeconomists.) But I have seen no evidence for this sudden change in technology—and no theory for why this might have happened. 40 America’s mass incarceration policies have also been an important instrument of discrimination. See M. Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York, The New Press, 2010. 41 For a recent account of this literature, see K. Basu, Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2010. See also J.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

As veterans of the Civil Rights, Women’s, Peace, Environmental, LGBTQ, Immigrant Justice, labor rights and other movements of the last 60 years, we are convinced that Occupy Wall Street is a continuation, a deepening and expansion of the determination of the diverse peoples of our nation to transform our country into a more democratic, just and compassionate society – a more perfect union. We believe that the rapidly expanding and racialized impoverishment of our population, the rise of mass incarceration, the celebration of the culture of war and violence, all create the bitter divisions among the peoples of our nation and throughout the world. Indeed, we believe such developments among us ultimately diminish the quality of life for all humanity, beginning with our own children who watch as we lower the priority for their care and education.

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One of my POC Caucus comrades eventually couldn’t take it any more and spoke out of ‘process’ to explain that raising these sorts of concerns is exactly why we exist as a caucus at spokes council. Because communities of color have suffered violence for generations – the violence of white supremacy, the violence of the police, the violence of mass incarceration, the violence of poverty. Again, no one listened to what she was saying but only put up their ‘point of process’ hand signs and rolled their eyes. I was talking about it with another friend from the POC Caucus on the phone the next day, and he felt like we have lost all good faith in the spokes council.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

Obviously, the magnitude of the anti-systemic insurrections in Asia, Latin America, and the urban ghettos of the US demanded the massive use of interconnected forms of economic, penal, and military violence over this period—forms of violence that continue to evolve in the present, as a new wave of struggles and “springtimes” has begun to coalesce. For example, the current mass incarceration of millions of African-Americans has its origins in the aftermath of the urban uprisings of the 1960s. But a parallel counter-insurgency, taking shape in the late 1970s, was primarily ideological, although sweeping in scope. Its target was a tentative constellation of forms of sociality that needed to be destroyed or deformed to produce acquiescence in the face of the global shift to more brutal forms of finance capital and the expanding monetization of everyday life.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

At this point these models of “future crime risk” start to come uncomfortably close to the dystopia of the Philip K. Dick story (and later Tom Cruise movie) The Minority Report, in which a “Precrime” division arrests people for crimes they have not yet committed. Today even some on the right are questioning mass incarceration, sometimes simply on budgetary grounds. But barring any effort to actually provide for either prisoners or the workers who benefit from the prison boom, what is to become of all these surplus populations? Sometimes, those who make it to prison are the lucky ones. Steeped in a culture that is quick to resort to violence, police forces routinely maim and kill those suspected of minor crimes or no crime at all.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Feminist, civil rights, and environmental activists kept fighting, but the powers that be moved with a new, unified force to crush dissent: Organized labor was shaken and class-based movements were discredited. The War on Drugs, followed later by Bill Clinton’s Three Strikes law, fuelled an unprecedented trend of mass incarceration that overwhelmingly targeted black and Hispanic men; and the rise of the radical right brought women into direct conflict with each other, focusing feminist battles on holding ground already won rather than embracing more encompassing visions of liberation. The balance of power that had seemed, for a moment in the early 1970s, to favor working people shifted definitively in favor of capital.

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, Cass Sunstein, correlation does not imply causation, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, mass incarceration

Many thanks to epidemiologist Isabelle Sternfeld for years of help with these records. 21 violent crime was plummeting in Los Angeles County Countywide homicides reached a high of 2,113 deaths in 1992 and had fallen to 1,085 in 2006, according to statistics provided at the author’s request by Craig Harvey, Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Crime would, of course, fall much lower after that. 22 “progressives tend to avoid or change the subject” James Forman, Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,” Faculty Scholarship Series 3599 (2012): p. 128. 23 “The familiar dismal statistics” Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 145. CHAPTER 2 1 such calls, at least in this year, came more than once a day, on average There were 835 shooting victims in South Bureau in 2007, and 1,016 in 2006—Los Angeles Police Department, Crime and Arrests Weekly Statistics, Dec. 31, 2007.

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Murphy, “Research and Statistics Note, No. 2014-01: African Americans: Description of Social Security and Supplemental Security Income Participation and Benefit Levels Using the American Community Survey” (Social Security Administration, Official of Retirement and Disability Policy, Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics, January 2014), p. 13. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness. New York: New Press, 2010. 2012 edition. Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Berg, Manfred.

