single-payer health

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pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

The plan would ensure that everyone has access to quality health care without going bankrupt from accessing it. And despite the plan’s audacious goals, it has attracted attention and support from all over the Democratic party. As I write this, candidates for the 2020 Democratic party presidential nomination are endorsing single-payer health care, with Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker staking their campaigns on the need for a single-payer health system. What would federally guaranteed health care mean for those of us trying to shed our meritocratic system? Most importantly, it would eliminate one of the central constraints on young people as they work to figure out which life to lead.

The Republican attitude toward government guarantees of education and health care went without saying; the Democrats, meanwhile, were content to pursue piecemeal solutions like Obamacare and vague talk of student loan forgiveness. Respectable national politicians did not associate themselves with pie-in-the-sky proposals like single-payer health insurance and free college for all. But times have changed. As I write this, the prospective candidates for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 election have just begun jockeying for position, with candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren already hard at work raising their profiles and staking out their policy positions.

(Many of those working in that capacity would come on, in such a system, as administrators in the new nationalized system, and any implementation of such a plan would involve placing those whose jobs have been eliminated into other productive employment.) But it certainly does not appear that we’re ready for full nationalization. There has been exciting progress in the realm of health care recently, though. Long dismissed as a pipe dream, a single-payer health insurance system is now being debated by many of the most prominent members of the Democratic party. In a single-payer system, government agencies fill the role currently played by health insurance companies, arranging payments of doctors, determining fees for patients, and working to responsibly divvy up scarce health care resources.


pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

I do think that we can make inroads and peel some of the low-information GOP voters off from that party, but as a leftist I understand that the basic task ahead of me is to turn liberals into leftists, and to help them change their orientation from symbol and language toward the concrete and material realities of our economic and political systems. Surely there are some affluent liberals who would, when push comes to shove, act in their own economic best interest and support a stingier, lower-tax system than the kind that would make single-payer health care and universal pre-K possible. But in general, such people represent the lowest-hanging fruit. If they’re more interested in putting up Black Lives Matter signs than in building a coalition that serves all working people, it’s only because of the strange and unfortunate cultural moment they find themselves in.

As the American sociologist and left activist Todd Gitlin once wrote, “If there is no people, only peoples, there is no left.” 8 TO FIGHT FOR EVERYONE I’m a Marxist, and though a fairly unorthodox one at this point, I would still love to see a Marxist revolution—you know, an international movement of workers rising up and taking control of the political and economic systems, distributing resources and labor based on need and organized under the principle of shared ownership of the productive apparatus of society. This appears to be an unrealistic dream, for now, so I’m left to piece together a set of lefty policy preferences that I can live with, the same as anyone else—a child tax credit, far more muscular laws protecting labor organizing, single-payer health insurance, reparations for slavery, and so on. Anyone can give you a list of political goals, and whether they succeed or not is usually out of our hands. This chapter is not going to be a list of policies that I want to see implemented or laws that I want to see passed—not predominately, at least.

And they too will have their say. This will, naturally, be viewed as an endorsement of incrementalism, of business as usual, as a denial of the possibility of revolution, of centrism. But that perspective is incorrect. I believe in the possibility of transformative change in my own lifetime. True single-payer health insurance in the United States, typically called Medicare for All, appears like a distant dream. The private health insurance industry naturally opposes it, as if it was passed it would mean the end of private insurance. (It is possible that we could pass single-payer and the health insurance industry would hang around, acting as an intermediary between the government and the people getting health care, as it does with Medicare today; this would be a depressing but profoundly American turn of events.)


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

But we should bring it into education reform. In a single-payer health-care plan, the federal government provides coverage for all U.S. citizens and legal residents. Patients don’t go to a government doctor—they just have the government pay the bill. And that’s how it would work with education. In a single-payer education plan, the federal government, in conjunction with the states, would provide an education allotment for every parent of a K–12 child. Parents would then be free to enroll their child in the school of their choice. In a single-payer health-care plan, all citizens would be free to select the physician and hospital of their choice.

In a single-payer health-care plan, all citizens would be free to select the physician and hospital of their choice. And, unlike in our education system, no one backing single-payer health care ever suggested that patients can see only a doctor in their own district or can be operated on only at the hospital down the street. If we don’t hold our health hostage to the value of our property, why do we do this with our children’s education? The annual educational cost per child—equalized for urban and suburban school districts across each state—would come from current education funding sources. When it comes to quality control, in health care the guidelines incorporated by Medicare are used to manage the quality of health-care services.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

But it was the news media’s attitude toward yet a third politician, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, that best revealed the peculiar politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers. To refresh your memory, the Vermont senator is an independent who likes to call himself a democratic socialist. He ran for the nomination on a platform of New Deal–style economic interventions such as single-payer health insurance, a regulatory war on big banks, and free tuition at public universities. Sanders was well to the left of where modern Democratic presidential candidates ordinarily stand, and in most elections he would have been dismissed as a marginal figure, more petrified wood than presidential timber.

There is the admiration for consensus, the worship of pragmatism and bipartisanship, the contempt for populist outcry, the repeated equating of dissent with partisan disloyalty. And think also of the loser ideas this pragmatism engendered: the cheers for TARP, the indignant refusal to question the DNC, the dismissal of single-payer health care as a preposterous dream. Why are worshipers of competence often so incompetent? What I am describing, of course, is the ideology of the professional class, of sound-minded East Coast strivers, fresh out of Princeton or Harvard, eagerly quoting as “authorities” their peers in the other professions, whether economists at MIT or analysts at Credit Suisse or political scientists at Brookings.


pages: 373 words: 80,248

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

You cannot, in most instances, be a viable candidate without their blessing and money. These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential Debates (a private organization), determine who gets to speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge, from universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care to Wall Street bailouts to NAFTA. If you do not follow the corporate script, you become as marginal and invisible as Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, or Cynthia McKinney. This is why most Democrats opposed Pennsylvania Democratic House Representative John Murtha’s call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq—something that would dry up profits for companies like Halliburton—and supported continued funding for the war.

