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Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

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Something else has to come along that provides fertile ground for those ideas.”16 This page intentionally left blank 23 SCHOOL VOUCHERS AND SOCIAL ISSUES he primary issue on which Friedman had worked in re Tcent years is school vouchers. He traced evolution of the vouchers idea in 2005: “Little did I know when I published an article in 1955 on ‘The Role of Government in Education’ that it would lead to my becoming an activist for a major reform in the organization of schooling.” His primary reason for supporting educational vouchers—whereby parents would receive financial credits that would be reimbursed or redeemed for their children’s educational costs—was not because he thought that the United States had poor elementary and secondary public schools in 1955.

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He does not believe that vouchers would lead to increased socioeconomic or racial separation in or of schools—he believes, in fact, the opposite. In recent years Milton and Rose chose to direct their personal efforts and fortune most to the issue of school vouchers. They established the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation to promote educational choice. Their children, Janet and David, serve on the board of directors along with the elder Friedmans. The school voucher idea has had much influence in the United States and elsewhere. Not only has the school voucher idea been considered outside of this country, but here and abroad the concept of vouchers—providing funding through government but leaving provision of services in competitive, private hands—has proved capable of extension to many other areas, resulting in privatization of government activities.

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The royalties from Free to Choose exceed by a magnitude of several times the royalties from all his other works combined. After the book’s success, the Friedmans’ financial status was higher than it had ever been. Friedman introduced many of his basic themes to television audiences around the world through Free to Choose, including educational vouchers, the monetary source of inflation, the power of the market, and the counterproductiveness of much government activity. In preparing the series, he offered these thoughts. To change the course of the previous half-century from collectivism to renewed individualism will require reinforcing our heritage rather than simply living on it.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

., 1n Boulding, Kenneth, 11 bounded rationality, 203 Bowles, Samuel, 71n Brazil: antipoverty programs of, 4 globalization and, 166 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 1–2 Britain, Great, property rights and, 98 bubbles, 152–58 business cycles, 125–37 balanced budgets and, 171 capital flow in, 127 classical economics and, 126–27, 129, 137 inflation in, 126–27, 133, 135, 137 new classical models and, 130–34, 136–37 butterfly effect, 39 California, University of: at Berkeley, 107, 136, 147 at Los Angeles, 139 Cameron, David, 109 capacity utilization rates, 130 capital, neoclassical distribution theory and, 122, 124 capital flow: in business cycles, 127 economic growth and, 17–18, 114, 164–67 globalization and, 164–67 growth diagnostics and, 90 speculation and, 2 capitalism, 118–24, 127, 144, 205, 207 carbon, emissions quotas vs. taxes in reduction of, 188–90, 191–92 Card, David, 57 Carlyle, Thomas, 118 carpooling, 192, 193–94 cartels, 95 Cartwright, Nancy, 20, 22n, 29 cash grants, 4, 55, 105–6 Cassidy, John, 157n Central Bank of India, 154 Chang, Ha-Joon, 11 chaos theory, butterfly effect and, 39 Chicago, University of, 131, 152 Chicago Board of Trade, 55 Chile, antipoverty programs and, 4 China, People’s Republic of, 156, 163, 164 cigarette industry, taxation and, 27–28 Clark, John Bates, 119 “Classical Gold Standard, The: Some Lessons for Today” (Bordo), 127n classical unemployment, 126 climate change, 188–90, 191–92 climate modeling, 38, 40 Cochrane, John, 131 coffee, 179, 185 Colander, David, 85 collective bargaining, 124–25, 143 Colombia, educational vouchers in, 24 colonialism, developmental economics and, 206–7 “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development, The” (Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson), 206–7 Columbia University, 2, 108 commitment, in game theory, 33 comparative advantage, 52–55, 58n, 59–60, 139, 170 compensation for risk models, 110 competition, critical assumptions in, 28–29 complementarities, 42 computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, 41 computational models, 38, 41 computers, model complexity and, 38 Comte, Auguste, 81 conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, 4, 105–6 congestion pricing, 2–3 Constitution, U.S., 187 construction industry, Great Recession and, 156 consumers, consumption, 119, 129, 130, 132, 136, 167 cross-price elasticity in, 180–81 consumer’s utility, 119 contextual truths, 20, 174 contingency, 25, 145, 173–74, 185 contracts, 88, 98, 161, 205 coordination models, 16–17, 42, 200 corn futures, 55 corruption, 87, 89, 91 costs, behavioral economics and, 70 Cotterman, Nancy, xiv Cournot, Antoine-Augustin, 13n Cournot competition, 68 credibility, in game theory, 33 “Credible Worlds, Capacities and Mechanisms” (Sugden), 172n credit rating agencies, 155 credit rationing, 64–65 critical assumptions, 18, 26–29, 94–98, 150–51, 180, 183–84, 202 cross-price elasticity, 180–81 Cuba, 57 currency: appreciation of, 60, 167 depreciation of, 153 economic growth and, 163–64, 167 current account deficits, 153 Curry, Brendan, xv Dahl, Gordon B., 151n Darwin, Charles, 113 Davis, Donald, 108 day care, 71, 190–91 Debreu, Gerard, 49–51 debt, national, 153 decision trees, 89–90, 90 DeLong, Brad, 136 democracy, social sciences and, 205 deposit insurance, 155 depreciation, currency, 153 Depression, Great, 2, 128, 153 deregulation, 143, 155, 158–59, 162, 168 derivatives, 153, 155 deterrence, in game theory, 33 development economics, 75–76, 86–93, 90, 159–67, 169, 201, 202 colonial settlement and, 206–7 institutions and, 98, 161, 202, 205–7 reform fatigue and, 88 diagnostic analysis, 86–93, 90, 97, 110–11 Dijkgraaf, Robbert, xiv “Dirtying White: Why Does Benn Steil’s History of Bretton Woods Distort the Ideas of Harry Dexter White?”

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., 151 tulip bubble, 154 Turkey, 166 Ulam, Stanislaw, 51 ultimatum game, 104 unemployment, 102 in business cycles, 125–37 classical view of, 126 in Great Recession, 153 wages and, 118, 150 see also employment Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, xi United States: comparative advantage principle and, 59–60, 139 deficit in, 149 educational vouchers in, 24 federal system in, 187 garment industry in, 57–58 Gold Standard in, 127 Great Depression in, 128 Great Recession in, 115, 134–35, 152–59 housing bubble in, 153–54, 156 immigration issue in, 56–57 income inequality in, 117, 124–25, 138–44 labor productivity and wages in, 123–24, 141 national debt in, 153 outsourcing in, 149 trade agreements of, 41 universal validity, 66–67 Uruguay, 86 validity, external vs. internal types of, 23–24 value, theories of, 117–21 Varian, Hal, 20 verbal models, 34 Vickrey, William, 2–3 Vietnam, 57–58 Vietnam War, 108 “Views among Economists: Professional Consensus or Point-Counterpoint?”

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Such experiments have become very popular in economics recently, and they are sometimes thought to generate knowledge that is model-free; that is, they’re supposed to provide insight about how the world works without the baggage of assumptions and hypothesized causal chains that comes with models. But this is not quite right. To give one example: In Colombia, the randomized distribution of private-school vouchers has significantly improved educational attainment. But this is no guarantee that similar programs would have the same outcome in the United States or in South Africa. The ultimate outcome relies on a host of factors that vary from country to country. Income levels and preferences of parents, the quality gap between private and public schools, the incentives that drive schoolteachers and administrators—all of these factors, and many other potentially important considerations, come into play.8 Getting from “it worked there” to “it will work here” requires many additional steps.9 The gulf between real experiments carried out in the lab (or in the field) and the thought experiments we call “models” is less than we might have thought.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

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See Christopher Jencks and associates, Education Vouchers: A Report on Financing Elementary Education by Grants to Parents (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for the Study of Public Policy, December 1970); John E. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 17. Coons and Sugarman, Education by Choice, p. 191. 18. Ibid., p. 130. 19. Wealth of Nations, vol. II, p. 253 (Book V, Chap. I). 20. For example, the Citizens for Educational Freedom, the National Association for Personal Rights in Education. 21. Education Voucher Institute, incorporated in May 1979 in Michigan. 22.

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A number of national organizations favor it today.20 Since 1968 the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity and then the Federal Institute of Education encouraged and financed studies of voucher plans and offered to help finance experimental voucher plans. In 1978 a constitutional amendment was on the ballot in Michigan to mandate a voucher plan. In 1979 a movement was under way in California to qualify a constitutional amendment mandating a voucher plan for the 1980 ballot. A nonprofit institute has recently been established to explore educational vouchers.21 At the federal level, bills providing for a limited credit against taxes for tuition paid to nonpublic schools have several times come close to passing. While they are not a voucher plan proper, they are a partial variant, partial both because of the limit to the size of the credit and because of the difficulty of including persons with no or low tax liability.

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In terms of test scores, McCollam School went from thirteenth to second place among the schools in its district. But the experiment is now over, ended by the educational establishment—the same fate that befell Harlem Prep. The same resistance is present in Great Britain, where an extremely effective group called FEVER (Friends of the Education Voucher Experiment in Representative Regions) have tried for four years to introduce an experiment in a town in the county of Kent, England. The governing authorities have been favorable, but the educational establishment has been adamantly opposed. The attitude of the professional educators toward vouchers is well expressed by Dennis Gee, headmaster of a school in Ashford, Kent, and secretary of the local teachers' union: "We see this as a barrier between us and the parent—this sticky little piece of paper [i.e., the voucher] in their hand—coming in and under duress—you will do this or else.

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

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

Such a tax would not only give employers more incentive to keep workers on, but would also help pay for the wage insurance and skill upgrades of the reemployment system. • • • School vouchers based on family income. Over the longer term, the best way to boost the earnings of Americans in the bottom half is to improve their education and skills. To that end, spending on public schools should be replaced by vouchers in amounts inversely related to family income that families can cash in at any school meeting certain minimum standards. For example, the $8,000 now spent per child in a particular state would be turned into $14,000 education vouchers for each school-age child in a poor family, and $2,000 vouchers for each child in a very wealthy family.

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For example, the $8,000 now spent per child in a particular state would be turned into $14,000 education vouchers for each school-age child in a poor family, and $2,000 vouchers for each child in a very wealthy family. School vouchers in this progressive form would improve overall school performance by introducing competition into the school system. They would also give lower- and middle-income families more purchasing power in the education market. Schools located in neighborhoods where there are many lower-income families would get immediate infusions of billions of dollars to upgrade their physical plants, buy new textbooks, and hire more and better teachers. Yet under my proposal, such schools would not be able to count on these extra revenues forever. After an initial three years, they would have to compete with other schools that might put those sizable vouchers to even better uses.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, business climate, Columbine, declining real wages, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, financial independence, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, McMansion, mortgage debt, new economy, New Journalism, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, school vouchers, telemarketer, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

It might take some re-jiggering to settle on the right amount for a public school voucher, but eventually every child would have a valuable funding ticket to be used in any school in the area. To collect those tickets, schools would have to provide the education parents want. And parents would have a meaningful set of choices, without the need to buy a new home or pay private school tuition. Ultimately, an all-voucher system would diminish the distinction between public and private schools, as parents were able to exert more direct control over their children’s schools.65 Of course, public school vouchers would not entirely eliminate the pressure parents feel to move into better family neighborhoods.

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See under Bankruptcies Fresno, California, public schools Friedan, Betty Gephardt, Richard Gore, Al Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) Great Depression Hadassah Harvard University Hatch, Orrin Health issues and filing for bankruptcy health insurance See also Disability coverage Herring Hardware Himmelstein, David Hispanics Homes of African Americans and Hispanics age of appliances/furnishings for bidding wars for of divorced fathers down payments foreclosures. See also Foreclosure rates of Hispanics home equity and bankruptcy home equity loans home ownership being “house poor,” housing and joint custody of children housing market and public education voucher system prices regulation of housing market renting and school quality single mothers owning size of spending on as proportion of family income vacation homes See also Mortgages Hospitals Housing and Urban Development, department of Hyde, Henry Illinois bankruptcy data collection Income, discretionary(fig.)

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I highly recommend to my viewers that they get THE TWO-INCOME TRAP.” —Bill Moyers “[Warren] argues movingly that the misery and shame of bankruptcy is as pungent as ever—it’s just more widely experienced . . . The book is brimming with proposed solutions to the nail-biting anxiety that the middle class finds itself in: subsidized day care, school vouchers, new bank regulations, among other measures.” —Wall Street Journal “Astounding.” —Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief, U.S. News & World Report “Warren and Tyagi argue persuasively that mass ‘over-consumption’ is not the problem . . . Moreover, the book does offer unexpectedly fresh discussions of “deadbeat dads” (it turns out there aren’t very many of them) and the credit-card industry (where the current business strategy is to get financially troubled families ‘to borrow [still] more money’).”

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education by Diane Ravitch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, confounding variable, David Brooks, desegregation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Cecelia E. Rouse of Princeton University and Lisa Barrow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago published a review of all the existing studies of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the District of Columbia. They found that there were “relatively small achievement gains for students offered educational vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero.” They could not predict whether vouchers might eventually produce changes in high school graduation rates, college enrollment, or future wages. But they did not find impressive gains in achievement. Nor was there persuasive evidence that the public school systems that lost voucher students to private schools had improved.

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When Baltimore handed over nine public schools to a for-profit business called Education Alternatives Inc. in 1992, Shanker was appalled. When Republican governor John Engler of Michigan endorsed charter legislation, Shanker denounced him for ignoring his state’s poor curriculum and standards. In his paid weekly column in the New York Times, he repeatedly condemned charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit management as “quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”14 After he turned against charter schools, Shanker steadfastly insisted that the biggest problem in American education was the absence of a clear national consensus about the mission of the schools. He repeatedly decried the lack of a national curriculum, national testing, and “stakes” attached to schooling; these, he said, were huge problems that would not be solved by letting a thousand flowers bloom or by turning over the schools to entrepreneurs.