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy

affirmative action, Charles Lindbergh, company town, desegregation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, market bubble, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, New Journalism, strikebreaker, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Description of tug-of-war over brothers: “Circus United a Negro Family,” Roanoke Times, Oct. 15, 1927. Black and white incarceration rates: “Ratio of proportion admitted to prison to share of population, by race, 1926–1993,” Figure H, and other analyses, Robynn J. A. Cox, “Where Do We Go from Here? Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” Economic Policy Institute, Jan. 16, 2015: http://www.epi.org/publication/where-do-we-go-from-here-mass-incarceration-and-the-struggle-for-civil-rights/. “disturbed showmen tore their hair”: Scott Hart, “Vexing Problem Develops over Two Circus Albinos,” Roanoke Times, Oct. 17, 1927. Chapter Ten. Not One Single, Solitary, Red Penny Interviews: Nancy Saunders, Al Stencell, Greg Renoff, Harvey Lutins, Nancy Barbour, Melville “Buster” Carico, T.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Four months after the first Snowden leaks, the literary organization PEN surveyed American writers on how the revelations impacted their lives. The results were unsettling. Writers worried they were being monitored. Many admitted to censoring themselves or feeling reluctant to write, speak, or do research about politically sensitive subjects online. Topics that might make them targets, they speculated, included mass incarceration, the drug wars, sexual assault in the military, anti-American sentiment overseas, the Occupy movement, and the NSA leaks themselves. “I have felt that even to comment on the Snowden case in an email would flag my email as worthy of being looked at,” one anonymous respondent wrote. PEN’s researchers were disturbed by these responses.

Dawn of Detroit by Tiya Miles

British Empire, classic study, European colonialism, food desert, gentleman farmer, gentrification, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, profit motive, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight

Our Department of Afroamerican and African Studies was centrally involved in this activity along with faculty in Social Work, Sociology, Urban Planning, and the Residential College, so I sat in on these discussions with urban planners, sociologists of the city, and twentieth-century urban historians, which heightened and sharpened my interest in Detroit. Although my peers were discussing postindustrial society, food deserts, green spaces, mass incarceration, and the pitfalls of gentrification, I could see links between this modern (and postmodern) Detroit and the Detroit of the colonial and early American eras when slavery was practiced. I began to visit Detroit museums and historic sites in southeastern Michigan to try to feel the outlines of a story I might tell even as my imagination was captured by a quotation by a colleague involved in the Detroit School discussions, the historian Charles Bright, who had written the following about Detroit history in an article in the Journal of American History: The dominant historical discourse [on Detroit] is one of rise and fall, spiked by an immense nostalgia for the city that once (briefly) was.

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Peter Onuf has argued that southerners could accept the slavery exception in the Northwest because they expected to benefit economically through commercial exchange with the region as it grew. Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 46–49, 110–11. 4. Northwest Ordinance (1787), www.ourdocuments.gov. Accessed May 5, 2015. 5. Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History (December 2010): 703–734, on prison labor see 717–23. 6. David G. Chardavoyne, “The Northwest Ordinance and Michigan’s Territorial Heritage,” in Paul Finkelman and Martin J. Hershock, eds., The History of Michigan Law (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 20. 7.

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It is difficult to imagine the bottom 90 percent joining together in a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans at a time when white voters without college degrees are repeatedly told that the country has been taken over by undocumented immigrants, Latinos, African Americans, and a “deep state” of coastal liberals, intelligence agencies, and the mainstream media. Trump and other demagogues are masterful at telling big lies, and they are backed by the oligarchy’s big money. It is also difficult to imagine such a coalition emerging when people of color are threatened by mass incarceration and mass deportation, and when women face new restrictions on reproductive freedom. Fear for oneself and one’s family is a potent deterrent to collective action. Creating such a coalition will therefore require something more than class consciousness. It will necessitate a common understanding of what it means to be a citizen with responsibilities for the greater good.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The bill he signed to “end welfare as we know it” helped some welfare recipients find jobs, but cut off desperately needed cash for families stuck in deep poverty. His 1994 crime bill had a few redeeming qualities (including the assault weapons ban and the Violence Against Women Act) but ultimately accelerated the mass incarceration of a generation of young black men. Boomers shored up Social Security for just long enough so that they’ll have it when they retire—the Social Security Trust Fund is expected to be exhausted by 2035, when the youngest boomers will be in their seventies and the average millennial is still hard at work.

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Some observers critiqued Black Lives Matter for not having a specific set of demands or a foundational document, but in the age of social media, the rules had changed: “Twitter is our text,” Cullors told me in 2015. The movement was an expression of rage: for Trayvon Martin, and later for Michael Brown and Eric Garner and every other unarmed black man killed in America. But it was also about rage at what scholar Michelle Alexander called “the New Jim Crow,” a system of mass incarceration that disproportionately targeted black people, overwhelmingly young black men. By 2015, more than 9 percent of black men between twenty and thirty-four were incarcerated, compared to less than 2 percent of white men the same age. Even as crime rates stayed low in American cities, the school-to-prison pipeline extended across the country.

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

Kerber, “Why Diamonds Really Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Another American Narrative,” Dædalus 141, no. 1 (2012): 89–100; and Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522 (1975). On African Americans, see Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008); and Michelle L. Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012). On aliens, see Rasul v. Myers, Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, January 2008, April 2009. On corporations, see sources in Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), 30–31; and David Ellerman, “Workplace Democracy and Human Development: The Example of the Postsocialist Transition Debate,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24, no. 4 (2010): 333–53. 29.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Following a series of terrorist attacks that left scores dead, Beijing has clamped down with great severity. It has established large camps for Uighurs and other Muslims, holding perhaps as many as a million people. Chinese officials describe them as “education and training centers.” Critics describe them differently—as “mass incarceration” and indoctrination. These camps have become a focus of controversy and stimulated much international protest. After the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill calling for sanctions and restrictions on transactions with Chinese companies involved in the region, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing denounced the bill as “gross” interference “in China’s internal affairs” and said that China’s policy is “about fighting violence, terrorism and separatism” and “advancing deradicalization.”