It is why the party opposed an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. It is why corporatist politicians opposed a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872, which allows mineral companies to plunder federal land for profit. It is why they did not back the single-payer health-care bill House Resolution 676, sponsored by Representatives Kucinich and John Conyers. It is why so many politicians advocate nuclear power. It is why many backed the class-action “reform” bill—the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA)—that was part of a large lobbying effort by financial firms.


pages: 389 words: 81,596

Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required by Kristy Shen, Bryce Leung

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy low sell high, call centre, car-free, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, do what you love, Elon Musk, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, follow your passion, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, Ponzi scheme, risk tolerance, risk/return, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, the rule of 72, working poor, Y2K, Zipcar

Expat Insurance But now I’d like to talk about my solution. Meaning, this is what we do for health insurance. It may surprise many readers that we have to do anything at all. After all, we are Canadian. Aren’t we supposed to have a gold-plated government-run single-payer health care system at our disposal? Surprisingly, no! Canadians are only eligible for our gold-plated government-run single-payer health care system if they live in Canada. Once we left Ontario for more than two years, we lost our health insurance. That’s right. We were faced with the same flop-sweat-inducing terror of being uninsured as our American friends.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

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

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

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made economic inequality one of the cornerstones of his unexpectedly popular campaign: “Unchecked growth—especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent—is absurd … Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for our people.” Sanders mentioned free college tuition and single-payer health care as important initiatives in this regard.12 At the same time that Americans seem to be grasping for answers to the problem of inequality, the history of American beliefs about, and policies toward, inequality remains understudied.13 In one of the few exceptions to this rule, Securing the Fruits of Labor (1998), James L.

As the United States and the Soviet Union adopted Cold War stances, even those Americans who had favored some degree of central planning during the 1930s, and particularly during World War II, backed off. Now it was widely believed that government intervention in the economy led to totalitarianism, and that economic freedom was a necessary condition for political freedom.4 Single-payer health insurance and public pensions were rejected in favor of employer-provided benefits. But later, as American industries downsized or moved overseas in the 1970s, health care and retirement would be jeopardized.5 As inequality decreased and the economy grew, prosperous America could afford political concern for “pockets of poverty” in inner cities and Appalachia.


I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business climate, corporate governance, East Village, fixed income, glass ceiling, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, six sigma, VA Linux, Y2K, zero-sum game

When Bernie Sanders campaigned for the presidency in 2016, I’m afraid he got a lot of college kids to believe that capitalism is bad and that America is headed, or should be headed, toward something that, in my mind, resembles socialism: Guaranteed income. Free college tuition. Single-payer health care. I disagree. Strongly. Guaranteed income: Where’s the incentive to do more, or to do better, if the money you get is detached from the work you do and the effort you put into it? Free tuition: Sounds great, but where’s that money going to come from? Single-payer health care: How are you going to feel about going to a hospital with a serious condition when you have no choice about where to go? I disagree with socialism not (as you might believe) because I’m a rich guy trying to hold on to my money.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

The ultimate idea, promoted in some European countries, is that a certain number of hours would constitute a total paid work life, with considerable flexibility around when the hours are worked. REMOVING THE BIG OBSTACLE TO WORK SHARING Of course, one additional public policy change would help make work sharing possible. It is single-payer health care, which would relieve the cost of health care provision for American employers. Because health care is so expensive, businesses find it more cost-effective to hire fewer workers and work them longer than pay benefits for more employees. The cost of employer-financed health care is the single most important factor in reducing the international competitiveness of American firms.

See social norms Curing Affluenza (video), 185 D dead zones, 105–6 debt, 18–21 DeWitt, Calvin, 132, 195–96 discontent advertising and, 42, 157, 159 dietary, 120–21 malls, 13, 14 market values and, 52–53 material wealth and, 24, 39, 115–17 self-esteem and, 123–24 sex, 121–22 social isolation and, 64–66, 68–71 throw-away society and, 49–50 See also fulfillment Doherty, William, 47–48 Dominguez, Joe, 179–81 Donovan, Webster, 107–8 Don’t Buy It (website), 219–20 Douglas, Tommy, 228 Dowie, Mark, 164–65 downshifters, 181, 185–86 Dungan, Nathan, 219–20 Dunning, David, 124 Durning, Alan, 95–96, 204 E Earth in Balance (Gore), 2 Earth Institutes, 186 ecological footprint, 96–97, 241 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx), 135–36 economics dissatisfaction and, 120 and the environment, 170 the G.I. Bill, 147, 149 globalization, 87–88 income inequality, 82–84 poverty, 82–83, 84–87 progress and, 3–4, 7 saving money and, 21–22 of scale, 66–67 single-payer health care, 228 sustainability and, 246, 247 taxes, 229–30 voluntary simplicity and, 232–33 workweek reduction and, 227 See also social class ecophobia, 192 education commercialization, 59–61, 231 Edwards, Felicia, 86 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 50, 85 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 149 Electronic Gaming Monthly (magazine), 58 Elgin, Duane, 183, 187 employment.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

He famously ran against the left wing of his own party, flying back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged inmate and publicly denouncing the rapper Sister Souljah. He worked with congressional Republicans to slash welfare and balance the federal budget. During his second term, he proudly declared that “the era of big government is over.” Health care offers an even starker example. In 1965, a Democratic president created a massive, single-payer health-care system for the nation’s elderly. But as liberal as Medicare was in both conception and execution, it received seventy Republican votes in the House as well as thirteen Republican votes in the Senate. Obamacare, by contrast, was modeled off Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts and built atop many Republican ideas;V it relied on private insurers for the bulk of its coverage expansion and ended up sacrificing its public option.