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Thorn, Fifth-Year Report: Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Madison, WI: Robert LaFollette Institute of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995); Paul E. Peterson, “A Critique of the Witte Evaluation of Milwaukee’s School Choice Program,” Occasional Paper 95-2, Harvard University Center for American Political Studies, 1995. 20 Cecelia Elena Rouse and Lisa Barrow, “School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Recent Evidence and Remaining Questions,” Annual Review of Economics 1 (2009), 17-42. A study of the Florida voucher program in 2009 found that the 23,259 students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools did no better or worse than similar students in public schools.

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

This has met with mixed success due to resistance at every level of the government, the lack of awareness among local and elected ward members of their powers and the sheer political clout of the teachers’ unions. A key reform to address this issue of accountability, which could also potentially converge the roles of state and private education, is school vouchers. This idea was suggested by Milton Friedman in 1955, and different kinds of voucher programs have seen successes in some U.S. states as well as in Chile, Sweden and Ireland. The basic idea of an education voucher is that the government funds students instead of schools—a transfer of power, since the money follows the student rather than the institution, and allows student choices to determine where the government’s education funds go.

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These concerns now loom large over us, affecting our ability to execute new ideas effectively, challenging the long-term success of our reforms. Our prereform, but still persistent, perception of the state as the “giver and taker of all” has doomed many of our most urgent policy proposals. I think that the single reform that will change this is bringing direct benefits into our welfare system. With health and education vouchers, citizens can choose between private- and public-sector alternatives. These and similar vouchers for essential commodities will free the poor of the middleman in India’s public distribution system and from the tyranny of the bureaucracy. Putting benefits such as cash in the hands of the poor, which would in turn allow them to participate in markets more effectively, can also rid us of the confrontational relationship that now exists between the government and our markets.

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This can bring the private sector and NGOs into already existing school infrastructure and government school buildings, instead of the current approach where we are constructing an alternative, private school system from scratch. There are still challenges to such solutions; for example, direct benefits like school vouchers are effective only if there are competing education providers, and this is a high bar to clear in the rural areas. Governments may have to specifically target such regions through incentives such as gap financing options for school entrepreneurs. A truly competitive market in education that involves both private and state schools offers a unique advantage—a rapid dissemination of best practices and effective teaching methods.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Despite the loss, through my efforts, the Supreme Court of the United States met and agreed to allow school vouchers as a viable option for states in May of 2002. The school voucher battle also allowed me to meet and inform John McCain about the benefits of school vouchers at a Ted Forstmann event in Aspen. Senator McCain subsequently promoted school vouchers in his presidential debate with Barack Obama. I have had multiple meetings with both Presidents Bush, Former Governor of California Pete Wilson, Former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger and many other powerful politicians on the topic of school vouchers since, and eventually, I believe school vouchers will come to pass.

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BizWorld also led me to the California initiative for school choice (school vouchers). When I first taught BizWorld, I noticed how stark the classrooms were in my daughter’s school. I started asking questions, and I realized there were structural issues that made it difficult to teach and manage schools now. I decided to see how I could help change the system. My activism led me to being appointed to the California State Board of Education, and my tenure there drove my efforts to become author and supporter of a statewide initiative for California to allow parents the right to choose the school their child attends. It was called the school voucher initiative, proposition 38 Yes.

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Go on a safari in Botswana Go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (many times) Visit the New York Stock Exchange (BizWorld and MeVC) See the opening of a Broadway show (Crazy She Calls Me) See Steve Miller Band in concert (with the Doobie Brothers at Shoreline—met him later) Visit the pyramids (and Ramses II) Go to the Olympics games (Summer in Atlanta, Winter in Utah) Friends Play touch football with Joe Montana Meet each President since Richard Nixon (so far, so good) Meet Barry Bonds (he helped coach my kids’ T-ball team) Meet Charles Barkley Meet Michael Milken (Spoke at the Milken Institute) Meet Michael Jackson (I had backstage passes to his concert in London, but he died before the concert was scheduled to begin) Meet Phil Collins (at the Oscars) Freaks Attend a funeral (this has happened too many times) Be in a hurricane (swam during Hurricane Bob) Be in an earthquake (dove under my desk at work) Be in a flood (our dog had to swim through the house) See an active volcano (in Pucon, Chile, and Mt Saint Helens, both from the sky) Visit a prison (Sonora State Prison with Defy Ventures) Fulfillment Create a board game (Stanford: The Game, Voter’s Choice) Create a game for a class (BizWorld) Paint 10 good paintings (“good” is in the eyes of the painter) Plant a tree that lives Build a treehouse with my kids (at my parents’ house before they tore it down) Produce a movie (The Tic Code, The Naked Brothers Band, Stella’s Last Weekend) Produce a CD-ROM title (I think technology has moved past me here) Get 10 articles published (most are about supporting entrepreneurship and driving technology) Write a very long poem Make a success of a dropout (there have been many) Get jobs for 10 friends (very satisfying) Grow a vegetable garden (it attracted crows) Free a prisoner Get a law changed or eliminated (made school vouchers legal) Teach a class at Stanford Business School (with Bill Sahlman) Fascination Learn more Japanese Learn to play 3 songs on the piano well Read 1000 books (I am at 350) Learn to make one spectacular dessert Read the Bible (Old and New) Read the Koran (brilliant legal document) Read the book of Mao (he was awesome, then he was awful) Read The Book of Mormon Shoot below 85 in golf (best score 86; typical score 110) Foolishness Bareback ride an unknown horse (with my brother-in-law in Hawaii) Hang glide (crashed and cracked the mast) Pilot an airplane (bush plane in Alaska) Parasailing (in Mexico) Drink snake blood in Snake Alley (in Taiwan) Swim in the Crystal Springs Reservoir (so muddy!)

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

“Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?”31 he asked. Friedman also championed freeing parents from having to send their children to government-run schools,32 a system that meant parents could only exercise control over schools through the political process.33 His solution? Education vouchers provided to parents by government equivalent to the cost of sending a child to a public school that could be spent at independent schools. He hoped his proposal would break the monopoly of teaching unions in public schools and give parents a real choice.34 FRIEDMAN WAS ENGAGED in a long political struggle across many fronts, but even by the early Sixties, in his early fifties, he remained little known outside of academia, and even then he was little regarded outside of a small coterie of economists who did not subscribe to the Keynesian consensus.

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Kennedy, 46 Joint Economic Committee of Congress hearing, 152–56 on labor unions, 47, 110, 153 legacy of, 289–94 on legalizing drugs, 50 on liberal bias in the press, 48–49, 52 libertarianism, 48–49, 69, 73, 86, 138, 217–18, 311 on licensing of doctors, 30, 48, 173, 269, 291 macroeconomics, 95–96, 268 on managing the economy, 95 market-based system supported by, 48, 70, 278 on monetary policy, 70, 106–8, 109, 111, 113, 129–31, 289–90 Mont Pèlerin meetings, 35–37, 82, 309 negative income tax plan, 143, 173, 292 Nixon’s 1968 campaign, 141–42, 157 Nobel Prize for economics, 26, 164–71 opposition to military draft, 49–50, 156, 290–91 opposition to wage and price controls, 150–52, 153–55, 157 outsider status, 74, 76, 132, 138, 174, 291 papers archived at Hoover Institution, 284 PhD thesis, 33 Pinochet and, 160–61, 168, 169, 170 popularity in Soviet bloc, 215, 254 praise for Samuelson, 162–63 price system seen as virtuous, 80 on property rights, 80 and protests at Nobel Prize for, 168, 169 quantity theory of money, 45, 95, 98–100, 101–3, 104–5, 107, 126–27 reaction to Samuelson’s 1995 note, 254 Reagan monetary policy and, 201–2 Reagan’s economic policy meeting and, 200–201 reputation in Britain, 229–30 research on role of money, 34–35, 103–5, 107, 262, 280, 320 response to 9/11 terrorist attacks, 255 return to Chicago, 33, 34 rivalry with Samuelson, 10, 27, 34, 71, 83, 132, 295–96 role of individual self-interest in society, 90, 91 Samuelson friendship with, 9–10, 254 in Samuelson’s Economics, 74, 171–73, 315 school voucher proposal, 50, 197 “shock treatment” in Chile recommended, 160–61, 169, 327 similarities to Samuelson, 11 on socialism, 217, 334 Soviet economy and, 218, 334 stagflation and, 119, 170–71, 207, 289, 322 Statistical Research Group at Columbia, 33 on steady money supply growth, 106, 113, 130–31, 140, 157, 203, 266 study at Columbia University, 28 study at Rutgers University, 26–27 supply-side economics and, 204, 207–8 suspicion of big government, 69 on taxation, 32, 79, 85, 155–56, 208, 290 on tax cuts, 44, 155–56, 208, 209, 211, 252 on taxes in wartime, 32 television series, 197 Thatcher’s election and, 239 “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” 114, 226, 321 and A Tract by Keynes, 94–96 tributes after death, 265–67, 268–69 on unemployment, 110–11, 304–5 at University of Chicago, 27–29, 70, 82, 99, 254 on velocity of money, 61, 93–94, 106, 109 view of Greenspan, 259–60 visit to Adam Smith’s grave, 43 visit to the Soviet Union, 215, 334 on Volcker’s Fed policies, 193–94, 195–96, 200–201, 202–4, 212, 214 Volcker’s skepticism about monetarism, 178–80, 181–85, 189, 235 “We are all Keynesians now,” 75 on the welfare state, 74, 76, 173, 230 at Wisconsin-Madison University, 31 work for New Deal programs, 29–31, 311 writing style of Newsweek columns, 10, 57–60 see also specific titles Friedman, Rose Director Aaron Director and, 11, 27 at Bureau of Home Economics, 309 in Cambridge, 39–40 death, 269 marriage, 27 on Nobel Prize for economics, 161–62, 164, 165, 166 resentment of Samuelson’s “privilege,” 27–28 Samuelson’s notes and, 254, 265–66 urging Friedman to work for Newsweek, 8–9, 11 visit to Adam Smith’s grave, 43 visit to the Soviet Union, 215, 334 Friedman, Sára Ethel (née Landau), 25–26 Galbraith, John Kenneth Affluent Society, The, 5, 302 birth and death, 302 favorable comments on the Soviet Union, 216, 219 Johnson and, 7 Kennedy and, 5–6, 22 Life in Our Times, A, 224–25 Nixon and, 147 opposition to Vietnam War, 7, 312 price controls demanded, 152 television series, 197 Garvy, George, 94, 319 Gary, Indiana, 11–12 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 291 General Motors, 146, 153 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, The (Keynes) on Great Depression, 106, 288 Hansen’s exposition of, 15 Hayek on, 44, 311 increasing aggregate demand, 204, 235 key elements and questions, 18–19, 60–61 macroeconomics, 101, 133, 302 monetary theory in, 101–2, 135 multiplier, 18, 97 propensity to consume, 19, 100, 133 publication, 8, 39, 55, 98, 133 quantity theory of money, 98 in Samuelson’s Economics, 18–19 Gilmour, Ian, 230, 231, 236, 244–45 Gingrich, Newt, 49, 251–53, 312 Giuliani, Rudolph (Rudy), 49, 312 God and Man at Yale (Buckley), 19, 306, 324 gold reserves, 148, 325–26 gold standard, 108, 112, 142, 185–86 Goldwater, Barry, 51–53, 139–41, 166, 200, 293, 312 Graham, Katharine Meyer, 4–5, 225, 302 Graham, Philip Leslie, 3–4, 5, 301–2 Great Depression causes, 34–35, 44, 47, 82, 103–5, 106, 323 deflation, 107 effects of, 14–15, 26, 30–31, 104 Keynesian economics and, 8, 23, 74–75, 98, 104, 106–7 Roosevelt and, 78, 104 Great Moderation, 271, 278, 282 Greenspan, Alan, 200, 255–56, 259–60, 271, 338 Griffiths, Brian, 246, 337 Guion, Connie, 2 Haberler, Gottfried von, 15, 305 Halberstam, David, 3, 301 Hansen, Alvin, 15, 304, 305 Hansen-Samuelson model, 14, 304 Harberger, Arnold C., 160, 168–69, 327 Harcourt, William, 75, 315 Harriman, Averell, 21, 306 Hayek, Friedrich attempt to join Chicago’s economics department, 37–38, 303 Ayn Rand and, 81 democracy and economics, 66 duel with Keynes in 1931, 9, 38, 53, 69 on failure of monetary theories, 213–14 on Friedman and macroeconomics, 95–96 on Friedman’s positive economics essay, 44 on intervention by government, 65–68, 87, 222 on Keynes’s General Theory, 44, 311 on managing the economy, 95 on measuring money in an economy, 213–14 microeconomics, 76 Mont Pèlerin meetings, 35–37, 82, 309 Nobel Prize for economics, 164, 166 popularity in Soviet bloc, 215 post–World War I experience in Austria, 61–62, 91 rejection of macroeconomics, 76, 95–96 Road to Serfdom, The, 35–36, 66–68, 87, 215, 222, 237, 334 in Samuelson’s Economics, 74, 315 on taxes in wartime, 309 on unemployment, 199 warnings about politicians, 116, 141, 199 see also specific titles Hazlitt, Henry Stuart, 5, 7–8, 302 Healey, Denis, 180–81, 190, 227–29, 230–31, 242, 330 Heath, Edward defeat in 1974 election, 231–32, 233, 235–36 economic policies, 232–33, 235 on monetarism, 233, 236, 239–40, 242, 243 Heller, Walter H., 116, 307, 321 Heller, Walter W., 116, 307, 321 Hicks, John, 41, 101, 343 History of Economic Thought, A (Barber), 73 Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawny, 88–89, 318 Hoff, Trygve, 309 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr., 85, 317 Horse Feathers (movie), 48, 311 Hotelling, Harold, 28, 307 Howe, Geoffrey, 239, 242, 243–44, 245, 246, 337 Hughes, Emmet John, 4–5, 302 Humphrey, Hubert, 142 Hutchins, Robert, 33, 34, 309 hyperinflation in Austria after World War I, 62, 91, 122, 322 Friedman on, 151, 170–71, 203 Keynes on, 62 Samuelson on, 121, 152 in U.S. from 1960s onward, 91–92, 115, 120–22, 125 Volcker and, 178, 202 in Weimar Germany, 115, 122, 322 see also inflation income-expenditure model, 19, 99, 319 Income from Independent Professional Practice (Friedman and Kuznets), 33, 308 IndyMac, 272 inflation cost-push inflation, 121, 124, 152 demand-pull inflation, 77, 121–22, 124 Federal Reserve mandate, 109, 178 Friedman explanation of, 74, 77–78, 125, 128, 130–31 Friedman on causes of, 61, 93–94, 115, 126–27, 129–30, 136–37 Friedman solution to, 113, 127–28, 131–32, 151, 197 as hidden tax, 77–78 higher interest rates urged to control, 122, 123, 128, 130 Keynesians on causes of, 118, 137 Keynes on, 62, 129 monetarist explanation of, 74 Nixon and, 145–50 raising taxes to control, 123–24 rates in U.S., 1975–1980, 175, 176 “rational expectations,” 96, 115, 180–81 Samuelson on problem of, 74, 118–22, 123, 176 Samuelson on remedies for, 122–25 sharp rise from 1960s onward, 115, 120–21, 125, 183–84, 186, 188, 192 in the U.K., 227 Vietnam War and, 121, 145 see also hyperinflation; stagflation “Inflation is Caused by Governments” (Joseph), 233 interest rates as cause of Depression, 34–35, 44, 103, 104, 257 discount rate, 104, 186–87, 188, 212, 282 federal funds rate, 181, 186–87, 188, 190, 192, 263 higher rates to control inflation, 122, 123, 128, 130 “natural” and “market” rates of interest, 110–11, 114 prime rate, 187, 194–95 rate cuts during financial freeze, 276 rate cuts to prevent recession, 255–56 risks of artificially low rates, 66, 107–9 and value of money, 45 intervention by government COVID-19 pandemic, 287–89 by Federal Reserve during financial freeze, 273–77 by Federal Reserve to keep dollar steady, 175 Friedman on, 47–48, 87, 222–23, 236, 278 Hayek on, 65–68, 87, 222 Keynes on, 62–65, 68–69 Samuelson on, 65, 87, 88–90 invisible hand, 90, 91, 95 Japan, liquidity crisis in 1990s, 280 Jay, Peter, 228–29, 335 Johnson, Harry, 39, 310, 323 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 5, 7, 51–53, 139, 140, 145, 302 Joseph, Keith about, 335 Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), 233 monetarism, 233–35, 237–38, 239 sound money policy and, 234, 238 Thatcher introduced to monetarism by, 237–38, 239 on unemployment, 234–35 views on the poor, 236, 336 JPMorgan, 273 Kahn, Richard, 39, 41, 310 Kaldor, Nicholas, 39, 306, 310 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald assassination, 5, 6, 302, 325 Camelot, 5, 22, 119, 302 Friedman on, 46 Galbraith and, 5–6, 22 Samuelson and, 6, 21–24, 120, 138 Kennedy, Joseph, 22 Keynesianism critique of The Road to Serfdom, 8, 68–69, 87 Great Depression and, 8, 23, 74–75, 98, 104, 106–7 macroeconomics, 18 multiplier effect, 14, 18–19, 39, 97, 100, 133 rift between Keynesians and conservatives, 38–40 stagflation and, 118–19, 289 Keynes, John Maynard about, generally, 302 aggregate demand, increasing, 23, 204, 235, 263, 339 Bretton Woods agreement, 40, 68, 142–43, 148, 177, 185, 310 Cambridge Circus, 39–41, 93, 290, 310 on capitalism, 65 on changing his mind, 42 duel with Hayek in 1931, 9, 38, 53, 69 on equilibrium in the economy, 63, 97 failure of free market, 64 fiscal policy and, 19, 106–8 Friedman’s article not published by, 28–29 Hayek challenge of, 9, 303 income-expenditure model, 19, 99, 319 on inflation, 62, 129 on intervention by government, 62–65, 68–69 “In the long run we are all dead,” 63, 96, 136, 324 on laissez-faire system, 63–64, 65 macroeconomics, 75–76, 94, 101, 133, 302 on managing the economy, 95 on monetary policy, 135 on moral values in economics, 69 multiplier, 14, 18–19, 39, 97, 100, 133 on quantity theory of money, 63, 94, 96–97, 98, 106 “rational expectations,” 96 tax cuts recommended by, 23, 204 on taxes in wartime, 32, 309 on unemployment, 15, 64, 234–35 on velocity of money, 63, 94, 97, 98 “You cannot push on a string,” 256, 263, 277, 338 see also specific titles Keynes, John Neville, 43 Kipling, Rudyard, 57, 313 Knight, Frank, 14, 28, 34, 82–83, 99, 304 Krugman, Paul, 285, 322 Kuhn, Thomas S., 94, 319 Kuznets, Simon, 29–30, 33, 71, 308 Laffer, Arthur lack of PhD, 206–7, 332 Laffer Curve and taxes, 205, 206, 208, 209, 332 supply-side economics, 205, 206–7, 250, 332 Lawson, Nigel, 245, 247, 337 Lehman Brothers, 275 Leigh-Pemberton, Robin, 246 Leijonhufvud, Alex, 283, 341 Leontief, Wassily, 15, 16, 29, 305 leveraging by banks, 272 Life in Our Times, A (Galbraith), 224–25 Lippmann, Walter, 4, 283, 302 Lucas, Robert Jr., 82, 283, 287, 317 Luce, Henry, 3 Luria, S.