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House of Representatives Passing the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019,” December 4, 2019; Jonathan D. Pollack and Jeffrey A. Bader, Looking Before We Leap: Weighing the Risks of US-China Disengagement, Brookings Foreign Policy Brief, July 2019; Lindsay Maizland; Lucy Hornsby, “Chinese Official Defends Mass Incarceration of Uighurs,” Financial Times, March 12, 2019; Steven Lee Myers, “China Defends Crackdown on Muslims, and Criticizes Times Article,” November 18, 2019 (“fakery”); Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Myunhee Lee, and Emir Yazici, “Counterterrorism and Preventative Repression: China’s Changing Strategy on Xinjiang,” International Security, Winter 2019/2020, pp. 9–47. 7.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Midskill workers in the United States are either more unwilling, or less able, to transition to jobs with different skill levels and are increasingly likely to move from unemployment to non-participation rather than back into work. Taken together, Tomlinson suggests, these factors are all likely to have contributed to falls in prime-age participation rates in the United States and the inverse outcome in the UK. Good stuff. The CEA (2016b) also noted that the rise of mass incarceration and the associated rise in the fraction of the population that was formerly incarcerated look to be part of the explanation for the reduction in prime-age participation rates. The number of men behind bars in the United States has increased substantially, growing from 564 per 100,000 in the population in 1990 to 890 per 100,000 in 2014.

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Black men suffered a 4.7- to 5.4-percentage-point reduction in their employment rate, while the equivalent for Latino men was 1.4–1.6 percentage points, and for white men it was 1.1–1.3 percentage points. They found that 6–6.7 percent of the male working-age population were former prisoners, while 13.6–15.3 percent were people with felony convictions, which seems incredibly high. Other advanced countries don’t use mass incarceration and don’t prevent ex-prisoners from working after their sentences are completed; they have figured out that rehabilitation works. In terms of GDP, Bucknor and Barber calculate that the population of former prisoners and people with felony convictions led to a loss of $78–87 billion in GDP in 2014.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs by Alexa Clay, Kyra Maya Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, collaborative consumption, conceptual framework, cotton gin, creative destruction, different worldview, digital rights, disruptive innovation, double helix, fear of failure, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer rental, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, supply-chain management, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Zipcar

Barbato, “Testing Prison Inmates for Entrepreneurial Aptitude,” May 19, 2004, Hofstra University and Rochester Institute of Technology. 2. Linda Anderson, “Troubled Teenagers Equal Entrepreneurial Success,” Financial Times, March 18, 2013, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a8c08352-8c9b-11e2-aed2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3IrN7GYCD. 3. Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie,” Prison Policy Initiative, March 12, 2014, http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie.html. 4. Matthew C. Sonfield, “From Inmate to Entrepreneur: A Preliminary Analysis,” Hofstra University. 5. Raphael Minder, “In Spain, Jobless Find a Refuge Off the Books,” New York Times, May 16, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/world/europe/spaniards-go-underground-to-fight-slump.html?

"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

They believe the risk at home is greater.”7 DONALD TRUMP, IMMIGRATION, AND THE WORKING CLASS It wasn’t that big a jump from President Bill Clinton’s criminalization of immigrants with the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) to Obama’s recriminalization with humanitarian exceptions, to candidate and then president Donald Trump’s repeated references to immigrants as “rapists,” “criminals,” “bad hombres,” and “bad dudes.” Nativism had become one arm of a multifaceted project of the criminalization of people of color, with mass incarceration, expansion and militarization of the police, and the creation of a climate of fear so as to justify the growth and institutionalization of a repressive apparatus at home and abroad. As I already argued in the book, anti-immigrant sentiment responds more to economic anxiety and to media and politicians’ fanning its flames than it does to actual facts about immigration and immigrants.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Crain’s Detroit Business, Book of Lists 2013, Table: Largest Detroit Employers. Available http://www.crains​detroit​.com​/section​/book​_of​_lists​2013, accessed 19 September 2013; Bill Vlasic, “Detroit is Now a Charity Case for Carmakers,” New York Times, September 23, 2013 9. Heather Ann Thompson, “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” The Journal of Law in Society, (Wayne State University Law School, forthcoming 2014). 10. My overview draws from the indispensable survey of Detroit’s finances by Nathan Bomey and John Gallagher, “How Detroit went broke: The answers may surprise you—and don’t blame Coleman Young,” Detroit Free Press, September 15, 2013. 11.