But it doesn’t beget extremism. We often assume that voters and political systems that split the difference are less extreme than those that don’t, but this idea proves incoherent upon a moment’s inspection. In 1965, most Senate Republicans joined with the Democratic Party to create Medicare, a single-payer health-care system for the elderly. In 2010, not a single congressional Republican voted for Obamacare, a health-care plan based on the system Republican governor Mitt Romney designed in Massachusetts. Under any definition, the 2010 system was more sorted and polarized than the 1965 system—opinions were better aligned by party, and fewer politicians found themselves in the middle.


pages: 124 words: 39,011

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It by Robert B. Reich

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, benefit corporation, business cycle, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, electricity market, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, job automation, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Too often, progressives become obsessed with one particular issue that becomes “their” fight, to the exclusion of everything else. Don’t get me wrong. It’s fine to fight for more efficient fuels or against climate change, or both; good to be concerned about human rights abuses or to push for gay rights or reproductive rights; worthwhile to mobilize around the needs of children, a single-payer health-care system, or cuts in military spending. But don’t be so mesmerized by any single issue—and don’t allow others to become so single-minded about their own fights—that we fail to join together on the bigger stuff that’s making it harder for the voices of average Americans to be heard on all of these issues and others: the growing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top; the increasing clout of global corporations and Wall Street; and the corruption of our democracy.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

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

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

It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who in 1961 tried to block the precursor to Medicare for elderly Americans, decrying it as socialism. He framed his outrage as an attack on doctors’ freedoms—while working as a spokesman for the American Medical Association, then run by Nancy Reagan’s dad. The AMA remains an opponent of single-payer health care, or Medicare for All, even as it enjoys widespread public support today. If Medicare were enacted, the future president warned, “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like when men were free.” What often gets lost in the criticism of the War on Drugs is the fact that Nixon began his version of the war using treatment, not incarceration, as his primary weapon, a little-known story recounted in journalist Michael Massing’s 1998 book, The Fix.

American hospitals and clinics had been founded as acts of compassion by civic leaders and religious orders. National plans were floated to pay for it all but ultimately dismissed as socialism. Masking as “liberty,” the notion of letting the free market drive the health of our nation was cunningly employed throughout the twentieth century by pro-business politicians who continued to connect single-payer health care to socialism, knowing full well that companies and doctors alike profit more when people are forced to take personal responsibility for their health—as if the American bootstrap mythology could cure cancer. Drawing upon the research he did for his magnificent book The Hospital, journalist Brian Alexander told me: “American medicine transmogrified into big business floating on a river of trillions of dollars in cash.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Marxism, Nations, and Migration • Capitalism and the Gender Binary • The Rise of Red Power and the American Indian Movement • Artists Against War • Gender and Disability • Whose Clinics? Our Clinics! Defending Abortion rights • What Do Socialists Say About White Privilege? • All Eleven Million: The Fight for Immigrant Rights • From TrumpCare to Medicare for All: The Growing Movement for Single-Payer Health Care • Socialism and Women’s Liberation • Athletes in Revolt: Black Lives Matter in Sports Today • U.S. Imperialism under Trump • From #MeToo to No More: How Can We End Sexual Harassment and Assault? • CSI Is Lying to You: Junk Science in Criminal Convictions • Queens of the Resistance: A Revolutionary Drag Show The thing is, Bob and I are also concerned with a lot of the same issues discussed in these sessions, but it’s not obvious what they have to do with socialism.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

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

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

Republicans were sure this provision would so infuriate young voters that they would flock to the GOP, but this never happened. Instead, most millennials disliked the bill not because it was too liberal but because it was too conservative—over the next ten years, millennials would become the loudest voices demanding single-payer health care, an evolution that would shape the politics of the 2020 campaign. Eric didn’t think the bill was perfect, but he knew it was good. And sitting outside Obama’s office, he’d learned how the game was played. He was there for the strikeouts, like when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner fumbled the rollout of Obama’s bank rescue plan.

for that exact reason: Ashley Parker, “And Now, Starring in the West Wing: Ax & Lesser, The New York Times, June 12, 2009. that followed the recession: Jonathan Alter, The Promise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). told Geithner in 2009: Alter, The Promise, 314. to dramatize his objection: Alter, The Promise. single-payer health care: “More Support for Single Payer Among Those Under 30 Than Older Adults,” Pew Research Center, June 23, 2017, pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/03/most-continue-to-say-ensuring-health-care-coverage-is-governments-responsibility/ft_17-06-23_healthcare_age_640px/. CHAPTER 9: FUCK THE SYSTEM three-quarter-acre pocket park: Mattathias Schwartz, “Map: How Occupy Wall Street Chose Zuccotti Park,” The New Yorker, November 18, 2011, newyorker.com/news/news-desk/map-how-occupy-wall-street-chose-Zuccotti-park. 40 percent of the active participants: Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, “Changing the Subject,” Murphy Institute, CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, 2013, docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/90d188_f7367c3e04de4e94a6f86f9e6b1023ed.pdf.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The basic problem we face is not a deficit but rather joblessness. A majority of the population agrees with that.17 But the banks don’t agree, so therefore it’s not discussed in Washington. We could have a reasonable health care system, like other industrial countries. Not exactly utopian. Again, fighting for that makes perfectly good sense. A single-payer health care system has a lot of popular support, but the financial institutions are against it, so it’s not even discussed. A national health care system would, incidentally, eliminate the deficit, among other things—not that the deficit is all that important. There are further goals I don’t think are unfeasible but could be revolutionary in import.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