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America by Charles Murray

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, centre right, correlation coefficient, critical race theory, Donald Trump, feminist movement, gentrification, George Floyd, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, invention of agriculture, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, publication bias, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, War on Poverty

Whereas I was pessimistic about the potential of federal social programs to do good in most arenas, I thought the one exception was school vouchers, especially for parents who were already actively engaged in overseeing their children’s education. “I suggest that when we give such parents vouchers, we will observe substantial convergence of black and white test scores in a single generation,” I wrote, confident that I was right. During the 1980s, a number of new studies gave reason to think that things were getting better even without a school voucher program. When Richard Herrnstein and I were writing The Bell Curve in the early 1990s, we included encouraging signs that the European–African test-score difference was diminishing, though we were worried about signs that the narrowing had stalled.

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Coleman Report college admissions; and IQ distribution College Board Consortium on Financing Higher Education Cotton, Tom Crime in the United States (FBI) crime rates: big-city; and economic activity; index crimes; murder arrests; and policing practice; property crime; reported offenses; shootings; small-city; and social policy; and socioeconomic status criminal justice reform critical race theory Cultural Revolution (China) Dallas, TX Declaration of Independence Democratic Party demographics: big-city; and immigration; misperceptions of; nomenclature; and self-identification; small-town/rural Dick, Philip, ix education: affirmative action in; inequality in; reform of; remedial; school vouchers; see also achievement tests; teachers Education Longitudinal Study Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965) employment discrimination Equal Educational Opportunity Survey (1965) Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Fayetteville, NC FBI: Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) feminism Floyd, George Forbes Fort Lauderdale, FL g (general intelligence) Gallup Gardner, Howard genetic testing gentrification Goldberg, Jonah Gould, Stephen J.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

MOOCs are currently viewed as an addendum to traditional classroom-based coursework; the latter enables you to get a degree from a deemed university, while the former is more important for acquiring the kind of skills that will help you land a job, a crucial aspect in a country whose standards of higher education are so low that nearly half the graduates it churns out every year are unemployable in any sector.15 Granting choice, eliminating fraud While MOOCs bring up regulatory concerns around innovation and the role of the state in education, there is another disruption that the government can bring about through incentive design. The concept of school vouchers has been discussed at length over the years, and was mentioned in Imagining India as well. This idea grants the power of choice to the consumer, and funds students instead of schools. Rather than pouring money only into government schools, a fraction of the funds can be used to grant school vouchers, which students can then use to pay for their education at a school of their choice. Naturally, students will gravitate to the institution that provides the best level of instruction, whether it’s public or private; the voucher system brings in competition that can help to lift the overall quality of both sets of institutions.

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Naturally, students will gravitate to the institution that provides the best level of instruction, whether it’s public or private; the voucher system brings in competition that can help to lift the overall quality of both sets of institutions. The flow of money from the government to schools will now follow the principles of the open market—the best-performing schools will get more money as more students enrol, and the underperformers will either have to pull up their socks or go out of business. Nandan envisioned the impact of school vouchers on the educational system as a reform which ‘effectively removes ideology from funding and implementation and makes it easier, say, to hand over management of existing and failing government schools to the private sector, if this will attract students. This can bring the private sector and NGOs into already existing school infrastructure and government school buildings, instead of the current approach where we are constructing an alternative, private school system from scratch.’

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Section 12 of the RTE mandates that private and unaided schools set aside 25 per cent of their total enrolment capacity for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and that such students should be given free and compulsory education up to the elementary level. This provision of the RTE Act gives us an opportunity to create a voucher system, where poor families are issued school vouchers that can be used by parents to match children to schools in the same way that students are matched to engineering or medical colleges upon completion of standard twelve.16 Lastly, we would like to turn our attention to the question of de-materialization of degrees and skill certificates. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already announced a Digital Locker initiative in which a person’s important records, including educational certificates, will be stored securely in the cloud and can be accessed by government departments as needed.17 Fake resumes are circulating in the job market to an alarming degree, with an estimated one in five resumes in the IT industry being falsified.18 People go so far as to set up fake companies that can provide experience certificates to jobseekers, helping them to inflate their expertise and skills when job-hunting.19 A de-materialized degree combined with Aadhaar-based identification serves as a guarantee for the person’s educational qualifications, increasing trust between jobseekers and potential employers.

India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

What is ideally needed is a drastic cull of delinquent teachers! But change from within the government sector is very unlikely to happen, given entrenched union power and the inertia in the system. There is thus a strong pragmatic case in India for an education voucher system in which all schools, including government schools, would charge fees to cover their costs, and poor people would be given education vouchers to enable them to send their children to government or private schools, whichever they prefer, with the presumption that schools that fail to attract applicants would have to contract or close down. (Of course, government schools would have to continue to be the sole source of instruction in remote areas where private schools do not exist or do not come up.)

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Indeed, one of the main arguments for public education is that it ensures universal free access (at the expense of the taxpayer) and makes up for the effects of income inequality. But this is a deficiency that could be corrected by offering all parents, or poor parents in particular, the option and the means to choose private or public schools for their children, by giving them ‘education vouchers’. Under such a scheme, both public and private schools would charge fees but students would ‘carry their school fees with them’ in the form of vouchers that are paid for out of general taxation. A voucher scheme would thus match the equity objective of free public education but would have the additionally important feature of enabling competition between public and private schools.

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In the Indian context, it is hard to imagine that government schools could deliver greater teacher effort and better education outcomes solely on the basis of reform within the public school system, in response to the ‘voice’ of citizens. Or to put it another way, ‘voice’ alone would be ineffective if parents did not also have the possibility of ‘exit’. Thus the case for education vouchers in India is not ideological but pragmatic: competition and the threat of student-​exit are necessary conditions for public education to improve. There are two counter-​arguments. The first is that if vouchers were introduced, the children of parents in vocal elite-​groups would leave government schools, which would lead to further deterioration of these schools by reducing the pressure for reform.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cass Sunstein, charter city, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, experimental subject, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, land tenure, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, microcredit, moral hazard, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, tontine, urban planning

For example, governments could subsidize insurance premiums, or distribute vouchers that parents can take to any school, private or public, or force banks to offer free “no frills” savings accounts to everyone for a nominal fee. It is important to keep in mind that these subsidized markets need to be carefully regulated to ensure they function well. For example, school vouchers work well when all parents have a way of figuring out the right school for their child; otherwise, they can turn into a way of giving even more of an advantage to savvy parents. Fourth, poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor, or because they have had an unfortunate history.

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The Rise of Affordable Private Schools,” working paper (2010). 20 Sonalde Desai, Amaresh Dubey, Reeve Vanneman, and Rukmini Banerji, “Private Schooling in India: A New Educational Landscape,” Indian Human Development Survey, Working Paper No. 11 (2010). 21 However, among applicants to a lottery for secondary school vouchers for private schools in the Colombian city of Bogotá, the difference persisted: The winners did better than the losers on standardized tests, were 10 percentage points more likely to graduate, and scored better on the graduation exam. See Joshua Angrist, Eric Bettinger, Erik Bloom, Elizabeth King, and Michael Kremer, “Vouchers for Private Schooling in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment,” American Economic Review 92 (5) (2002): 1535– 1558; and Joshua Angrist, Eric Bettinger, and Michael Kremer, “Long-Term Educational Consequences of Secondary School Vouchers: Evidence from Administrative Records in Colombia,” American Economic Review 96 (3) (2006): 847–862. 22 Desai, Dubey,Vanneman, and Banerji, “Private Schooling in India.” 23 Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, Esther Duflo, and Leigh Linden, “Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122 (3) (August 2007): 1235–1264. 24 Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Stuti Khemani, “Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2 (1) (February 2010): 1–30. 25 Trang Nguyen, “Information, Role Models, and Perceived Returns to Education: Experimental Evidence from Madagascar,” MIT Working Paper (2008). 26 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “Growth Theory Through the Lens of Development Economics,” in Steve Durlauf and Philippe Aghion, eds., Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 1A (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Ltd.