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., Public Education Under Siege (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, revised ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011); and Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997). 36. On incarceration and employment, see Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Thompson, “Unmaking the Motor City.” On welfare policy, see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). P.2 Abandoned and collapsed houses, like this one near my father’s childhood home on Detroit’s West Side, are a common sight in Detroit in the early twenty-first century.

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

While society had better options, the Boomers favored ever-stricter laws and processed ever more people into the prison system, the spectacle of law and order always being more satisfying to Boomer psychology than any reality of justice or efficacy. While Reagan often gets the blame for the rise of imprisonment, it was Boomers who (frequently in bipartisan accord) passed the most odious laws and Boomer administrations that presided over the most spectacular and fruitless phases of mass incarceration. In the 1960s and 1970s, the argument for expanding incarceration had a certain reasonable dimension, because the United States had problems with crime—young people have a higher propensity to commit crime, as do antisocial people, and the United States was well supplied with both: Boomers.

…

What Boomers are responsible for is the explosion in the prison population, vastly increasing the numbers of those exposed to institutional injustice while providing no real path for these prisoners to become self-sufficient on release. As ex-convicts bleed into the probation system and then the general public, the costs will be disproportionately borne by current and future taxpayers, not the Boomers who presided over mass incarceration in the first place. One notable perversity of Boomer justice is the creation of a police state by Leftists of the very same generation so heavily associated with protesting the “pigs” during the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic Convention, and so on, their supposedly libertarian cogenerationalists, and even small-state Rightists.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Her “comprehensive progressive vision for America’s future” included the following: a reduced tax burden on working families; an end to the “quiet epidemic” of substance abuse; a cure for Alzheimer’s disease; a “new, wide-ranging autism initiative”; campaign finance reform; the elimination of campus sexual assault; installation of a half billion solar panels to address climate change; the defeat of ISIS; criminal justice reform to terminate “the era of mass incarceration”; expanded opportunities for the disabled; universal preschool for every four-year-old child; an end to the “epidemic of gun violence”; a gigantic infrastructure program; the eradication of HIV and AIDS; the elimination of child poverty; guaranteed paid family and medical leave; “universal, quality, affordable healthcare for everyone”; and a “safe and strong” America that will “lead the world in the 21st century.”47 All this and more.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Mindfulness programs are aligned with the interests of power, not questioning the institutional order. There is never a focus on the exploitation of workers, or the mindless export of suffering as pollution, and other externalities. Mindfulness in politics has not had the slightest impact on global warming, unprecedented inequality, poverty, mass incarceration, racism, sexism, corruption or militarism. Why would it when its aims are so tame and inward-focused? Psychoanalysis was similarly neutered by being Americanized. Many European psychoanalysts were Marxists and socialists. These neo-Freudians viewed neuroses as a social disease, saying personal troubles could not be divorced from historical and social contexts.

Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

Smith, who introduces this book, has written extensively about how white supremacy in North America is constituted through interrelated but separate logics: “slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism; genocide, which anchors colonialism; and orientalism, which anchors war.”(24) Under Smith’s first pillar, black people are constructed as property of the state and capital due to the legacy of slavery and current conditions of mass incarceration. The second pillar is the assimilation and attempted disappearance of Indigenous people through genocide and settler colonialism in order to illegally claim land and resources. The final pillar is Orientalism—a term theorized by Said that casts certain communities, especially Arab and/or Muslim, as permanent internal and external threats to empire.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

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

Over the past three decades, the average net worth of white families has climbed more than 80 percent, three times the rate for black families, a study by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Enterprise Development has found. Were that pattern to continue for the next three decades, white households would gain $18,000 in wealth a year, with black households gaining just $750. The racial wealth gap would never close. The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the growing calls to end mass incarceration, the sunset of the Obama presidency, the start of the Trump presidency, the furious marching of Nazis and racists on the streets: all of these trends have coalesced as the UBI conversation has come to the fore. In his essay “The Case for Reparations,” the Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates made a moral argument for trying to repair these injustices.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

‘It was like hell,’ said one.70 These measures are all part of what the Chinese leadership has called a ‘great wall of iron’ being placed around the western provinces; this was essential, said President Xi, so that ‘people of all ethnic groups feel the Party’s care and the warmth of the motherland’.71 Others have called it ‘the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today’.72 Concern about Afghanistan’s instability has also played a role in Chinese efforts to reinforce the frontier, both through initiatives such as the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism, a joint project between China, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan, and with support and training for border troops in neighbouring countries.

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

Here I want to suggest another way to improve voter education levels: by inaction rather than action. Here I have a pro-epistocracy voting reform that involves doing nothing at all: don’t restore voting rights to felons. This issue of whether felons should be allowed to vote has been salient in the United States in recent years as the rise in mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s created millions more convicted, imprisoned, and released felons than ever before. In the United States, and to some degree in Belgium, Italy, Greece, and Luxembourg, convicted felons are stripped of their voting rights even after their release from prison.²¹ The rights-based argument for doing so is that felons have violated the social contract in an important way and have thereby lost the right to vote.