People like my father, working as hospital porters, orderlies, and cleaners, suddenly found themselves at the tip of the spear as frontline workers alongside doctors and nurses, all of them confronting a mysterious and deadly new threat without anywhere close to the level of support that they and their patients needed. The pandemic highlighted the vital importance of finding ways to fix the overall system. Some of the commissioners recommended the creation of a socialized or universal single-payer health-care system as in the UK and Europe. For most Brits and Europeans who settle in the United States, the creation of a single-payer health-care system seems long overdue. The politics that swirl around this issue are nothing short of baffling. Why is universal access to health care an example of the “evils of socialism”? Socialized medicine exists already in the United States in the form of Medicare and Medicaid funding.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

To offset this pain, fighting climate change will require additional progressive taxes. Governments that forget this basic truth will learn it the hard way. Or take health care. In the United States, two of the most comprehensive efforts to introduce universal health insurance—the Clinton proposal of 1993, and the Vermont single-payer health care project of 2014—failed not for lack of general support, but largely because there was no palatable, fair funding solution. That’s what happens when only spending matters, and not how the money is raised. Often, no spending occurs. Since the failure of Clinton’s 1993 universal health care plan, thousands of Americans have died for lack of insurance;2 millions have lived with the fear of losing theirs.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Meanwhile, polling suggests that public opinion has taken a turn: in 2019, only 50 percent of Americans said that tech companies have a positive effect on the United States, compared with 71 percent in 2015. This doesn’t mean that change is inevitable. Public opinion has no reliable relationship with public policy: plenty of ideas that are broadly popular, like single-payer health care, are nonstarters in a political system whose priorities are largely set by corporations and the rich. Nevertheless, internet reform has become something of a preoccupation in policymaking circles in recent years. Internet reform is by no means monolithic: the particular proposals and points of emphasis vary widely.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Technology that should decrease costs has been kept at the door, because for most actors in the system, the goal is to increase revenue and profitability. The more services, tests, appointments, procedures, and expensive gadgets you use, the better. The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes. Changing these incentives is key. The most direct way to do so would be to move toward a single-payer health care system, in which the government both guarantees health care for all and negotiates fixed prices. Medicare—the government-provided health care program for Americans 65 and over—essentially serves this role for senior citizens and has successfully driven down costs and provided quality care for tens of millions.


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

National Labor Relations Board, Decision and Order, Caterpillar Inc. v. UAW, Cases 33-CA-10414 and 33-CA-10415, December 10,1996, p. 2. 8. Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein, available at www.pbs. org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath__classical.html. 9. See, for example, Dr. Marcia Angell, "Dispelling the Myths about Single-Payer Health Care," Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP, undated); "National Health Insurance, Single Payer Fact Sheet"(PNHP, 2001); Dr. Gordon Schiff and Dr. David U. Himmelstein, "Questions and Answers about Single Payer National Health Insurance" (PNHP: 1996). Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care, Cambridge, Mass., "For Our Patients, not for Profits, a Call to Action," JAMA 278 (21): 1733-38 (December 3, 1997); Dr.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

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

the election of a black president: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” Atlantic, Sept. 2012. “key factor” associated with support for Trump: Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel, “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did,” Nation, May 8, 2017. only for those he sees as deserving of them: Dylan Matthews, “Why the Alt-Right Loves Single-Payer Health Care,” Vox, Apr. 4, 2017. “Why Trump Must Champion Universal Healthcare”: Richard Spencer, “Why Trump Must Champion Universal Healthcare,” Altright.com, Mar. 23, 2017. pushing for a federal jobs guarantee: Neera Tanden, Carmel Martin, Marc Jarsulic, Brendan Duke, Ben Olinsky, Melissa Boteach, John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, and Rob Griffin, “Toward a Marshall Plan for America: Rebuilding Our Towns, Cities, and the Middle Class” (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, May 16, 2017).


pages: 229 words: 72,431

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Healthcare expenses, in particular, have driven up this line item. In the United States, healthcare has become an enormous, seemingly uncontrollable sector, swelling relentlessly and growing far faster than the rest of the economy—much as cancer grows, without relationship to neighboring cells. Short of a seismic change such as universal single-payer health insurance with price controls on drugs and procedures, the upward pressure on employee benefits will continue. The upshot is a strong incentive to replace full-time employees with part-time, outsourced, overseas, or contract workers, who receive no benefits. Better yet, simply lay people off—or hand off jobs to customers as shadow work.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The Social Security system, which has been a marvel of low bureaucratic costs and high popularity, succeeds in part because its coverage is so wide. When access to programs is restricted, the costs of maintaining the boundaries and ferreting out free riders can be high, and perverse incentives are introduced. In universal systems, these problems disappear. Single-payer health care systems, which include everyone, are much more cost-effective than private insurance. In the United States, the fraction of health care costs attributed to administration, rather than care, has been estimated to be as high as 31 percent. Second, costs can be kept low by avoiding private profit from essential services.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Donald Trump also appealed to people who were on the losing end of neoliberalism, and unlike virtually any Republicans before him, Trump also relied heavily on small donors. But unlike Sanders, who was coalescing a radically progressive program, Trump was pulling together threads from the right. While Sanders talked about single-payer health care and free higher education Trump fed his networks stories of Mexican rapists and nostalgia for a time when America was “great.” Trumpism, which political scientist Cas Mudde describes as a “radical right combination of authoritarianism, nativism and populism,” can be traced back to a response to the 2008 crisis, but one very different from the response on the left.44 After the crisis anger over debt, precarity, the bailout, job loss, and alienation was also articulated through right-wing voices such as Rick Santelli, now an editor for CNBC.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