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See Joshua Angrist, Eric Bettinger, Erik Bloom, Elizabeth King, and Michael Kremer, “Vouchers for Private Schooling in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment,” American Economic Review 92 (5) (2002): 1535– 1558; and Joshua Angrist, Eric Bettinger, and Michael Kremer, “Long-Term Educational Consequences of Secondary School Vouchers: Evidence from Administrative Records in Colombia,” American Economic Review 96 (3) (2006): 847–862. 22 Desai, Dubey,Vanneman, and Banerji, “Private Schooling in India.” 23 Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, Esther Duflo, and Leigh Linden, “Remedying Education: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments in India,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122 (3) (August 2007): 1235–1264. 24 Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster, and Stuti Khemani, “Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Education in India,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2 (1) (February 2010): 1–30. 25 Trang Nguyen, “Information, Role Models, and Perceived Returns to Education: Experimental Evidence from Madagascar,” MIT Working Paper (2008). 26 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, “Growth Theory Through the Lens of Development Economics,” in Steve Durlauf and Philippe Aghion, eds., Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 1A (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Ltd.

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

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

option=com_content&view=article&id=74: the-2009-silicon-valley-index&catid=39:silicon-valley-index&Itemid=52. 16. Lori Olszewski, “Some Prop. 39 Backers Have Deep Pockets,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 2000. bnotes.indd 302 5/11/10 6:29:36 AM notes to pages 190–221 303 17. Paul Festa, “High-Tech Advocates Clash over School Vouchers, Skilled Labor,” CNET News, September 22, 2000, http://news .cnet.com/High-tech-advocates-clash-over-school-vouchers,-skilledlabor/2100-1023_3-246068.html. 18. Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” Harvard University, Working Paper, September 24, 2007. 19. John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 9.

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Someday, if Facebook goes public and if it can actually earn a profit, Zuckerberg is likely to be worth far more. Looking further ahead, the day will come when Zuckerberg starts to tire of business and will want to do something useful with his pile of money. And although it’s impossible to say what he might do, there is a good chance that he won’t be bankrolling right-wing think tanks or school vouchers. Zuckerberg’s fortune is just one of many that will be harnessed for public purposes in future years. Although the United States seems at the end of its second Gilded Age, we are still at the beginning of a golden era of philanthropy that taps the wealth created during this period. Some of today’s largest new fortunes have barely been touched for charitable or political causes—like the money of the Google Guys ($17.5 billion each in 2010), or the great wealth of people such as Steve Ballmer ($14.5 billion), Jeff Bezos ($12.3 billion), Abigail Johnson ($11.5 billion), James Simons ($8.5 billion), Steven Cohen ($6.4 billion), and on and on.

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

According to a 1998 memo, members of the Congressional Black Caucus were to be particular targets of Abramoff’s campaign to “develop” Democrats for the CNMI; two of them actually took trips to the islands (since their trips were sponsored by yet another friendly nonprofit, these representatives were unaware of Abramoff’s involvement). Another tactic in this quixotic campaign was school vouchers, the issue which always seems to come up when conservatives are moved to consider the black electorate. Proclaiming in 1997 that the CNMI—as part of its well-known devotion to free-market principle—was about to approve a vouchers program, Abramoff’s team brought various CNMI officials to the mainland and hooked them up with leading conservative voucher advocates and inner-city education activists in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C.

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Labor unions were number two; Norquist proposed that conservatives “crush labor unions as a political entity” with some sort of “paycheck protection” measure and weaken them more generally with strategic expansions of NAFTA, like forcing Teamsters “to compete with Mexican truck drivers.” Third were school vouchers, which would put paid to what he called the “2.1 million Democratic precinct workers belonging to the National Education Association.” Fourth, a few “modest reforms” at HUD and the Department of Education that would cut off funds to “big city machines.” And then—the coup de grâce—the Democratic Party would become “a dead man walking” when Team R privatized Social Security, permitting everyone in the country to own stock and thus share in those pleasures heretofore known only to the elite: “watching their investments grow—rather than shrink in the face of trial-lawyer parasites, labor-union work rules, and government-worker-driven taxes.”3 And much of this program was accomplished during the conservative era, if not on the precise terms Norquist suggested.

…

Wade Roosevelt, Franklin D. Rothbard, David Rove, Karl Saarinen, Eero Saipan. See Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) Saipan Tribune SALT treaties San Francisco Chronicle Santorum, Rick Saturday Evening Post Savage, Michael Savimbi, Jonas Scanlon, Michael schools vouchers science, war on Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) Seattle Times Sellars, Duncan Sequent (newspaper) Sessions, William sex industry shareholder revolts Shaw Group Shelby, Richard Shelk, John Sherman Anti-Trust Act Shriver, Sargent Silicon Valley Simpfenderfer, Mike Singapore “small government” “smart-growth” faction social Darwinism Social Security privatization of Social Security Administration South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission Southern Baptists Soviet Union collapse of Spain Special Operations Technology Spike, The (de Borchgrave) SSA Marine firm Stalin, Joseph Starr, Ken State, Department of Stayman, Allen Steffens, Lincoln Stevens, Ted Stewart, Scottn Stigler, George Stockman, David stock market crash of 1929 stock options strike suppression strip-mining Student Coalition for Truth student loan programs Students for a Better America Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Students for America subcontractors “supply-side” theory Swann, Ingon Switzerland Syria Tan, Willie Target America (Tyson) tariffs tax-and-spend mantra taxes Ciskei and CNMI and cuts in income tax lobbyists and tax-exempt foundations tax revolts teamsters union Teapot Dome scandal Telecommunications Act (1996) Telling It Like It Is (videotape) Ten Commandments Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Tenorio, Froilan terra nova (journal) terrorism Tet Offensive Thailand Thatcher, Margaret think tanks Third Wave, The (Toffler) Threlkeld, John Tierney, John timber industry Tinian air base “Tinkering with the Success of Liberty” (Ferrara) Torres, Stanley tort reform tourist industry toy industry Tozzi, Jim trade associations tradition, destruction of Transportation Safety Administration Treason (Coulter) “Treason of the Senate, The” (Phillips series) Treasury Department trial lawyers “trips” program Trotsky, Leon trucking industry Tyson, James Ukraine union-busting firms Union Pacific Railroad UNITA United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC) United Nations U.S.

Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

The envisaged expanded coverage of these programs has progressed slowly, however. Various new socialprogram initiatives were discussed during early stages of the crisis, but budget restrictions and, more importantly, political indecisiveness impeded their progress. Some, such as employment programs, never materialized at all and others, such as an education voucher program, were only implemented as of late 2001. By that time, the economy was showing signs of recovery, with GDP growing at 2.3 and 4.5 percent in 2000 and 2001, respectively, and with open unemployment down from a peak level of 14 percent in 1999 to around 10 percent in 2000 and 2001. Economic recovery was helped by rising oil prices (in 2000), migration abroad of large numbers of Ecuadorans, and several rounds of real-wage adjustments.

…

More likely, the real economy has become more sensitive to the effects of such shocks without the short-term cushion—albeit imperfect—that used to be provided by exchange-rate and monetary adjustment. The need for an adequate social-protection system remains. In the aftermath of the crisis, the Ecuadoran government has taken measures to allow for a recovery of real social spending after severe declines during the crisis, and it has introduced new programs, including the educational voucher program, targeted to the poor. Overall, however, the social safety net in many ways still suffers from the deficiencies it had at the start of the crisis. Much more is needed to provide effective protection to the vulnerable. This chapter aims to analyze the effects of the crisis on poverty and human development during the crisis and the response capacity of Ecuador’s social safety net.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

For a time, Betsy and Dick lived down the street from the Prince family, including Erik, who is nine years younger than his sister.34 In 1988, Gary Bauer and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson began building what would become the Family Research Council (FRC), the crusading, influential, and staunchly conservative evangelical organization that has since taken the lead on issues ranging from banning gay marriage to promoting school vouchers for Christian schools to outlawing abortion and stem-cell research. To get it off the ground, though, they needed funding, and they turned to Edgar Prince. “[W]hen Jim Dobson and I decided that the financial resources weren’t available to launch FRC, Ed and his family stepped into the breach,” wrote Bauer.

…

In 2004 she was the single largest donor to the successful campaign to ban same-sex marriage in Michigan, kicking in $75,000 of her own money.89 She served on the boards of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family and was active in the Council for National Policy and a host of other right-wing religious organizations.90 “My main thrust is to do things that Jesus would want you to do to further your knowledge of him and his ways,” she told the Holland Sentinel in 2003.91 Edgar, Elsa, and her new husband, Ren, cumulatively donated nearly $556,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees,92 along with untold millions to right-wing causes. Along with the DeVos family, the Princes remain major players in the conservative Christian movement in Michigan and nationally. One of their recent hard-fought but unsuccessful battles was to implement school vouchers in Michigan. The DeVos family itself spent upwards of $3 million in 2000 pushing the perennial conservative education ideal.93 Erik Prince adopted his father’s behind-the-scenes demeanor, as well as his passion for right-wing religious causes, but with a twist. “Erik is a Roman Catholic,” said author Robert Young Pelton, who has had rare access to Prince.

…

In many nations—right now—Christians are harassed, tortured, imprisoned, and even martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ.”151 Jim Jacobson, a former aide to Gary Bauer in Ronald Reagan’s White House, runs the group, which has taken public positions against the work of the United Nations, calling some of its agencies “merchants of misery,”152 and has protested that Iraqi self-determination could harm Christians.153 In calling for the United States to attack Afghanistan after 9/11, Jacobson declared, “Only unequivocal military strikes will express our commitment to world peace and the rule of law.”154 The board of directors included Blackwater lobbyist Paul Behrends, former Republican Senator Don Nickles, and former Voice of America director Robert Reilly, who began his career as a Reagan White House propagandist for the Nicaraguan Contras and worked briefly for war contractor SAIC on its ill-fated attempt to create a new Iraqi information ministry.155 In 2000 Erik Prince was on hand for a Michigan benefit to raise money for one of his family’s (and the theoconservative movement’s) pet causes—school vouchers. At the event, Prince spoke to the Wall Street Journal, saying both his family and the DeVos clan believe in conservative, Christian, free-market ideals, and that his beloved father’s business—the one responsible for building up Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council—“was an engine that generated cash that he could use to do good things.”156 He said his sister Betsy was using those “same energies.”157 By that time, the thirty-year-old Prince had his own small cash-generating engine, on the brink of becoming much, much bigger.

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

Billionaires like the Waltons, the Broads, and the Fishers have spent hundreds of millions on education reform, and the Gateses are at the center of it all. They argue that we need to completely re-envision public education if we are to prepare children for a high-tech future. There are varying opinions on how to do it. Some, like the Waltons and the Broads, want school vouchers (government-issued certificates of funding that enable parents to send their children to private schools instead of public ones) and complete privatization. The Gateses think that vouchers have “some very positive characteristics” and praise the efficiency of parochial schools, but they think the public is too invested in public education and thus resistant to these kinds of sweeping change.23 Instead, the Gates Foundation is pursuing incremental change through the increased application of market mechanisms to public schooling.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

Seattle and San Francisco both did reasonably well at handling Covid (certainly compared with Washington, DC). San Francisco and Boston are good at technology; Dallas leads the way on toll roads; New York has massively improved air quality. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans embraced charter schools and school vouchers. Since the 1960s the federal government has generally centralized power, shifting it to the place that is farthest away from the people and closest to the organized special interests that crowd together in K Street. That process must be reversed. Big-city mayors should get more power over schools, transport, and police, and they should also be encouraged to copy successful ideas from other cities through a special federal government fund.

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

While 83 percent of Americans believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus, only 28 percent admit to a belief in evolution.3 These statistics take on added significance in light of the remarkable commingling of politics and religion that has occurred in recent years and gives every indication of increasing in the future. In that mixture it is not religion generally but primarily fundamentalist and evangelical religion whose energetic political activism is helping to shape the course of some public policies (e.g., antiabortion, school vouchers, and welfare programs) and playing a pivotal part in elections. Evangelical Protestants are in the vanguard of these developments, both as foot soldiers for the Republican Party and as influential players in Beltway politics.4 Contrary to a common assumption—that an “outdated” belief is similar to an old-model refrigerator or auto, that its antique status connotes inefficiency, feebleness, lack of power—the exact opposite is true of religious fundamentalists.

…

How influential the phony version can be was illustrated when, during the 2004 elections, the Democratic presidential candidate testified plaintively, “I am not a redistributionist Democrat. Fear not.” He identified himself as “an entrepreneurial Democrat.”22 The nationalistic, patriotic, and “originalist” ideology being hawked by Republicans promotes a myth of national unity, consensus, that obscures real cleavages in order to substitute synthetic ones (“the culture wars,” school vouchers, abortion) that leave power relationships unchallenged. Manufactured divisiveness complements the politics of gridlock; both contribute to induce apathy by suggesting that the citizenry’s involvement in politics is essentially unneeded, futile. In the one case, of consensus, active involvement is superfluous because there is nothing to contest—who wants to dispute the wisdom of The Founders?