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

A report by the National League of Cities, which represents 19,000 US cities and towns, has recommended that cities investigate basic income.5 Meanwhile, a newly influential movement, Black Lives Matter, allying over fifty organizations, issued an ‘official platform’ in August 2016 that included a demand for a universal basic income (UBI). It also argued for an additional amount (a sort of UBI+) to be paid to black Americans as reparation for the harms of colonialism, slavery and the mass incarceration of mainly young black men in modern times. Without endorsing this specific demand, which would be hard to administer fairly, the essence of the platform is a demand for reparation for past injustices. The Middlesbrough tale of Chapter 2 is very much along the same lines. In Europe, the scope for greater public pressure has been enhanced by the energies of new political parties, by national networks that are welcoming new members, and by new initiatives such as the annual Basic Income Week events.

$2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin, H. Luke Shaefer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, business cycle, clean water, ending welfare as we know it, future of work, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, informal economy, low-wage service sector, machine readable, mass incarceration, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, The Future of Employment, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

.” [>] identifiably black or white: Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (2004): 991–1013. [>] relative to whites: For descriptions of both studies, see Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). [>] wildly inaccurate: Persis S. Yu and Sharon M. Dietrich, “Broken Records: How Errors by Criminal Background Checking Companies Harm Workers and Businesses” (National Consumer Law Center, Boston, April 2012), http://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/pr-reports/broken-records-report.pdf. [>] average low-wage job in America: Andrew Leigh, “Who Benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit?

The Sellout: A Novel by Paul Beatty

affirmative action, Apollo 13, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, cotton gin, desegregation, El Camino Real, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Lao Tzu, late fees, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, p-value, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skinner box, telemarketer, theory of mind, War on Poverty, white flight, yellow journalism

Chavez Ravine, where a generations-old Mexican-American neighborhood was torn down, its residents forcibly removed, beaten, and left uncompensated to make room for a baseball stadium with ample parking and the Dodger Dog. Seventh Street, between Mesa and Centre, is the vortex where in 1942 a long line of buses idled as Japanese-Americans began the first step toward mass incarceration. And where would Hominy be most happy but on the #125 bus rolling through Dickens, a racial vortex unto itself. His seat on the right-hand side, three rows from the front door, the spinning epicenter of racism. The signs were such good replicas, most people didn’t notice the difference, and even after you “read” them, your comprehension tricked you into thinking the signs said what they’d always said, PRIORITY SEATING FOR SENIORS AND THE DISABLED, and although it was the first, the yogi’s complaint wouldn’t be the only one Marpessa fielded that day.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

” * * * Stories like these help explain the popularity—or perhaps the necessity—of social infrastructures that serve as safe spaces for members of excluded groups that are subjected to prejudice, discrimination, and violence. Oppressed communities often endure extreme social and economic pressures that inhibit the formation of stable, enduring relationships. In the United States, as the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued, the history of slavery, ghettoization, segregation, and mass incarceration has led to high levels of instability within the black community. “Afro-Americans are the most unpartnered and isolated group of people in America,” Patterson writes, “and quite possibly in the world.” Black Americans, and all other groups that face severe discrimination, need spaces that foster support and cohesion.

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

Numbers from “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2016”, by J. Semega, K. Fotenot, and M. Kollar, US Census Bureau, September 2017, and Yale’s Environmental Performance Index, http://archive.epi.yale.edu/epi/issue-ranking/water-and-sanitation, and https://www.vox.com/2015/4/7/8364263/us-europe-mass-incarceration 4. Quotes from Mike Bygrave, “Where Did All the Protesters Go?”The Observer, July 14, 2002. 5. Quoted in David Mogan, “Truth About Tech Campaign Takes on Tech Addiction,” CBSNews. com, February 5, 2018. 6. Jonathan Haidt, “The Key to Trump is Stenner’s Authoritarianism”, The Righteous Mind (blog), January 6, 2016. 7.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson, “Bias in Criminal Risk Scores Is Mathematically Inevitable, Researchers Say,” ProPublica, December 30, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/bias-in-criminal-risk-scores-is-mathematically-inevitable-researchers-say. 26.  Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner, “Machine Bias,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing. 27.  Leah Sakala, “Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census,” Prison Policy Initiative report, May 28, 2014, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html. INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Hertz notes that race is a crucial factor in mobility, particularly for those in the lowest income bracket. “The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn’t changed in twenty years,” he told me. “That is not a society moving toward equality. It’s a society that’s reproducing inequality by race.” Part of this is likely due to the rise of the war on drugs and mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts African Americans. A report based on the research of Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, published by Pew, looked at the effect that our criminal justice policies have on social mobility. It found that incarceration dramatically reduces earnings after release, as well as the prospects for children of those incarcerated.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

New York Daily News, December 30, 2014. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/chicago-uber-driver-charged-alleged-rape-passenger-article-1.2060817. Alcor Life Extension Foundation. “Official Alcor Statement Concerning Marvin Minsky.” Alcor News, January 27, 2016. Alexander, Michelle, and Cornel West. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised ed. New York: New Press, 2012. Ames, Morgan G. “Translating Magic: The Charisma of One Laptop per Child’s XO Laptop in Paraguay.” In Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America, edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes, 207–224.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

O’Sullivan, Feargus. 2018. “Barcelona Finds a Way to Control Its Airbnb Market.” CityLab, June 6, 2018. Pacitti, Aaron. 2011. “The Cost of Job Loss and the Great Recession.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 33 (4): 597–620. Pager, Devah. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paharia, Neeru, Anat Keinan, Jill Avery, and Juliet B. Schor. 2011. “The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography.” Journal of Consumer Research 37 (5): 775–90. Parigi, Paolo, and Bogdan State. 2014. “Disenchanting the World: The Impact of Technology on Relationships.”