When major businesses join progressive boycotts, they often succeed. Building coalitions that extend beyond our natural allies is difficult. It requires a willingness to set aside, for the moment, issues we care deeply about. If progressives make positions on issues such as abortion rights or single-payer health care a “litmus test” for coalition membership, the chances for building a coalition that includes evangelicals and Republican business executives will be nil. We must lengthen our time horizons, swallow hard, and make tough concessions. This does not mean abandoning the causes that matter to us.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

When asked the same question in 2016, just 27 percent saw immigrants as a burden, and 63 percent thought immigration was a good thing.3 Even after being subjected to three years of attacks from both the Right and corporate Democrats, Bernie Sanders is among the most popular politicians in the United States. His central demands—a universal jobs program and single-payer health insurance—both enjoy substantial support among voters. Polls show that 52 percent want a jobs guarantee nationwide, with even higher favorability in poor states like Mississippi (72 percent). Medicare for All could be just as popular a platform plank: in April 2018 support for the measure crept above 50 percent.4 The challenge is to take these individual “policy preferences” and bundle them into a coherent politics, but this has been precisely the Sanders campaign’s breakthrough.


pages: 294 words: 85,811

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid

Berlin Wall, British Empire, double helix, employer provided health coverage, fudge factor, Kenneth Arrow, medical malpractice, profit maximization, profit motive, single-payer health, South China Sea, the payments system

1 “I felt that no boy should have to depend either for his leg or his life upon the ability of parents to raise enough money,” Douglas wrote in his memoir.“I came to believe that people should be able to get ... health services irrespective of their individual capacity to pay.”2 When he was elected premier (that is, governor) of the province of Saskatchewan in 1944, Douglas turned that passionate belief into a government-run, single-payer health care system for all of Saskatchewan’s 1 million residents. The program was so successful and so popular that residents of other provinces began demanding the same program. The federal government in Ottawa signed on; by 1961 everyone in Canada was covered by a taxpayer-funded hospital insurance program.


pages: 423 words: 92,798

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

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

Movement actors can and must reasonably predict the concession costs in advance; otherwise, they enter the fight without knowing which strategies to deploy. As Luders says, different economic actors are unequally vulnerable and concession costs are not static—they are variable and contingent on the ability of actors to force disruption costs. If, for example, the movement actors’ demand is for single-payer health care, activists must understand what it will cost the health care industrial complex to concede that demand. Without that understanding they will not know the magnitude of the fight on their hands, and might adopt the wrong strategy, applying an insufficient mobilizing approach rather than an all-out organizing approach.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

The European right is pushing, in some cases, for greater national sovereignty (or even an exit from the European Union) and tighter controls on immigration. They are not yet mounting a broad assault on liberalism and democracy – though that may come. The left, meanwhile, is advocating an end to austerity policies in some cases and expansions to the welfare state in others. Sanders campaigned on free college tuition and the creation of a single-payer health insurance system. They are not yet running on confiscatory taxation and nationalization of the means of production. Both political extremes might never have the opportunity to pursue their aims to their logical conclusion. But radicalism will become an increasingly real and powerful force in global politics until governments begin answering the difficult questions posed by the digital revolution.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

We asked participants whether they supported or rejected various policies that were hot-button issues at the time (2012): Whether there should be a national flat tax Whether there should be a cap-and-trade program on carbon emissions Whether there should be unilateral sanctions on Iran Whether the retirement age for Social Security should be raised Whether there should be a single-payer health care system Whether there should be merit-based pay for teachers As in the standard procedure, we first asked people to rate their understanding of an issue on a scale of 1 to 7. Next we asked them to provide an explanation of all the effects that the policy would lead to. For instance, the instructions for the cap-and-trade issue read, “Please describe all the details you know about the impact of instituting a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, going from the first step to the last, and providing the causal connection between the steps.”


pages: 314 words: 88,524

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

Nor does it include upkeep.”68 In addition, “the Green New Deal also aspires to provide jobs guarantees at a ‘living wage.’ A government assessment of a similar proposal by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) puts the cost of such a program at $543 billion in its first year. Though the costs thereafter would fall, the cumulative expense over ten years would come to some $2.5 trillion. The goal of developing a universal, single payer health-care system would, according to an MIT-Amherst study of a similar plan put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders, come to about $1.4 trillion a year.”69 “Just these six of AOC’s long list of aspirations,” states Ezrati, “would then roughly cost some $2.5 trillion a year. Since Washington’s 2018 budget put spending at $4.5 trillion, the Deal would effectively increase federal spending by a touch over half again.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Public failure has had two perverse effects on politics and policy. First, it has corroded faith in state institutions, effectively precluding arguments for their extension or preservation (in the United States, anyway). For example, President Barack Obama apparently considered that proposing a Canadian-style, single-payer health-care system would be completely unpalatable to the American public and powerful healthcare interests. So he quickly and publicly dismissed the idea early in 2009, reversing years of endorsing such a system’s proven success in Canada and many other places.62 In the United States any suggestion of regulation or public investment must be couched in the language of the market if it is to be taken seriously.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