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

., 211 Dickerson, Caitlin, 220 DeGeorge syndrome, 213 Dietterich, Thomas, 328n12 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, 283–84 Digital Geneva Convention, 113–15, 128, 300 digital neutrality, 35 diplomacy, 109–30 disabilities, 200, 287–88 disinformation campaigns, 90, 94, 102, 104, 106–7, 289, 294, 302 Russia and, 95–98, 103 Downing, Richard, 59 DREAMers, 173–74 E Economic Graph, 181 economy, 241–43, 289, 299 Edelman Trust Barometer, 216–17 Edison, Thomas, 194 education, 156, 180, 182, 186, 207 computer science, 170, 177–81, 184 Microsoft’s school voucher program, 177 Microsoft’s Technology Education and Literacy in Schools program, 178–79 national talent strategy and, 175–76 Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program, 181–82 Workforce Education Investment Act, 182–84 Egan, Mike, 331n8 8chan, 99 Einstein, Albert, 129, 171, 209–10, 289 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 172 ElectionGuard, 87 elections, 84, 95 in France, 81 hacking and, 81, 86–88 U.S. presidential election of 2016, 81, 82, 139, 144, 157, 172, 189, 278–82, 331n8 voting machines and, 87 electricity, 70, 286, 289, 299 data centers and, xiv, xvi, 44 in rural areas, 159, 160, 163–66 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), 22, 23, 33, 47 electronic grids and infrastructures, 70–71, 266, 299 El Paso, Tex., 233–35, 331n8 Ely, James, 110 email, 23, 24, 28, 49, 221, 237–38 phishing and, 79, 83 Russian hackers and, 81, 95 employee activism, 215–17 Empson, Mark, 70 encryption, 14–15, 19, 87, 149, 171, 283 endangered species, 288 engineering, 141–42 England, 316n2 National Health Service in, 62 see also United Kingdom Estonia, 89–93, 320n19 Étienne, Philippe, 123 European Commission, 131 European Court of Justice, 136, 137 European Union (EU), 43, 44, 47–48, 56, 124, 284, 314n10 Brexit and, 131–32, 139, 238 General Data Protection Regulation of, 131–32, 139–43, 146–49 International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles of, 133–36 Privacy Shield of, 137–38, 300 F FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), 336n10 Facebook, 2, 16, 44, 73–76, 85, 92, 95–99, 103, 104, 120–21, 124, 125, 133, 173, 253, 270, 272, 281, 285 Cambridge Analytica and, 144 Christchurch mosque shootings and, 99, 126 disinformation campaigns on, 90, 95–98 privacy and, 135, 144 facial recognition, 203, 211–30, 239, 264, 330n21 bias and, 198 legislation on, 226, 330nn19–20, 331n26 regulation of, 221–22, 224, 225, 228, 296 surveillance and, 227–28 Fancy Bear (APT28; Strontium), 78–81, 84–85 Fargo, N.Dak., 331n8 FarmBeats, 163 farmers, farming, 156, 163, 164, 171, 243–44 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 13, 22, 25, 27, 28, 36, 49, 63, 73, 78 data requested from Microsoft by, 31 FCC (Federal Communications Commission), 158, 323n17 Blue Book of, 101–2, 318nn27–28 broadband and, 153–56, 158, 322n6, 323n9 FedEx, 70 Ferguson, Bob, 173, 324n4 Ferry County, Wash., 151–55, 157, 166–67 fiber-optic cables, 13, 14, 42, 43, 153, 158, 159, 162, 163, 296 filing cabinets, xiv, 309n2 fire extinguishers, 236 fire horses, 231–32, 245, 247 First Amendment, 12, 15, 33, 36, 102 FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), 12 5G, 153, 266 Ford, Henry, 245, 246 4G, 158 Fourth Amendment, 7–8, 14, 15, 23, 26, 33, 34, 36 Fourth Geneva Convention, 113, 117–18 Fourth Industrial Revolution, 169 Fox News, 314n10 France, 126 National Assembly in, 224 presidential candidates in, 81 Revolution in, 319n36 1798 war with U.S., 9–10 terrorist attacks in Paris, 26–28 war between United Kingdom and, 105 Francis, James C., IV, 52, 314n10 Francis, Pope, 209–10 Frank, John, 3, 4, 8, 22 Franklin, Benjamin, 7, 77, 87, 107, 192 frauds and scams, 192–93, 316n2 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 272–74, 276, 284–86 Freedom House, 222 freedom of speech, 102 French Revolution, 319n36 Friedman, Nat, 277 FTC (Federal Trade Commission), 29, 146, 310n6 G Galileo, 209 Garnett, Paul, 167 Gates, Bill, xviii, 29, 194, 240, 252, 254, 277, 325n11 Gates, Melinda, 252 Gebru, Timnet, 198 Gellman, Bart, 13 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 131–32, 139–43, 146–49, 294 Genêt, Edmind Charles, 105–6, 319n36 Geneva, 129 Geneva Conventions, 113, 117–18, 320n16 Geography of Thought, The (Nisbett), 258, 261–62 George, John Earl, Sr., 165, 166 Germany, 39–41, 51–53, 56 Germany, Nazi, 39, 41, 61, 90, 129 Giant Company Software, xviii Gibson, Charlie, 314n10 Gilliland, Gary, 273 GitHub, 100, 277 Global Network Initiative (GNI), 333n16 Good, I.J., 328n12 Google, 16, 19, 44, 85, 97, 104, 120, 122, 124, 126, 133, 144, 173, 199, 216, 253, 256, 269, 272, 285 government sued by, 12, 18–19 Microsoft and, 12 military and, 203, 204, 215, 216 NSA and, 2, 4, 13 Plus, 270 YouTube, 2, 95, 99, 125, 126 GPS, 33–34, 228 Graham, Lindsey, 56, 57 Gramophone, 101 Graphika, 95 Great Depression, 164, 165, 171, 242–44 Greek philosophy, 259, 263 Green Bay, Wisc., 331n8 Green Bay Packers, 233, 331n8 Gregoire, Christine, 186, 189, 316n2, 325n20, 327n40 Guardian, 2–4, 8, 19 Gutenberg, Johannes, xiii, 209 Guterres, António, 205 Gutierrez, Horacio, 312–13n12 H hackers, hacking, 71, 79, 81, 86, 113, 266, 287 Chinese, 251, 263 elections and, 81, 86–88 hackers, Russian, 78, 82–83, 95 elections and, 81, 86 Strontium (Fancy Bear; APT28), 78–81, 84–85 Hamilton, 106, 249 Hamilton, Alexander, 105, 106 Harding, William, 100 Harvard Law Review, 330n24 Hastings, Reed, 16, 17, 335n7 Hatch, Orrin, 176, 314n9 He Huaihong, 261–62 Heiner, Dave, 194, 197 Heller, Dean, 314n9 Hippocratic oath for coders, 207–8 Hitachi, 122 Hoffman, Reid, 267, 292 Hogan-Burney, Amy, 25–26 Hollande, François, 28 HoloLens, 204, 238–39, 252 Hood, Amy, 174, 183, 188–89, 293–94, 306 horses, 240–45 fire, 231–32, 245, 247 Horvitz, Eric, 194, 199, 218, 327n5, 328n12 Hotmail, 21–22 Hour of Code, 179 House of Representatives, 7, 56, 57, 176 housing, 186–90, 302, 327n40 Houston, Tex., 96 Howard, David, 31–33, 35 HP, 120, 132 Huawei, 263 Hudson Institute, 84 Hu Jintao, 252 human rights, 260, 262–64, 292, 301–4, 333n16 Human Rights Watch, 206 Humphries, Fred, 55 Hutchinson, Bill, 272 Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 272–74, 276, 284–86 I I, Robot, 193 IBM, 192, 285, 310n6 ImageNet, 197 immigration, 169, 171–76, 290 DACA program and, 173–74 facial recognition and, 214–15 national talent strategy and, 175–76 separation of children from parents at the border, 214, 215, 220–21 Immigration and Customs Enforcement, US (ICE), 214–15 Immigration Innovation Act (I-Squared), 176 information bubbles, 95 information technology, 70, 253, 298–300 China and, 253, 258, 263–67 persuasion and, 107 weaponization of, 97 infrastructure and grids, 70–71, 266, 299 Inslee, Jay, 325n20 Instagram, 95–96 Intel, 253 intellectual property, 113, 175, 207, 284, 336n9 International Campaign to Ban Landmines, 127 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 113, 118, 127, 320n16 International Humanitarian Law, 117 International Monetary Fund, 97 International Republican Institute (IRI), 84 international rules, 302 arms control, 116–18, 128, 302 International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, 133–36 internet, 24, 41, 91, 106, 107, 192–93, 299, 335n9 Communications Decency Act and, 98–99 rural broadband and, 151–67, 289, 296, 322n6, 323n9 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 95–96 Interstate Commerce Commission, 299–300 Iowa, 164–66 Iran, 71 Iraq, 81 Ireland, 42–46, 49–56, 133, 135 Ischinger, Wolfgang, 96 ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), 28 Israel, 81 J Jacobins, 319n36 Japan, xvii, 75, 122, 124, 129, 253 Japanese-Americans, internment of, 10 Jarrett, Valerie, 15–16 Jefferson, Thomas, 105, 106, 313n5 Jewish manuscripts, 288, 335n2 jobs, 186, 187, 297, 302 artificial intelligence and, 231–47 creation of, 156–58 digital content in, 177–78 Economic Graph and, 181 immigration seen as threat to, 175 unemployment, 152, 156 Jobs, Steve, 142, 241 Jones, Nate, 25–26, 49 Jourová, Věra, 136–37 Joyce, Rob, 73 Justice Department (DOJ), xx, 12, 13, 16, 18–19, 26, 31, 35, 36, 49, 53, 56, 148 K Kahan, John, 323n9 Kaljurand, Marina, 91–92 Kenya, 160 Kentucky School for the Blind, 287, 334n1 KGB, 92 Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), 220, 329n11 King County, Wash., 152, 157 Kirkpatrick, David, 192 Kissinger, Henry, 250, 259 Kistler-Ritso, Olga, 90–92, 317n2 Klobuchar, Amy, 176 Klynge, Casper, 109, 112, 123, 127, 128, 130 Kollar-Kotelly, Colleen, 335n7 Koontz, Elbert, 152–55, 167 Kubrick, Stanley, 328n12 Kushner, Jared, 173, 280 L Lagarde, Christine, 97 landmines, 127, 320n21 language translation, 197, 236, 239–40, 261 Law Enforcement and National Security (LENS), 24–26 Lay-Flurrie, Jenny, 334–35n1 Lazowska, Ed, 178, 325n11 LEADS Act (Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad), 314n9 League of Nations, 129 Lee, Kai-Fu, 269–70, 272, 273, 276 legal work, impact of technology on, 236, 237 Leibowitz, Jon, 29 LENS (Law Enforcement and National Security), 24–26 Leopard, HMS, 313n5 libraries, ancient, xiii, 309n1 Liddell, Chris, 173 Lincoln, Abraham, 10 LinkedIn, 100, 103, 126, 181, 325n18 Linux, 277 Long, Ronald, 43 LTE, 158, 162 M Macron, Emmanuel, 81, 123–24, 127 Mactaggart, Alastair, 144–49 Madison, James, 7 Maersk, 70–71 Mahabharata, The, 205 malware, 63, 68 see also cyberattacks Mamer, Louisan, 164–66 Manhattan Project, 171 Map to Prosperity, 157 Marino, Tom, 314n9 Markle Foundation, 325n18 Martin, “Smokey Joe,” 231 Martinon, David, 123 Mattis, James, 67 May, Theresa, 132, 238–39 Mayer, Marissa, 18 McCaskill, Claire, 83 McFaul, Michael, 117 McGuinness, Paddy, 56 McKinsey Global Institute, 241 Mercedes-Benz, 240, 326n31 Merck, 70 Meri, Lennart, 91 Merkel, Angela, 239 Mexico, 124 Microsoft: AccountGuard program of, 84, 85 AI ethics issues and, 199–201, 205, 218, 222, 223, 229–30, 294 AI for Earth team of, 288 antitrust cases against, xx, 12, 29, 96, 143, 148, 175–77, 291, 310n6, 335n7 Azure, 126, 140 Bing, 100, 104, 126, 140 board of directors of, 335n7 Brazil and, 48–49, 53 China and, 65, 250–52, 254–55, 259–61 Christchurch Call to Action and, 125–27 cloud commitments of, 30, 33, 292 Code.org and, 179 Cyber Defense Operations Center of, 111 Cybersecurity Tech Accord and, 119–21 data centers of, xiv–xix, 5, 14–15, 29–30, 34, 42–46, 48–56 Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) of, 78–81, 85, 111, 112, 316n2 ElectionGuard system of, 87 engineering structure at, 142 facial-recognition technology of, 213–15, 222–24, 226–27, 229–30 and FBI’s request for customer data, 31 Friday meetings of, 62 General Data Protection Regulation and, 140–43, 146–47, 294 Giant Company Software and, xviii GitHub, 100, 277 Google and, 12 government sued by, 12–13, 15, 16, 18–19, 33, 35–37, 83 housing initiative of, 186–90, 327n40 Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, 214–15 Ireland and, 42–45, 49–56 Law Enforcement and National Security (LENS) team of, 24–26 LinkedIn, 100, 103, 126, 181, 325n18 Muslim travel ban and, 173 NSA and, 1–4, 8, 13–14 Office, 84, 140, 253, 254 OneDrive, 126 open-source code and, 277–78 Patch Tuesdays of, 74 Philanthropies, 178–80 privacy legislation advocated by, 132, 146–48, 321n3 Research (MSR), 170–71, 194–95, 197, 237, 275, 328n12 Research Asia (MSRA), 255 Rural Airband Initiative of, 160–62, 166–67 Russia’s message to, 86 school voucher program of, 177 security feature development in, 111 Senior Leadership Team (SLT), 15, 62, 141, 221, 274, 307 Strontium and, 78–81, 84–85 Tay, 255–56 TechFest, 170–71 Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS) program of, 178–79 TechSpark program of, 233, 331n8 Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) of, 63, 78–79, 84 Windows, xx, 12, 29, 63–65, 203, 212, 253, 270 Word, 50, 264 Xbox, 72, 100, 126, 140, 160 military weapons, 117–18, 127, 202–6, 264, 329n29 artificial intelligence in, 202–6, 215, 216 nuclear, 116–17, 210 minimum viable product, 225–26, 296 Minority Report, 211–12 missiles, 66–67 MLATs (mutual legal assistance treaties), 47–49, 52 Mobility Fund, 158, 323n17 Moglen, Eben, 314n8 Mook, Robby, 279 Morrow, Frank, 125 MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center), 63, 78–79, 84 Munich Security Conference, 96–97, 208 Muslims, 288, 335n2 Christchurch mosque shootings, 99–100, 102, 125–26 travel ban on, 173 Myerson, Terry, 65 Myhrvold, Nathan, 194–95 Mylett, Steve, 187 N Nadella, Satya, 28–29, 62, 65, 66, 73, 115, 126–27, 141–43, 172–74, 186–88, 199, 200, 204–5, 218, 219, 221, 239–40, 252, 274, 276, 277, 289, 292 National Australia Bank, 213 National Federation for the Blind, 334n1 National Geographic Society, 161 National Health Service, 62 National Human Genome Research Institute, 213 National Institute of Standards and Technology, 221–22 nationalism, 112, 300–301 National Press Club, 29 national security: cybersecurity and, 110–11 individual freedoms vs., 9–10 National Security Council, 26 NATO, 82, 124, 204 Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence, 92, 320n19 Nazi Germany, 39, 41, 61, 90, 129 negotiations, 175 Netflix, 16, 335n7 network effects, 270 neural networks, 196–97 New Deal, 164 NewsGuard, 104–5 New York, N.Y., 245 fire horses in, 231–32, 245, 247 New York Times, 63, 65–67, 99, 118, 219–20 New York University, 333n16 New Zealand, 75, 124, 125–27, 130 Christchurch mosque shootings in, 99–100, 102, 125–26 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 127, 128, 208, 302, 303 Nimitz, USS, 203 9/11 terrorist attacks, 8–9, 71, 72 1984 (Orwell), 227 Nisbett, Richard, 258, 261–62 North Korea, 63, 64, 67–69, 71–74 missile launch of, 67 Noski, Chuck, 335n7 NotPetya, 69–72 NSA (National Security Agency), 3, 8–9, 13, 15, 73 Google and, 2, 4, 13 Microsoft and, 1–4, 8, 13–14 PRISM program of, 1–4, 8, 9, 310–11n4 Snowden and, 4–5, 8, 9, 13–14, 17–19, 25, 41 Verizon and, 2–3 WannaCry and, 63–69, 71–74 and White House meeting with tech leaders, 16–19 nuclear power, 143–44 nuclear weapons, 116–17, 210 O Obama, Barack, 15–16, 26, 53, 83, 131, 174, 179–80, 278, 279, 284 meeting with tech leaders called by, 16–19 Office, 84, 140, 253, 254 Office of Personnel, US (OPM), 251, 263 O’Mara, Margaret, 297, 335n9 OneDrive, 126 Open Data Initiative, 285 Oracle, 120 Orwell, George, 227 O’Sullivan, Kate, 119–20 Otis, James, Jr., 6–7, 311nn14–15 Ottawa Convention, 320n21 Oxford University, 95 P Paglia, Vincenzo, 208–9 Pai, Ajit, 153–54 Pakistan, 21–22 Palais des Nations, 129 Paltalk, 2 Panke, Helmut, 335n7 paralegals, 236 Paris, terrorist attacks in, 26–28 Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, 123–25, 127, 128, 300, 301 Paris Peace Forum, 123 Parscale, Brad, 280, 281 Partnership on AI, 200–201 Partovi, Hadi, 179 PAWS (Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security), 288 PBS NewsHour, 85–86 Pearl, Daniel, 21–22 Pearl Harbor attack, 10 Pelosi, Nancy, 57 Penn, Mark, 312–13n12 Pettet, Zellmer, 242–44 Petya, 69 Pew Research Center, 155–56, 323n9 phishing, 79, 83 Pickard, Vincent, 101 Pincus, Mark, 17–18 poachers, 288 Posner, Michael, 333n16 post office, 7, 192 Prague Spring, 40–41 presidential election of 2016, 81, 82, 139, 144, 157, 172, 189, 278–82, 331n8 Preska, Loretta, 314n10 Priebus, Reince, 279–80, 282 Princeton University, 13, 174, 218, 288, 314n10, 335n2 printing press, xiii, 209 PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management), 1–4, 8, 9, 310–11n4 Pritzker, Penny, 136, 137, 250 privacy, 5–6, 21, 22, 30, 39–59, 131–49, 193, 229, 289, 300, 301 artificial intelligence and, 171, 199–200, 207 California Consumer Privacy Act, 147–48 data sharing and, 282–84 differential privacy, 282–83 Facebook and, 135, 144 facial recognition and, see facial recognition Fourth Amendment and, 7–8, 14, 15, 26 General Data Protection Regulation and, 131–32, 139–43, 146–49 legislation on, 132, 146–48, 321n3 Privacy Shield and, 137–38, 300 public attitudes about, 143 public safety and, 21–37, 222 reasonable expectation of, 7–8, 34 right to, 330n24 Safe Harbor and, 133–34 search warrants and, see search warrants social media and, 145 Wilkes and, 5–6, 23 see also surveillance Privacy Shield, 137–38, 300 Private AI, 171 Progressive movement, 245 ProPublica, 197–98 Proposition 13, 146 Purdy, Abraham, 232 Q Quincy, Wash., xiv–xv, 5, 34, 42 R racial minorities, 184–85 radio, 95, 100–102, 106, 159 Radio Free Europe, 107 radiologists, 236–37 railroads, 110, 299–300 Railroads and American Law (Ely), 110 ransomware, 68 WannaCry, 63–69, 71–74, 122, 294, 300, 301 Rashid, Rick, 237, 238 Reagan, Nancy, 116 Reagan, Ronald, 23, 116, 146 Red Cross, 113, 118, 127, 320n16 Reddit, 99 Redmond, Wash., 187 Reform Government Surveillance, 16–17 regulation, 102, 143, 144, 192, 206–7, 219, 224, 266, 295–98, 300, 301, 303 of artificial intelligence, 192, 296 China and, 258 of facial recognition, 221–22, 224, 225, 228, 296 of governments, 301–2 of railroads, 299 of social media, 98, 100, 102–4, 144 Republic, Wash., 151–52, 155, 167 Republican National Committee (RNC), 279–82 Republicans, 82, 106, 172, 278–80 International Republican Institute, 84 Republic Brewing Company, 167 restaurants, fast-food, 235, 241 Ries, Eric, 225 Riley v.