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

While Madeleine was making The Lottery, she started to think about the role of prison in American society. “It’s kind of the flip side,” she observed. “It’s what happens when people don’t get a good education. I knew we had more people in prison than anywhere in the world.” Madeleine decided that she would explore the vexing problem of mass incarceration by making a fictional feature film about an older prisoner on the eve of his release. As a documentarian, however, she wanted the film to feel grounded in the real world. So she decided she would try to make the movie inside an actual functioning prison—“with prisoners acting.” To another young filmmaker, this might have seemed like an artistically ambitious but logistically impossible notion.

…

Purdue executives might have evaded jail time for their role in a scheme that generated billions of dollars for Madeleine’s family, but in 2016, Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, signed a law reinstating a mandatory minimum sentence for any street-level dealer who was caught selling heroin and had a prior conviction: ten years. Nationwide, 82 percent of those charged with heroin trafficking were Black or Latino. It is impossible to speak honestly about mass incarceration without also speaking of the war on drugs. And it’s impossible to speak honestly about the war on drugs without addressing the opioid crisis. Yet this was the rhetorical needle that Madeleine Sackler somehow managed to thread. It was a deft performance. For the most part, she was able to weigh in, sagely, on the plight of America’s prison population without being asked to account for her own familial connection to one of the underlying drivers of that crisis.

Who Is Rich? by Matthew Klam

carried interest, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, liberation theology, Mason jar, mass incarceration, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

There’d been moments over the winter when I’d wanted to interrupt our epistolary love affair to unleash a searing rant of impeccable erudition—on the history of unstructured capitalism, twentieth-century U.S. imperialism, American workers forced to compete with Asian slave labor, private for-profit mass incarceration, Donald Rumsfeld, the Koch brothers, Citizens United, and the coming worldwide extinction—but I never got around to it. I went through her purse and found some used Kleenex, hair ties, gum, a tube of Pantene Overnight Miracle. Eyeglasses, a kid’s toy pen that looked like a cucumber. An Air France deck of cards.

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

There is a mysterious quality to all popular uprisings. Astute observers know the tinder is there, but never when it will be lit. I had watched this dynamism in the Middle East in late 1987. The brutality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, which included extrajudicial killings, mass detentions, mass incarcerations, house demolitions, deportations, and crippling poverty in the West Bank and Gaza, was sending out waves of rage, especially through the young, whose dignity, hopes, and dreams were being crushed in the concrete hovels of the Palestinian refugee camps. But none of us expected that a general uprising would be ignited on December 8, 1987, after four Palestinians from the Jabalia refugee camp were killed in a traffic accident involving an Israeli truck.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

Inmates of the latter hospital were finely graded following a policy of what John Thompson and Grace Goldin called ‘divide and conquer’: each idiot, each maniac and each melancholic had his or her cell, which – because of the building’s low-lying site – periodically filled with Seine water and sewer rats. This mass incarceration, which Michel Foucault called ‘the Great Confinement’, was repeated across Europe: for example, in England there were houses of correction and later workhouses. In the Bethlem Royal Hospital, which under its nickname Bedlam became a byword for insanity, inmates were subjected to the stares and laughter of the paying public: advertising the attractions within, a statue on the gate represented ‘raving’ madness bound in chains.

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays by Phoebe Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, defund the police, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joan Didion, Lyft, mass incarceration, microaggression, off-the-grid, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Rosa Parks, Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois

When a white person is considered the leading voice in how to be antiracist, it creates more harm and mental anguish for Black people because they are proven right yet again that there is no conceivable way that, even when armed with years of education and personal experience, they can be seen as authorities on antiracism, or the many ills that stem from a racist society, including advocating for government policies and legislation, addressing racial disparities in poverty, jobs, mass incarceration, and housing, and how the police system was designed, as Olivia B. Waxman wrote in her Time magazine article “How the U.S. Got Its Police Force”: In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Jeremy Gorner, “Chicago Police Use Heat List as Strategy to Prevent Violence,” Chicago Tribune, August 21, 2013, http://articles.chicagotribune.com. 66. Anthony Braga, Andrew Papachristos, and David Hureau, “The Effects of Hot Spots Policing on Crime: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Justice Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2012): 633–663. 67. Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 68. Gorner, “Chicago Police Use Heat List.” 69. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), 90. 70. Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World by James Miller

Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, mass incarceration, means of production, Occupy movement, Plato's cave, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto

Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed. Abbé-Sieyès abolitionism Achen, Christopher Adams, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Samuel Adbusters Aegina Aelius Aeschylus Africa, postcolonial African Americans: mass incarceration of; in Rhode Island; voting rights of Albany, N.Y., Tocqueville and Beaumont’s visit to Albany Argus Alcibiades Alcmaeonid family All-Russian Union of Railroad Employees and Workers All-Russia Peasants’ Union American Association for Public Opinion Research American Bureau of Labor Statistics American Civil Liberties Union American colonies American Commonwealth, The (Bryce) American culture, commerce and American democracy; commerce and; consent as core principle of; democratic clubs in, see democratic clubs, American; distrust of big government in; elections as central to; equality as principle for; factions in; French Revolution’s impact on; individualism and; popular sovereignty and; presidency in, see presidency, U.S.; private property and; Republican Rome as model for; self-reliance as principle of; slavery and; Tocqueville on; voting rights in, see voting rights; Wilson on American Dream American exceptionalism American Political Science Association American Revolution “American Scholar, The” (Emerson) Ames, Fisher anarchists Anaxagoras Ancient Law (Maine) Andreyev, L.

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

There was no plan. By 1990, one person died from AIDS every minute in America. In cities, it had become the leading cause of death for women aged 15–44. Promising drugs remained untested. Congress voted $800 million for treatment – but none of the money was ever released. Rumours of deportations, mass incarceration and suicides swirled around the community. Activists were dying; they were also burning out. But as they retired the field, others replaced them, fired by the certainty that if silence meant death, acting up at least meant possibility. ‘Faith defies uncertainty’ is how David France put it. Without optimism, there was nothing.

Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics by Don Hanlon Johnson

BIPOC, clean water, colonial rule, complexity theory, conceptual framework, deep learning, emotional labour, epigenetics, imposter syndrome, liberation theology, mass incarceration, microaggression, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, W. E. B. Du Bois, working poor

For one to say that they don’t see color means to say that they don’t acknowledge the reality of this country’s history of immeasurable violence against people of color. A history that includes atrocities such as genocide, human slavery, and internment camps, and continues systemic oppression through mass incarceration disproportionately imprisoning black and brown bodies. Since the time I was in grade school, I was curious about my family origins. Really, I was curious about my paternal ancestry. My father, while present for many of my early childhood years, sort of disappeared. When attempting to recall when he stopped being present, my mind is blank.

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

Most of us hadn’t experienced the fear of not being able to pay your health care bill. Or the sensation of a cop pulling you over because of the color of your skin. Or the feelings of powerlessness in the face of incarceration. It was clear to us that we couldn’t solve economic injustice, racial profiling, or mass incarceration on our own. But we could do our part. Solidarity, it seemed to us, was based on an understanding of interconnection. It was based on the admission that my wealth is partly tied to your poverty. It was scary and guilt-provoking to admit, but we were forced to recognize that our families made their wealth by extracting the labor of workers or refining the raw materials of the earth.

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

The pending purchase hit a three-month snag when Fulton County, which owned the 137-acre chunk of land leased to Vulcan, demanded as part of the deal that Atlanta provide five hundred jail beds for the overflowing inmate population at the Fulton County Jail—mostly African Americans convicted of drug charges in what some have called a “new Jim Crow” era of mass incarceration of black men. Ironically, sale of this quarry originally dug by leased black convicts was being held up because the nearby Fulton County Jail was overflowing with black prisoners. In the end, Fulton got only 175 Atlanta jail beds, while the agreed-upon payment to Fulton County went up to $15.2 million.

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 all conspire to make society collectively stupider. It is the theory of cults, applied nationwide. However, there are also deeper shifts in society that will take decades to recover from. The war on drugs is perhaps the worst case. The War of Drugs In the name of public health, drug policy has allowed mass incarceration of the poorest men, pumped up the prison system into a new form of slavery, funded the militarization of the police forces, corrupted law enforcement, and turned recreational drug users into criminals on demand, living in constant fear of arrest. The damage on US society is broad and deep, and it is damage done by bad laws, not damage done by drugs as such.

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

As the new century dawned, however, many of the pre–Baby Boom voters who had favored a hard line were dying, and the incarceration rate peaked. By 2012, when Colorado legalized marijuana, the oldsters had been replaced by a generation that looked at the drug experimentation of the 1960s as rather cool. Spurred by Michelle Alexander’s tract The New Jim Crow (2010), Obama accelerated the movement away from mass incarceration that had begun as George W. Bush came to office in 2001. Drugs were only a proximate cause of white decline. Now poor rural whites were being discussed as a deep social “problem” the way urban blacks had been until a generation before. There were, as always, essentially two philosophies about problem populations: Blame the people, or blame the circumstances under which society compelled them to live.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The prison chapel is the original Shaker chapel, thus nightmarishly bringing together two of our country’s most notorious innovations—utopian thought and the dystopian prison industrial complex. What does it say about our country that the Shaker movement could be enfolded into the project of mass incarceration at the very moment when our prison system has become not only the largest in the world in terms of population, but the largest in the world per capita? To me, it suggests that the utopian is never far from its opposite, that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness, that power will always accumulate in the same ways and marshal the same violence, and that growth, in this culture, works only in one direction.