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

There is simply not enough space now in our political discourse for the governing class to consider policy solutions that reach to the level of the problems that it is are supposed to solve. Serious regulation of Wall Street is off the table. Abandoning the role of world policeman is off the table. In the debate over health care, a single-payer health care system like Canada’s is off the table. Industrial policies and trade policies are off the table. Strengthening the bargaining position of workers is off the table. Government planning to build a sustainable economy by moving off the sandpile of consumption and debt is well off the table.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

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

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

Members of Congress opposed to a public option don’t seem to object to the government covering the cost of medical services for themselves: in addition to receiving a 72 percent subsidy—paid by taxpayers—on premiums for a gold-level ACA plan, they can use the navy-run Office of the Attending Physician and get free outpatient services at military facilities in the Washington area. The reason we have a single-payer health-care system for the elderly (Medicare) but not for children is simple: seniors vote, and children don’t. So while American children die at 55 percent higher rates than children in other advanced countries, Americans who make it to age sixty-five and qualify for Medicare then have a remaining life expectancy similar to that of our peer countries.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Over time a VAT will be crucial to capture some of the gains of automation which typically accrue to sophisticated private firms. My platform revolves around 3 key proposals: Universal Basic Income (“the Freedom Dividend”) Evolution to the next stage of capitalism, “Human Capitalism,” geared toward optimizing around human well-being in addition to GDP Single-payer health care—necessary in the aftermath of job reduction You may not agree with me on every front. But I hope that you agree that we need to elevate meaningful solutions. I also hope that you’re excited to have me as a spokesperson for new approaches. The campaign is coming together beautifully; I’ve found the best sign that you’re going to succeed is when amazing people want to come work with you.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Tim Arango, “Ady Barkan Won’t Let Dying Stop His Activism,” New York Times, September 19, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/us/ady-barkan-activist-medicare.html. 7. Michelle Chen, “There Is No ‘Nursing Shortage.’ There’s Just a Good Nursing Job Shortage,” The Nation, August 7, 2019, www.thenation.com/article/archive/health-care-medicare-nurses/; “Union Endorsers,” Unions for Single Payer Health Care, https://unionsforsinglepayer.org/union_endorsers/. 8. Jason Lemon, “Medicare for All Would Save $450 Billion Annually While Preventing 68,000 Deaths, New Study Shows,” Newsweek, February 18, 2020, www.newsweek.com/medicare-all-would-save-450-billion-annually-while-preventing-68000-deaths-new-study-shows-1487862. 9.


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Moderate was a term that meant a lot in San Francisco and absolutely nothing outside it. When it came to national issues, most of the city was some version of what Scott Wiener was: a very liberal Democrat who received 100 percent ratings on union scorecards and was in favor of gun control, higher income taxes, legalized marijuana, single-payer health care, state-sponsored abortions, state-sponsored gender confirmation surgery, windmills, and fracking bans. But none of that really mattered in local elections, first because there was no point of differentiation and second because city politics revolve around neighborhood arguments that have little to do with the federal government.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

See skill biased technological change (SBTC) Schlosser, Eric, 210 Schmidt, Michael, 108, 109 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 22 S-curves, 66–67, 68, 69, 70–71, 250 secular stagnation, 274n self-driving cars, See autonomous cars Selingo, Jeffrey J., 140, 141 Semiconductor Industry Association, 80 service sector, 12–20 The Shallows (Carr), 254 Shang-Jin Wei, 225 Silvercar, 20 Simonyi, Charles, 71 single-payer health care system, 165–167, 169 The Singularity, 233–238, 248 The Singularity Is Near (Kurzweil), 234 Singularity University, 234 Siu, Henry E., 49, 50 skill biased technological change (SBTC), 48 skills, acquisition of by computers, xv–xvi Skipper, John, 201 “Skynet,” 22 Slate (magazine), 153 Smalley, Richard, 244–245 Smith, Adam, 73 Smith, Noah, 219–220, 273 Smith, Will, 111 social media response program, 93–94 social safety net, 278.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

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

Unless politics is a tradition in your family, your odds of getting elected to federal office are slim. And unless you’re a white male lawyer, you rarely get to vote for someone like yourself in a national race. Nor, in reality, do we have an opportunity to choose policy positions: no major candidates support important proposals that most voters agree with, like single-payer health care. Instead, national elections have been boiled down to simple binary choices, which advertising men and public relations teams reduce to pure emotions: Fear. (A bear prowls through the woods.) Hope. (The sun rises over a hill.) Vote Smith. Or maybe Jones. Nor does the major media elevate the level of debate.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Daniel Markovits, “A New Aristocracy,” Yale Law School Commencement Address, May 2015, https://law.yale.edu/system/files/area/department/studentaffairs/document/markovitscommencementrev.pdf (italics in the original). 23. One possible counterargument is to see forces of decommodification reflected in the demand for open-source software and free (single-payer) health care in the United States, trends that may become more important in the future. It is a possibility: nobody knows what will happen in the future. However, I think that the arguments presented here, based on the internal logic of the system (not least on the set of values it promotes), point in the opposite direction. 24.