…

., 152, 157 Kirkpatrick, David, 192 Kissinger, Henry, 250, 259 Kistler-Ritso, Olga, 90–92, 317n2 Klobuchar, Amy, 176 Klynge, Casper, 109, 112, 123, 127, 128, 130 Kollar-Kotelly, Colleen, 335n7 Koontz, Elbert, 152–55, 167 Kubrick, Stanley, 328n12 Kushner, Jared, 173, 280 L Lagarde, Christine, 97 landmines, 127, 320n21 language translation, 197, 236, 239–40, 261 Law Enforcement and National Security (LENS), 24–26 Lay-Flurrie, Jenny, 334–35n1 Lazowska, Ed, 178, 325n11 LEADS Act (Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad), 314n9 League of Nations, 129 Lee, Kai-Fu, 269–70, 272, 273, 276 legal work, impact of technology on, 236, 237 Leibowitz, Jon, 29 LENS (Law Enforcement and National Security), 24–26 Leopard, HMS, 313n5 libraries, ancient, xiii, 309n1 Liddell, Chris, 173 Lincoln, Abraham, 10 LinkedIn, 100, 103, 126, 181, 325n18 Linux, 277 Long, Ronald, 43 LTE, 158, 162 M Macron, Emmanuel, 81, 123–24, 127 Mactaggart, Alastair, 144–49 Madison, James, 7 Maersk, 70–71 Mahabharata, The, 205 malware, 63, 68 see also cyberattacks Mamer, Louisan, 164–66 Manhattan Project, 171 Map to Prosperity, 157 Marino, Tom, 314n9 Markle Foundation, 325n18 Martin, “Smokey Joe,” 231 Martinon, David, 123 Mattis, James, 67 May, Theresa, 132, 238–39 Mayer, Marissa, 18 McCaskill, Claire, 83 McFaul, Michael, 117 McGuinness, Paddy, 56 McKinsey Global Institute, 241 Mercedes-Benz, 240, 326n31 Merck, 70 Meri, Lennart, 91 Merkel, Angela, 239 Mexico, 124 Microsoft: AccountGuard program of, 84, 85 AI ethics issues and, 199–201, 205, 218, 222, 223, 229–30, 294 AI for Earth team of, 288 antitrust cases against, xx, 12, 29, 96, 143, 148, 175–77, 291, 310n6, 335n7 Azure, 126, 140 Bing, 100, 104, 126, 140 board of directors of, 335n7 Brazil and, 48–49, 53 China and, 65, 250–52, 254–55, 259–61 Christchurch Call to Action and, 125–27 cloud commitments of, 30, 33, 292 Code.org and, 179 Cyber Defense Operations Center of, 111 Cybersecurity Tech Accord and, 119–21 data centers of, xiv–xix, 5, 14–15, 29–30, 34, 42–46, 48–56 Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) of, 78–81, 85, 111, 112, 316n2 ElectionGuard system of, 87 engineering structure at, 142 facial-recognition technology of, 213–15, 222–24, 226–27, 229–30 and FBI’s request for customer data, 31 Friday meetings of, 62 General Data Protection Regulation and, 140–43, 146–47, 294 Giant Company Software and, xviii GitHub, 100, 277 Google and, 12 government sued by, 12–13, 15, 16, 18–19, 33, 35–37, 83 housing initiative of, 186–90, 327n40 Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, 214–15 Ireland and, 42–45, 49–56 Law Enforcement and National Security (LENS) team of, 24–26 LinkedIn, 100, 103, 126, 181, 325n18 Muslim travel ban and, 173 NSA and, 1–4, 8, 13–14 Office, 84, 140, 253, 254 OneDrive, 126 open-source code and, 277–78 Patch Tuesdays of, 74 Philanthropies, 178–80 privacy legislation advocated by, 132, 146–48, 321n3 Research (MSR), 170–71, 194–95, 197, 237, 275, 328n12 Research Asia (MSRA), 255 Rural Airband Initiative of, 160–62, 166–67 Russia’s message to, 86 school voucher program of, 177 security feature development in, 111 Senior Leadership Team (SLT), 15, 62, 141, 221, 274, 307 Strontium and, 78–81, 84–85 Tay, 255–56 TechFest, 170–71 Technology Education and Literacy in Schools (TEALS) program of, 178–79 TechSpark program of, 233, 331n8 Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) of, 63, 78–79, 84 Windows, xx, 12, 29, 63–65, 203, 212, 253, 270 Word, 50, 264 Xbox, 72, 100, 126, 140, 160 military weapons, 117–18, 127, 202–6, 264, 329n29 artificial intelligence in, 202–6, 215, 216 nuclear, 116–17, 210 minimum viable product, 225–26, 296 Minority Report, 211–12 missiles, 66–67 MLATs (mutual legal assistance treaties), 47–49, 52 Mobility Fund, 158, 323n17 Moglen, Eben, 314n8 Mook, Robby, 279 Morrow, Frank, 125 MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center), 63, 78–79, 84 Munich Security Conference, 96–97, 208 Muslims, 288, 335n2 Christchurch mosque shootings, 99–100, 102, 125–26 travel ban on, 173 Myerson, Terry, 65 Myhrvold, Nathan, 194–95 Mylett, Steve, 187 N Nadella, Satya, 28–29, 62, 65, 66, 73, 115, 126–27, 141–43, 172–74, 186–88, 199, 200, 204–5, 218, 219, 221, 239–40, 252, 274, 276, 277, 289, 292 National Australia Bank, 213 National Federation for the Blind, 334n1 National Geographic Society, 161 National Health Service, 62 National Human Genome Research Institute, 213 National Institute of Standards and Technology, 221–22 nationalism, 112, 300–301 National Press Club, 29 national security: cybersecurity and, 110–11 individual freedoms vs., 9–10 National Security Council, 26 NATO, 82, 124, 204 Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence, 92, 320n19 Nazi Germany, 39, 41, 61, 90, 129 negotiations, 175 Netflix, 16, 335n7 network effects, 270 neural networks, 196–97 New Deal, 164 NewsGuard, 104–5 New York, N.Y., 245 fire horses in, 231–32, 245, 247 New York Times, 63, 65–67, 99, 118, 219–20 New York University, 333n16 New Zealand, 75, 124, 125–27, 130 Christchurch mosque shootings in, 99–100, 102, 125–26 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 127, 128, 208, 302, 303 Nimitz, USS, 203 9/11 terrorist attacks, 8–9, 71, 72 1984 (Orwell), 227 Nisbett, Richard, 258, 261–62 North Korea, 63, 64, 67–69, 71–74 missile launch of, 67 Noski, Chuck, 335n7 NotPetya, 69–72 NSA (National Security Agency), 3, 8–9, 13, 15, 73 Google and, 2, 4, 13 Microsoft and, 1–4, 8, 13–14 PRISM program of, 1–4, 8, 9, 310–11n4 Snowden and, 4–5, 8, 9, 13–14, 17–19, 25, 41 Verizon and, 2–3 WannaCry and, 63–69, 71–74 and White House meeting with tech leaders, 16–19 nuclear power, 143–44 nuclear weapons, 116–17, 210 O Obama, Barack, 15–16, 26, 53, 83, 131, 174, 179–80, 278, 279, 284 meeting with tech leaders called by, 16–19 Office, 84, 140, 253, 254 Office of Personnel, US (OPM), 251, 263 O’Mara, Margaret, 297, 335n9 OneDrive, 126 Open Data Initiative, 285 Oracle, 120 Orwell, George, 227 O’Sullivan, Kate, 119–20 Otis, James, Jr., 6–7, 311nn14–15 Ottawa Convention, 320n21 Oxford University, 95 P Paglia, Vincenzo, 208–9 Pai, Ajit, 153–54 Pakistan, 21–22 Palais des Nations, 129 Paltalk, 2 Panke, Helmut, 335n7 paralegals, 236 Paris, terrorist attacks in, 26–28 Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace, 123–25, 127, 128, 300, 301 Paris Peace Forum, 123 Parscale, Brad, 280, 281 Partnership on AI, 200–201 Partovi, Hadi, 179 PAWS (Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security), 288 PBS NewsHour, 85–86 Pearl, Daniel, 21–22 Pearl Harbor attack, 10 Pelosi, Nancy, 57 Penn, Mark, 312–13n12 Pettet, Zellmer, 242–44 Petya, 69 Pew Research Center, 155–56, 323n9 phishing, 79, 83 Pickard, Vincent, 101 Pincus, Mark, 17–18 poachers, 288 Posner, Michael, 333n16 post office, 7, 192 Prague Spring, 40–41 presidential election of 2016, 81, 82, 139, 144, 157, 172, 189, 278–82, 331n8 Preska, Loretta, 314n10 Priebus, Reince, 279–80, 282 Princeton University, 13, 174, 218, 288, 314n10, 335n2 printing press, xiii, 209 PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management), 1–4, 8, 9, 310–11n4 Pritzker, Penny, 136, 137, 250 privacy, 5–6, 21, 22, 30, 39–59, 131–49, 193, 229, 289, 300, 301 artificial intelligence and, 171, 199–200, 207 California Consumer Privacy Act, 147–48 data sharing and, 282–84 differential privacy, 282–83 Facebook and, 135, 144 facial recognition and, see facial recognition Fourth Amendment and, 7–8, 14, 15, 26 General Data Protection Regulation and, 131–32, 139–43, 146–49 legislation on, 132, 146–48, 321n3 Privacy Shield and, 137–38, 300 public attitudes about, 143 public safety and, 21–37, 222 reasonable expectation of, 7–8, 34 right to, 330n24 Safe Harbor and, 133–34 search warrants and, see search warrants social media and, 145 Wilkes and, 5–6, 23 see also surveillance Privacy Shield, 137–38, 300 Private AI, 171 Progressive movement, 245 ProPublica, 197–98 Proposition 13, 146 Purdy, Abraham, 232 Q Quincy, Wash., xiv–xv, 5, 34, 42 R racial minorities, 184–85 radio, 95, 100–102, 106, 159 Radio Free Europe, 107 radiologists, 236–37 railroads, 110, 299–300 Railroads and American Law (Ely), 110 ransomware, 68 WannaCry, 63–69, 71–74, 122, 294, 300, 301 Rashid, Rick, 237, 238 Reagan, Nancy, 116 Reagan, Ronald, 23, 116, 146 Red Cross, 113, 118, 127, 320n16 Reddit, 99 Redmond, Wash., 187 Reform Government Surveillance, 16–17 regulation, 102, 143, 144, 192, 206–7, 219, 224, 266, 295–98, 300, 301, 303 of artificial intelligence, 192, 296 China and, 258 of facial recognition, 221–22, 224, 225, 228, 296 of governments, 301–2 of railroads, 299 of social media, 98, 100, 102–4, 144 Republic, Wash., 151–52, 155, 167 Republican National Committee (RNC), 279–82 Republicans, 82, 106, 172, 278–80 International Republican Institute, 84 Republic Brewing Company, 167 restaurants, fast-food, 235, 241 Ries, Eric, 225 Riley v.