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

The New York Times reported that the then head of CNN “made a public show of meeting with Republican leaders in Washington to discuss CNN’s perceived liberal bias.” According to the Times CNN subsequently became more conservative. April 16, 2003, B-9. 19. See Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2, 15, 19. See also Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 166–68, 173–74. 20. During the Katrina disaster the federal government suspended minimum wage requirements for some businesses under contract for the cleanup operations. 21.

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

Early in the pandemic, I became worried that the thinning out of our intellectual life over the past twenty years would pose barriers for managing the spread of the virus. Political entrenchment and geographically segregated living patterns have made people less open to opposing ideas, and this has hampered addressing a variety of societal problems, from climate change to mass incarceration. I feared that, together with a number of other problematic, convergent features, this intellectual atrophy would make our response to the pandemic challenging. First, there has been a progressive denigration of science. Science has come to be seen by too many as serving political ends. Many people have even abandoned the fundamental idea that it is possible to have an objective appreciation of the truth.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

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

53 Between 1972 and 2007, the number of people incarcerated in the United States, corrected for population growth, grew by more than 500 per cent.54 And those inmates are locked up for an average of sixty-three months – seven times longer than in Norway. Today, almost a quarter of the world’s prison population is behind American bars. This mass incarceration is the result of intentional policy. The more people you lock up, Professor James Wilson and his followers believed, the lower the crime rate. But the truth is that many American prisons have devolved into training grounds for criminals – costly boarding schools that produce more accomplished crooks.55 A few years ago, it came out that a mega-facility in Miami was cramming as many as twenty-four inmates into a single cell, from which they were let out for one hour twice a week.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

It was, in political scientist Melinda Cooper’s words, “a state-enforced system of private family responsibility,” built on the old Poor Law tradition but expanding its punitive nature. 58 Despite all the politicians’ professions that they wanted to help women, the new law surveilled and punished Black women in disproportionate numbers. (All of this happened alongside the growth of mass incarceration, itself a bipartisan project of the 1980s and 1990s.) The flood of new, desperate workers into the low-wage labor market—often, once again, into jobs mirroring the work they were expected to do in the home—helped to hold wages down for all while improving profits for those at the top. 59 In the decades following welfare reform, labor in the paid workplace has been made cheaper because certain work remains unwaged and in the home.

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The Census Bureau, keen to survive the war and to do its patriotic duty, rushed into the fray, publishing data about so-called enemy aliens. It churned out data on Germans, Italians, and Japanese living in the United States. And it distributed special reports and tabulations to military authorities, thereby helping to justify and facilitate the mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans. That number itself eerily echoes the number of enumerators in 1940. Imagine the outrage if the United States had corralled its approximately 120,000 census takers behind barbed wire for years. In its militarized, weaponized form, the 1940 census (and the government it served) fell far short of being “the greatest inventory of the world’s greatest democracy.”

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

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

Fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head. This is among the most urgent and pressing issues facing America today, and acknowledging the breadth and depth of the problem changes the way we look at poverty. For decades, we’ve focused mainly on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration. No one can deny the importance of these issues, but something fundamental is missing. We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors.

Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Other polls had similar results. 6. See the seminal study by Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014). For the post-slavery era, see among others Donald Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name (Anchor, 2009) and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New Press, 2010). The trilogy should be required reading for Americans who wish to understand their country. 7. Barack Obama, “Statement by the President on Cuba Policy Change,” press release, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/17statement -president-cuba-policy-changes. 8.

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

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

Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Heather C. West, William J. Sabol, and Sarah J. Greenman (2010), “Prisoners in 2009,” Report NCJ 231675, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Bruce Western and Christopher Wildeman (2009), “The Black Family and Mass Incarceration,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 621:221–42. increasing shoplifting Kerry Segrave (2001), Shoplifting: A Social History, Mcfarland & Co. fewer bicycle riders Maxwell H. Cameron, A. Peter Vulcan, Caroline F. Finch, and Stuart V. Newstead (1994). “Mandatory Bicycle Helmet Use Following a Decade of Helmet Promotion in Victoria, Australia: An Evaluation,” Accident Analysis & Prevention, 26:325–7.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Kit Miniclier, “Critics Say ‘No-Knocks’ Dangerous, Unnecessary,” Denver Post, January 27, 1995. 26. Egan, “Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty.” 27. US Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, “Department of Justice and Department of Defense Joint Technology Program: Second Anniversary Report” (February 1997). 28. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), pp. 141–145. 29. The ABC World News Tonight episode, which aired March 28, 1996, is summarized in Peter Kraska and Victor Kappeler, “Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units,” Social Problems 44 (1, February 1997). 30. 18 USC § 3109. 31.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Airbnb, centre right, drug harm reduction, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, illegal immigration, low interest rates, mass incarceration, McJob, moral panic, Naomi Klein, placebo effect, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, San Francisco homelessness, science of happiness, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, traveling salesman, vertical integration, War on Poverty