pages: 382 words: 105,657

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

(“He liked to be in charge,” said Peter McNerney, one of three younger brothers.) At Yale, McNerney pledged Delta Kappa Epsilon, one of the oldest fraternities in the country, and was initiated by George W. Bush. Leadership was practically in his blood. His father, Walter James McNerney Sr., ran the giant insurer Blue Cross and was an early advocate of a single-payer health-care system for elderly Americans, Medicare, enacted in 1965. The senior McNerney went on to advise Richard Nixon on health policy. He led the Task Force on Medicaid that reached a strikingly progressive conclusion in 1970 about coverage for poor Americans: “A sizable unmet need for health service is a disgrace and cannot be tolerated in an affluent society,” said the report from the “McNerney task force,” as it was known.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But almost immediately upon arriving and paying his $150 registration fee, he had attracted first one reporter and then a growing circle, a spontaneous press scrum, and he responded by giving an ad hoc news conference. Like Yiannopoulos, and in many ways like Trump and Bannon, Spencer helped frame the ironies of the modern conservative movement. He was a racist but hardly a conservative—he doggedly supported single-payer health care, for instance. And the attention he received was somehow less a credit to conservatism than another effort by the liberal media to smear conservatism. Hence, as the scrum around him increased to as many as thirty people, the CPAC irony police stepped in. “You’re not welcome on the property,” announced one of the security guards.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

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

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

And there can be no conflict between the naming of whiteness and the naming of the degradation brought about by an unrestrained capitalism, by the privileging of greed and the legal encouragement to hoarding and more elegant plunder. I have never seen a contradiction between calling for reparations and calling for a living wage, on calling for legitimate law enforcement and single-payer health care. They are related—but cannot stand in for one another. I see the fight against sexism, racism, poverty, and even war finding their union not in synonymity but in their ultimate goal—a world more humane. To Kenyatta, Tom, Nikola and Amelie, who went with me into the deep, and saw me back to shore ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book was made possible by The Atlantic, which, from fact check to paycheck, supported me through these eight years.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

See also Soviet Union “reforms” in Serb conflict and after Soviet collapse Ryan, Randolph Sabra and Shatila (Lebanon) Sachs, Jeffrey Sadat, Anwar Saddam Hussein Sahoun, Mohammed Said, Edward on hypocrisy on Middle East PLO confronted by US-Israel policy opposed by Sakharov, Andrei Salinas Sanders, Bernie San Diego, skilled workers lacking in Sandinistas S&Ls San Jose Mercury News Santiago, Daniel São Paulo Sarajevo Saskatchewan Saudi Arabia Save the Children Schanberg, Sydney Scheiner, Charlie schools, underfunded Schor, Julie Schoultz, Lars Schultz, George Schurmann, Franz science and technology biotechnology interactive technology Pentagon as conduit for investment prisons and public funding for recruitment of scientists in India semiconductors telecommunications Scott, Peter Dale Second Amendment secret services, incompetence of Security Council resolutions (UN) “security zone,” self image Sematech consortium semiconductors Senate Foreign Relations Committee (US) Serbs service role of Third World countries sexism, class differences vs. Shabak Shamir, Yitzhak shantytowns Sharon, Ariel Shavit, Ari Sicily Sidon Siemens signs of progress (and not) “silent genocide” in Africa Silvers, Robert Simpson, Chris Singer, Daniel single-payer health-care plan Skidelsky, Robert slavery Slavs, conflicts between slums See also shantytowns “smash and grab,” Smith, Adam on British imperialism capitalism and on free markets and equality on India on mercantilist system socialist-anarchist tradition and on “vile maxim” of the “masters,” wealth vs. democracy and Smith Corona smoking and tobacco deaths due to expansion into foreign markets freedom and now lower-class social harm due to US tobacco exports war on drugs and SNCC social conditioning socialism doctrinal meaning of meaning of new opportunity for Soviet Union not example of socialist-anarchist tradition socially responsible investing Social Policy Social Security Social Security “reform,” social services Social Text Socrates Sokal, Allen Solarz, Steven Solow, Bob Somalia atrocities in Bosnia vs.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Josh Smith, “FCC Chairman Lobbies Pentagon for More Spectrum,” National Journal online, Aug. 3, 2012, techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2012/08/fcc-chairman-lobbies-pentagon.php. 108. E-mail from S. Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, to the author, May 2, 2012. 109. Lynn Sweet, “Obama on Why He Is Not for Single Payer Health Insurance: New Mexico Town Hall Transcript,” Chicago Sun Times, May 14, 2009, http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2009/05/obama_on_why_he_is_not_for_sin.html. 110. Al Gore, “Networking the Future: We Need a National ‘Superhighway’ for Computer Information,” Washington Post, July 15, 1990, B3. 111.


pages: 637 words: 128,673

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

It seeks to redress a situation or condition without significantly modifying power relationships (e.g., a “tax break for the middle class”). The other, paradigmatic or strategic change, institutes not only a new program but recasts basic power relationships: it reforms, empowers, sets a new direction (e.g., a single-payer health care system). Democracy Incorporated describes the paradigmatic change represented by the amalgamation of state and corporate power. Sometimes a paradigmatic change takes the form of an attack on an entrenched or longstanding status quo—for example, reducing the power of the antebellum plantation owners.