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use by Bobbi Bly

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Columbine, Donald Trump, George Santayana, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, Joan Didion, John Nash: game theory, Network effects, placebo effect, Ralph Waldo Emerson, school vouchers, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, three-masted sailing ship

“To behold the day-break! / The little light fades the immense and DIAPHANOUS shadows, / The air tastes good to my palate.” – Walt Whitman, American poet and humanist diatribe (DIE-uh-tribe), noun A speech railing against injustice; a vehement denunciation. The editorial was a mean-spirited DIATRIBE against school vouchers written to prevent children from other towns from being sent by bus to Centerville High School. dichotomy (die-KOT-uh-me), noun Division into two parts, especially into two seemingly contradictory parts. A DICHOTOMY between good and evil is present in every human heart. didactic (dye-DAK-tik), adjective Designed, made, or tailored for purposes of education, self-improvement, or ethical betterment.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

SIFRY In 2007, Steve Urquhart, the Republican chairman of the Utah House of Representatives Rules Committee, launched a wiki called Politicopia, where he promised to post the text of pending legislation before his committee and invited the public in to comment. Thousands of people did, and Urquhart credits the dialogue that resulted in affecting the outcome on several pending bills, including one on school vouchers and another on abortion. Commenting on the passage of the voucher legislation, Urquhart said, “For six years we’ve been chasing our tail on this bill, and today the bill passed in very large part because of Politicopia.” He explained how: “When private dialogue was made public, the main area of criticism was publicly revealed to be fictitious.”15 Another valuable experiment that also happened in 2007 was something called “Legislation 2.0.”

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

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

“Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Obama could run so we could all fly”: that was the story in a sentence, and it was so convincing to a lot of people in my generation—including me—that we were slow to notice how little it meant to a lot of people under thirty-five. Or we heard but didn’t understand and dismissed them with irritable mental gestures. We told them they had no idea what the crime rate was like in 1994. Smart Americans pointed to affirmative action and children’s health insurance. Free Americans touted enterprise zones and school vouchers. Of course the kids didn’t buy it. In their eyes “progress” looked like a thin upper layer of Black celebrities and professionals, who carried the weight of society’s expectations along with its prejudices, and below them, lousy schools, overflowing prisons, dying neighborhoods. The parents didn’t really buy it either, but we had learned to ignore injustice on this scale as adults ignore so much just to get through.

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

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

Among its off-the-deep-end arguments were that corporations should not make charitable donations (lest stockholders be defrauded by this economic irrationality); that the Post Office should be sold off; that licensing procedures for professionals like doctors should be banned (the market would take care of the problem of quackery on its own)—and that the government should disburse educational “vouchers” to force public schools to compete in the marketplace. It seemed only a matter of time before Friedman and Goldwater should meet. Friedman first wrote Goldwater with a policy suggestion in late 1960, but he received only a perfunctory acknowledgment in return. After the professor bludgeoned Goldwater’s Senate adversary Joe Clark, however, Goldwater proposed a meeting.

…

The best measure of a politician’s electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people’s desires, but how well he could tap their fears. This is a book, also, about how that story began. Scratch a conservative today—a think-tank bookworm at Washington’s Heritage Foundation or Milwaukee’s Bradley Foundation (the people whose studies and position papers blazed the trails for ending welfare as we know it, for the school voucher movement, for the discussion over privatizing Social Security) ; a door-knocking church lady pressing pamphlets into her neighbors’ palms about partial-birth abortion; the owner of a small or large business sitting across the table from a lobbyist plotting strategy on how to decimate corporate tax rates; an organizer of a training center for aspiring conservative activists or journalists; Republican precinct workers, fund-raisers, county chairs, state chairs, presidential candidates, congressmen, senators, even a Supreme Court justice—and the story comes out.

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

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

Chapter 7 • Milton Friedman163 Attempts to follow particular measures of the money supply in the UK in the 1980s ended after it was shown that direct and predictable links between the growth of the money supply and the rate of inflation broke down. This form of monetarism was replaced first by exchange rate targeting and then by inflation targeting. Some of Friedman’s unorthodox libertarian policy proposals – such as school vouchers and a volunteer army – have gained mainstream acceptance while versions of a negative income tax have found a home in the UK’s Working Tax Credit and the US Earned Income Tax Credit. Others, such as the legalisation of drugs and prostitution, may be ideas whose time is yet to come. Verdict: credits and debits Friedman vies for the title of the most influential economist of the late 20th century (probably with Samuelson).

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

The nine food bank presidents who comprised the rest of the working group did not all greet the idea of using markets to fix their not-really-broken system with a standing ovation. It may not have helped that the pitch came from a group of University of Chicago economists, whose ranks include libertarian extremists like Milton Friedman (of school-voucher fame) and Gene “Efficient Markets” Fama. Prendergast recalls that at some point during the preliminary discussions, John Arnold, then president of the West Michigan Food Bank, stood up and announced, “Look, I’ve got to tell you guys. I’m a card-carrying member of the American Socialist Party.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, late fees, medical malpractice, obamacare, off-the-grid, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, working poor

But it was a strong sense of duty, so Mom and I went to Mamaw’s for the night. I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

This shift does not mean that the majority professional opinion has abandoned markets, however. Most economists consider markets as generally a better way where possible than direct government intervention of organising the economy, still often advocate market solutions (such as carbon trading or school vouchers) for policy problems, remain convinced about the broad merits of trade liberalisation, and so on. Such instincts are generally justified by evidence based on specific applied research. If the evidence suggests an active government role, economists will recommend it; and indeed in the decade since the GFC there has been a widespread shift in sentiment in this direction.

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit by William Keegan

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, congestion charging, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, gig economy, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Just-in-time delivery, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, transaction costs, tulip mania, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

By 1988, he was at Health, where, from the left of the party or not, she found him ‘extremely effective … tough in dealing with vested interests and trade unions, direct and persuasive in his exposition of government policy’. But when he got to Education, Clarke disappointed his political mistress with his firm belief in state provision and his public dismissal of her advocacy of a pet proposal of the right’s – education vouchers. In those previous departments Clarke was in many ways blazing the trail for New Labour’s policy of trying to make public services more efficient and more responsive to public demand. He was an active reformer and maintains in The Chancellors’ Tales that the offer of the chancellorship by John Major was ‘a bit of a surprise to me’.

Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

But the point is to make people afraid that there’s an educational crisis coming. The second thing is, Make that crisis come by underfunding, Not enough school construction, low salaries and so on. Then propose alternatives, which sound at the beginning like good ideas: charter schools, magnet schools, vouchers, who could be against that? You gradually chip away, making the public system less and less functional, less and less popular because it’s nonfunctional, producing propaganda about how awful it is, offering alternatives which begin small and end up where the big investment firms are expecting it to.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

It has put its pension system on a sound foundation, replacing a ­defined-benefit system with a defined-contribution one and making automatic adjustments for longer life expectancy. It has reinvented its state as well as reducing its size. The Swedes have done more than anyone else in the world—certainly more than the cautious ­Americans—to embrace Milton Friedman’s idea of educational vouchers, allowing parents to send their children to whatever school they choose and ­inviting private companies or voluntary groups to establish “free” schools, that is, schools that are paid for but not run by the state. In Stockholm half the schoolchildren go to independent schools. In the country as a whole almost half have opted out of their local schools (so they go either to another one, farther away, or to an independent school).

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Community committees should demand competition in education. The issue is what is in the best interest of individual students and the public, not entrenched school board members, teachers’ unions, and the educational bureaucracy. This triumvirate always oppose school choice, including charter schools, vouchers for private and parochial schools, etc., because they oppose competition. Parents and other taxpayers should insist that tax dollars follow the student, especially now given the radicalization and politicization of our public school systems, and the abuse of power demonstrated by many teachers’ unions during the coronavirus pandemic. 8.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, continuous integration, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, endowment effect, equity premium, feminist movement, financial engineering, fixed income, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, index fund, invisible hand, late fees, libertarian paternalism, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, medical malpractice, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, pension reform, presumed consent, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Zipcar

International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 9 (1991): 47–68. Perry, Ronald W., Michael K. Lindell, and Marjorie R. Greene. Evacuation Planning in Emergency Management. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1981. Peterson, Paul E., William Howell, Patrick Wolf, and David E. Campbell. “School Vouchers: Results from Randomized Experiments.” In The Economics of School Choice, ed. Caroline Hoxby, 107–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “D Is for Daunting: The Medicare Drug Program.” November 6, 2005, Health section, Five-star ed. Polikoff, Nancy D. “We Will Get What We Ask For: Why Legalizing Gay and Lesbian Marriage Will Not ‘Dismantle the Legal Structure of Gender in Every Marriage.’”

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

When the department began to tighten up on the rules for such loans, Donald Graham, the Washington Post’s CEO, led an intense campaign to protect his investment, hiring high-priced lobbyists and editorializing against the tighter rules in the paper. One result was that in the 2011 budget standoff between President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner, the president acquiesced to Boehner’s demand that a District of Columbia’s policy of refusing to provide local tax money for private school vouchers be overruled.15 Even more profit may lie in the reformers’ ultimate goal of making charter schools the model for U.S. primary and secondary education. Charter schools are supposed to be community based, run by boards of parents and local residents and therefore more responsive to neighborhood needs than “faraway” city school boards.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

It found that Republican affiliation correlated with the length of time that a person had been in a retirement plan. After 10 years those in a 401(k) plan were 7 per cent more likely to support a corporate tax cut, 9 per cent more like to oppose a minimum wage, 10 per cent more likely to support school vouchers, and 17 per cent more likely to support social security privatization than non-investors. They were also more likely to support free trade, death-tax reduction and market-based energy policies. Those owning stocks directly, as opposed to indirectly via pension funds, developed a capitalist ideology even more rapidly.23 A Gallup poll in 1999 found that shareowners were more likely to support cuts in capital gains tax, as did Rasmussen Research, which found that the result held for all demographic groups.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

Conservatives, Horowitz says, believe in process and different points of view. But the leftists just wanted to hire another Marxist. At another university, a prospective professor says that he was about to get a job as an Asian history professor but the offer was rescinded after he let slip that he supported school vouchers. When Horowitz was a Marxist he was never singled out like that. Professors, he says, should never reveal their political perspectives. After all, doctors don’t have politics; they’re professionals. But professors have the audacity to put political cartoons on their doors, scaring away timid conservatives.

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

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

We also need to find ways of publicizing school-performance assessments in a manner that is both comparable across schools and easily understood by parents. Failing schools need to be given initial support to improve, but not multiple chances to do so. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 goes some way toward these goals but needs to be strengthened. Finally, parental choice can help bring the discipline of competition to schools. School voucher programs, if properly administered, can allow students to vote with their feet and prevent failing schools from holding talented but poor students hostage. Charter schools can also help. These are quasi-public schools that have more freedom from regulation than public schools in return for greater accountability.

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

NEVER SAY: School choice INSTEAD SAY: Parental choice INSTEAD SAY: Equal opportunity in education NEVER SAY: Vouchers INSTEAD SAY: Opportunity scholarships Thanks to an effective advertising campaign by national and state teacher unions, Americans remain at best evenly split over whether they support “school choice.” But they are heavily in favor of “giving parents the right to choose the schools that are right for their children,” and there is almost universal support for “equal opportunity in education.” “Vouchers,” seen as depriving public schools of necessary dollars, have even less support than the principle of school choice. However, “opportunity scholarships” do have widespread backing, as they are perceived to be a reward for good students to get a good education. Here again, the words you use determine the support you will receive.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

He also opposed direct government involvement in the economy, highlighting the detailed regulation of industry, the control of radio and television, toll roads, public housing and national parks, and the legal prohibition of carrying mail for profit as examples of taking government too far. Friedman was also in favour of the legalization of drugs, school vouchers, health saving accounts and an end to conscription in peacetime. In short, Friedman advocated a limited role for government, countering objections with: ‘Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.’10 For Friedman, each government policy needed to be carefully analysed for its impact on the economy.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

He also opposed direct government involvement in the economy, highlighting the detailed regulation of industry, the control of radio and television, toll roads, public housing and national parks, and the legal prohibition of carrying mail for profit as examples of taking government too far. Friedman was also in favour of the legalization of drugs, school vouchers, health saving accounts and an end to conscription in peacetime. In short, Friedman advocated a limited role for government, countering objections with: ‘Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.’10 For Friedman, each government policy needed to be carefully analysed for its impact on the economy.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, basic income, benefit corporation, big-box store, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, government statistician, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, job automation, Kickstarter, land bank, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

They might want to think about expanding programs like the federally funded Race to the Top, in which states compete to create templates for new learning environments that merit the infusion of extra dollars from the feds. They might want to push legislation such as that championed, so far without success, by Denise Juneau, Montana’s energetic superintendent of education, mandating that all students remain in high school until they turn 18. They might want to argue the merits of charter schools, or school vouchers, both of which have engendered spirited, frequently overheated, debate in recent years. They might want to emulate Oregon’s recent efforts to create an all-encompassing education strategy that goes from preschool to higher education, with an oversight board empowered to shift resources into particular settings as the need demands.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

‘Well, then everyone despises the people at the level below, and will do everything they can to get to the level above.’ Another parent describes it as ‘educational war’. The middle layer – the co-payment schools – are the key players in this battle. Introduced in the 1980s the co-payment policy provides parents with an educational voucher, which can be ‘spent’ with a school of the parents’ choice; these vouchers are then used by the schools to claim a monthly payment from the government, on top of which they are able to charge additional fees. The SIMCE system was introduced at the same time to provide a transparent measure of each school’s performance.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Kaitlin Mulhere, “In the Face of Colossal Cuts,” Inside Higher Ed, April 27, 2015, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/27/anxiety-over-massive-proposed-cuts-louisianas-colleges-felt-across-state. 95“explore options and ramifications of ending the Desegregation Order” See CSRS, Southwest Louisiana Regional Impact Study (accessed August 4, 2015), 121, http://www.gogroupswla.com/Content/Uploads/gogroupswla.com/files/SWLA%20Regional%20Impact%20Study_Final.pdf. The U.S. Department of Justice has listed twenty-five un-desegregated schools on its Civil Rights Division’s “Open Desegregation Cast List.” And it has held up a school voucher program in an attempt to force desegregation—locking children into failing schools, critics charge. Since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, desegregation of public schools has been legally mandatory. But today schools remain very separate and unequal. More than two million black students attend schools where 90 percent of the student body is made up of minority students.

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

We have to make sure that all children have adequate nutrition and health care—not only do we have to provide the resources, but if necessary, we have to incentivize parents, by coaching or training them or even rewarding them for being good caregivers. The right says that money isn’t the solution. They’ve chased reforms like charter schools and private-school vouchers, but most of these efforts have shown ambiguous results at best. Giving more money to poor schools would help. So would summer and extracurricular programs that enrich low-income students’ skills. Finally, it is unconscionable that a rich country like the United States has made access to higher education so difficult for those at the bottom and middle.

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

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

Democracy in a Box Packaged interventions come in all shapes and sizes: iPads to supply children’s education; condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS; and you may have seen ads from organizations such as Oxfam and Heifer International asking you to donate a goat – great as food and fertilizer source for a poor farming family. But, as with microcredit, packaged interventions aren’t limited to physical goods. They can be abstract ideas or institutional structures: school vouchers, charter schools, home mortgages, elections. Elections are hailed as the means to achieve democracy, and US foreign policy seems fixated on having other countries hold them. Few events provoke the media frenzy as a nation’s first election. Recent events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, though, remind us how little voting accomplishes in and of itself.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

I have powerful childhood memories of my father, who has no great affection for the environment but could squeeze a nickel out of a stone, stalking around the house closing the closet doors and telling us that he was not paying to air-condition our closets. Meanwhile, American public education operates a lot more like North Korea than Silicon Valley. I will not wade into the school voucher debate, but I will discuss one striking phenomenon related to incentives in education that I have written about for The Economist.4 The pay of American teachers is not linked in any way to performance; teachers’ unions have consistently opposed any kind of merit pay. Instead, salaries in nearly every public school district in the country are determined by a rigid formula based on experience and years of schooling, factors that researchers have found to be generally unrelated to performance in the classroom.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

The human right of a parent to send their child to a state-funded selective school has already been curtailed. Why shouldn’t the state change the character of non-state schools? Should the human-rights bar prove insurmountable perhaps we should consider turning all our schools into fee-paying private institutions, issuing the poorest pupils with school vouchers which they could spend at Eton, Harrow and Winchester or any school they chose. By sending everyone to public schools run by companies like Capita and G4, no one would unfairly benefit from a privileged education and the taxpayer would save tens of billions of pounds a year in funding primary and secondary schools.

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

She is lambasting the very man actually leading the movement for economic liberalism, for which in fact she was primarily the fiction propagandist, its Maksim Gorki. Part of why Rand hated Hayek is explained by Greg Johnson. For Hayek, government intervention in the economy is out. “Redistribution, however, is quite another matter. . . . For instance, social safety-nets, subsidies for the arts, school-vouchers, and taxes on luxuries and ‘sins’ do not seek to alter or replace the market. Rather, they merely re-direct demand within it.” Though Hayek would not necessarily support all such measures, he would argue that they do not inherently menace the survival of capitalism. So Hayek does not completely rule out the government reallocating resources by political means, an absolute no-no for Rand.

Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell

A Pattern Language, business intelligence, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Firefox, longitudinal study, school vouchers, seminal paper, social software, social web, sorting algorithm, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, web application

Your eyes have probably followed the changes across the rows, noting changes through the year, and comparisons up and down the columns are easy, too. The example shown in Figure 7-48 uses the grid to encode two independent variables—ethnicity/religion and income—into the state-by-state geographic data. The dependent variable, encoded by color, is the estimated level of public support for school vouchers (orange representing support, green opposition). The resultant graphic is very rich and nuanced, telling countless stories about Americans’ attitudes toward the topic. Figure 7-48. Geographic and demographic small-multiples chart (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/07/hard_sell_for_b.html) A more abstract two-dimensional trellis plot, also called a coplot in William Cleveland’s Visualizing Data, is shown in Figure 7-49.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

That’s more than $400,000 for every man, woman, and child living in the city before the hurricane, or more than $200,000 for every household in the much larger New Orleans metropolitan area. Surely the people of New Orleans would have been better off just getting that money directly, in the form of checks or housing and school vouchers, than for great gobs of cash to go to contractors. If it wasn’t for the durability of its homes, the city would have been much smaller a long time ago. No matter how much we all love New Orleans jazz, it never made sense to spend more than $100 billion putting infrastructure in a place that lost its economic rationale long ago.

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

“We’ve trained more superintendents than any other group in America,” says Broad. “We have placed fifty-seven MBAs with experience into large urban schools. We feel good about that.” Meanwhile, in New York City, hedge fund manager Bruce Kovner (2006 net worth: $3 billion) is (like Ted Forstmann) deeply involved with education vouchers as well as in creating small, independent charter schools. Kovner sees competition and freedom of choice as a way for children and their families to break out of huge, crime-ridden, dead-end schools. “More than one out of every three hundred people in the United States is in New York City public schools,” says Kovner.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Manifestly, money makes a difference: witness the dominance that Eton, a school for the rich, has over British public life. Equally clearly, private, non-profit schools have no problem delivering a good education. So one way of ensuring there are Etons for everyone would be to provide parents with generous education vouchers, with top-ups for kids from underprivileged backgrounds. That way schools would be motivated to attract them and then have the resources to provide them with better education. Paying higher salaries to attract better teachers would help; as would valuing teaching more highly as a profession; perhaps one would lead to the other.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

The requirement to involve a majority imposes massive transaction costs between you and achieving what in all likelihood is a relatively straightforward and rational goal. Milton Friedman discussed the merits of the economic, as opposed to the political, mode of expression in advancing his proposal for school vouchers in Capitalism and Freedom: Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible. In general they can now take this step only by changing their place of residence. For the rest, they can express their views only though cumbrous political channels.5 Albert 0.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

Harold also found that his new colleagues shared a materialistic mind-set. Both liberals and conservatives gravitated toward economic explanations for any social problem and generally came up with solutions to this problem that involved money. Some conservatives argued for child–tax credits to restore marriage, low-tax enterprise zones to combat urban poverty, and school vouchers to improve the education system. Liberals emphasized the other side of the fiscal ledger, spending programs. They tried to direct more dollars to fix broken schools. They expanded student-aid subsidies to increase college-completion rates. Both sides assumed there was a direct relationship between improving material conditions and solving problems.

Anarchy State and Utopia by Robert Nozick

distributed generation, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Menlo Park, moral hazard, night-watchman state, Norman Mailer, Pareto efficiency, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, rent control, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Yogi Berra

But since it would have no right to forbid private entrepreneurs from doing the same, why think the state will have any more success in attracting customers in this than in any other competitive business? f Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chap. 6. Friedman’s school vouchers, of course, allow a choice about who is to supply the product, and so differ from the protection vouchers imagined here. g Unfortunately, too few models of the structure of moral views have been specified heretofore, though there are surely other interesting structures. Hence an argument for a side-constraint structure that consists largely in arguing against an end-state maximization structure is inconclusive, for these alternatives are not exhaustive.

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

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

Perhaps for that reason, even some of the most suppression-heavy counterinsurgencies in history made some efforts to provide g.20 To understand the substantive intuition for why g complements m, think of residents of three villages in Colombia.21 In the first, a father is converted to supporting the government by a program that provides welfare payments and school vouchers. He may want to help the government take control of his village, but that is difficult because the only guns he sees in the streets are in the hands of FARC guerrillas. A tip is unlikely, because he can’t imagine what the government forces would do with it. In the second village the government spends the same amount on troops, rather than on welfare and schools, so an elderly woman sees government forces moving in, somewhat replacing the FARC.

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

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

He goes so far to say that most observers agree on this, and that to achieve modernity and progress we would follow a natural tendency for power to gravitate to the state and be taken away from those who hold private property. With privatization reemerging in the late 20th century, affecting prisons, security forces, port administration, Medicare drug plans, universities (funding crowded out by endowments), and soon public schools (vouchers) or social security, he laments that this favorable trend began to reverse decades ago.10 The folly of this view is that privatization and big government are bedfellows. Once government gets to the size that it is involved in nearly every industry and aspect of our lives, people are naturally going to engage with it to shape outcomes.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

Betsy DeVos, who eventually became the chairwoman of Michigan’s Republican Party, was said to be every bit as politically ambitious as her husband, if not more so. With her support, in 2002 Dick DeVos ceased managing Amway in order to devote more time to his political career. The results, though, were dismal. The DeVos family spent over $2 million in 2000 on a Michigan school voucher referendum that was defeated by 68 percent of the voters. The family then spent $35 million in 2006 on Dick DeVos’s unsuccessful bid to become the state’s governor. In their zeal to implement their conservative vision, few issues were more central to the DeVos family’s mission than eradicating restraints on political spending.

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

Instead, I have advocated changes that I think would work if they were implemented but that I know are politically impossible—replacing all welfare and income transfer programs with a universal basic income, legal defense funds to support systematic civil disobedience to the federal government, and universal education vouchers, among others. Valued Places and the Four Wellsprings for Human Flourishing However, I do have beliefs about policy implications more sweepingly defined. Readers who don’t know what they are have an ample choice of sources. I’ve touched on them in all but a few of the books I’ve written from Losing Ground on, most comprehensively in In Pursuit (1988).

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

The Bergers advocated a state that would respect "private preferences" instead of attempting to remodel the family according to preconceived theories of child psychology and moral development. The state's responsibility for children ended with adequate nutrition, health care, and education; and even these were more likely to be assured by the market than by an elaborate welfare state. A system of educational vouchers, for example, would provide families with a range of institutional alternatives and thereby introduce market forces into the "monopolistic situation" created by a uniform system of public schools. The best way to assure moral order and economic progress, in short, was to curb the power of the new class

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

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

In nineteenth-century London, consumer groups were formed by propertied householders against private monopolies in gas and water. In 1980s–’90s India, the frontier of consumer politics was bad public services. One reason choice appeared so attractive as an instrument of social welfare was that most of the poor had been let down by state schools and power stations; Pradeep Mehta, CUTS’ crusading director, has proposed school vouchers, so the poor can pick their school, instead of sitting in a classroom with no teacher at all. In the 1990s, critics across the globe attacked neo-liberalism for shrinking public life. Privatization, it was said, reduced public-minded citizens to self-centred customers. That argument was the privilege of affluent nations that went to bed without having to worry whether there would be water and electricity in the morning.