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The prevention of governmental action, and this is the aim of many lobbies, is relatively easy under these circumstances.”86 “Most issues,” Baumgartner and his colleagues find, “do not reach those final stages and most are not highly publicized, even within the Beltway.”87 That means, again, the opportunity for invisible influence is great. Senator Larry Pressler (R-S.D.; 1979–1997) describes a particular example, drawn from the recent battle over health care: There should have been an up or down vote on [single-payer health insurance], or a vote at least on cloture. There was neither. For some reason, it just went away. Barack Obama abandoned it completely, although he had said he was for it. Some Republicans are for it—I was for it way back and Nixon was for it… on a much more significant basis. Bob Packwood had a plan for it.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

If that seems a daring claim, even conspiracy talk, consider the following quote, from an interview with then US president Barack Obama about some of the reasons why he bucked the preferences of the electorate and insisted on maintaining a private, for-profit health insurance system in America: “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have,” Obama said, continuing on the health care theme. “Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.’ That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?”


pages: 441 words: 124,798

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

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

Having lost scores of people to opioid overdose, including his mom and grandmother, he hadn’t used illicit drugs in more than three years. “I had put off going to RAM for years because I figured they’d make you feel like shit about yourself, like ninety percent of the social service people do,” he said. “But everyone was just…so…kind.” If there’s an argument to be made for a single-payer health care system with mental health and substance abuse coverage, this is the lumpy ground on which to make it, a gravel lot in which upward of three thousand Appalachians camp out for days in 100-degree heat to be treated in exam rooms cobbled together from bedsheets and clothespins. Behind a banner for the virginia-kentucky district fair & horse show, patients wait in bleachers while volunteers pass out bottles of water as they triage them to pop-up clinics for medical, dental, and eye care.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

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

“The Salvation Army has detox beds available,” he said, “but the city actually discourages you from going to the Salvation Army because it’s a faith-based organization. So there’s really nowhere to go for treatment.”22 Is the reason for the lack of drug treatment that the United States does not have a single-payer health-care system like Medicare for All, or the Canadian system? There may be good reasons for such a system. But Canada has a single-payer system, and yet the West Coast province of British Columbia has seen overdose deaths increase 74 percent, from 984 deaths in 2019 to 1,716 deaths in 2020.23 Like San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, British Columbia’s most populous city, Vancouver, embraced decriminalization, harm reduction, and Housing First.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

The study also found that the tech folks were extremely globalist in their worldview, with 44 percent, more than any other group, agreeing that “trade policy should prioritize the wellbeing of those abroad instead of Americans.” And they supported many classically redistributionist tax-and-spend policies: 82 percent supported single-payer health care even if it meant raising taxes, and 75 percent supported spending federal money on programs that benefited only the poor. Nearly all supported same-sex marriage, and 82 percent favored gun control. “In other words,” as the researchers concluded in their paper, “technology entrepreneurs are not libertarians.”


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

See workplace sexual harassment Shapiro, Carl, 115 Shared Security System, 193–94 shareholder primacy, 118–22 sheepherders, 261–62 Shell, Ellen Ruppel, 275–76 Sherman Act of 1890, 23 Shierholz, Heidi, 265 Shih, Willy, 140 Sides, John, 292 Silva, Jennifer, 287 “silver or lead,” 72, 116, 117 single-payer health care, 100–101, 102–3, 106 Sitaraman, Ganesh, 45–46, 104–5 Skills For Chicagoland’s Future, 213–14 skills and labor markets, 269–71, 281–84 skills gap debate, 270–71 skills training, 281–84 slavery, 18, 63, 67, 82–83, 260–61, 284, 293 Smith, Adam, 107, 173 Smith, Jeanetta, 93–94 SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), 91, 92–93, 187–88, 190, 329n Snellman, Kaisa, 287 Snyder, Jack, 294 Social Darwinism, 90–91 socialism, 103, 106 Social Security, 23–24, 159–60, 161, 174, 188, 189, 200–201 Social Security Act of 1935, 24, 73 Social Security Caregiver Credit Act of 2019, 328n Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), 91, 93–94, 198–200, 336n Sparling, Dara and Rob, 195–96 Sperling, Doris, 149, 216 Sperling, Larry, 31 Sperling, Rick, 217, 287 Sprung-Keyser, Ben, 285 Stack-Martinez, Rebecca, 252 “stakeholder test,” 119–20 stakeholder theory, 119, 281 Standard Oil, 71–72 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 15 static economies, 130–31 status quo policies, 8, 131–34 stealing tips, 264–65 Steinbaum, Marshall, 278 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) majors, 280–81 Stephanopoulos, George, 239 Stern, Andy, 187, 205 Stewart, Potter, 11 Stiglitz, Joseph, 8, 104, 136, 146, 247 Stout, Lynn, 119 Strine, Leo, 119–20 student loan debt, 97–98, 274–75, 276 subprime mortgage crisis, 109, 112 Summers, Lawrence, 220–21 summer school activities, 286–88 Sunstein, Cass, 135, 158 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

She was twenty when Obama emerged in the 2008 campaign. She thought it would be awesome to have a black man as president, but she wondered if he’d turn out to be as progressive as Hillary—he knew how to play to both sides. Then, suddenly, it began to feel like a popular movement was rising, for things like single-payer health care, and if Obama was the reason for that movement, she was going to be for him. When the Wall Street crisis hit right before the election, she thought, “This is it, the financial system is coming to an end.” She expected a return to the fifties and sixties, harsh regulations and a blue-collar economy, but without the bigotry (because the American dream in those days didn’t make room for people like her and her mother).


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

It took the Labour government just a few short years to implement a raft of social welfare policies that transformed British society. The Labourites established child subsidies, expanded a range of social insurance programs, built vast new tracts of public housing, imposed far-reaching rent controls, and launched a comprehensive program of state-run, single-payer health care (the National Health Service). It all proved enormously popular. Labour’s economic policies were even more far-reaching. “It is doubtful whether we have ever, except in war, used the whole of our productive capacity,” the Labour election manifesto proclaimed. “This must be corrected.” Attlee and his cabinet set out to do this through a series of measures that transformed British capitalism.