Greta Thunberg

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pages: 651 words: 162,060

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

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

Classification: LCC QC903 .T59 2023 (print) | LCC QC903 (ebook) | DDC 363.738/7452—dc23/eng20230113 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049218 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049219 Cover design: Darren Haggar Cover image: Warming Stripes by Professor Ed Hawkins, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading Designed by Jim Stoddart, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen pid_prh_6.0_142488116_c0_r0 PART ONE / How Climate Works 1.1 ‘To solve this problem, we need to understand it’ / Greta Thunberg 1.2 The Deep History of Carbon Dioxide Peter Brannen / Science journalist, contributing writer at the Atlantic and author of The Ends of the World. 1.3 Our Evolutionary Impact Beth Shapiro / Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Santa Cruz and author of Life as We Made It. 1.4 Civilization and Extinction Elizabeth Kolbert / Staff writer for the New Yorker and the author, most recently, of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. 1.5 ‘The science is as solid as it gets’ / Greta Thunberg 1.6 The Discovery of Climate Change Michael Oppenheimer / Atmospheric scientist, Princeton University’s Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs and long-time IPCC author. 1.7 Why Didn’t They Act?

Naomi Oreskes / Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. 1.8 Tipping Points and Feedback Loops Johan Rockström / Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor at Potsdam University. 1.9 ‘This is the biggest story in the world’ / Greta Thunberg PART TWO / How Our Planet Is Changing 2.1 ‘The weather seems to be on steroids’ / Greta Thunberg 2.2 Heat Katharine Hayhoe / Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University and author of Saving Us. 2.3 Methane and Other Gases Zeke Hausfather / Climate research lead at Stripe, research scientistat Berkeley Earth. 2.4 Air Pollution and Aerosols Bjørn H.

PART FOUR / What We’ve Done About It 4.1 ‘How can we undo our failures if we are unable to admit that we have failed?’ / Greta Thunberg 4.2 The New Denialism Kevin Anderson / Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen. 4.3 The Truth about Government Climate Targets Alexandra Urisman Otto / Climate reporter at the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and co-author of Gretas resa (Greta’s Journey). 4.4 ‘We are not moving in the right direction’ / Greta Thunberg 4.5 The Persistence of Fossil Fuels Bill McKibben / Founder of the environmental organizations 350.org and Third Act and author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature and Eaarth. 4.6 The Rise of Renewables Glen Peters / Research Director at the Centre for International Climate Research in Oslo; member of the executive team of the Global Carbon Budget; an IPCC lead author. 4.7 How Can Forests Help Us?


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

As we try and move to a better post-pandemic world, we'll need to achieve similar results despite being in an economy that is fully up and running again. Notes 1 Greta Thunberg, World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, held in Davos, Switzerland, January 2019. An edited version of this speech can be found in under the title, “Our house is on fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, Urges Leaders to Act on Climate,” The Guardian, January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate.2“Ibidem”. 2 “Ibidem”. 3 “School Strike for Climate—Save the World by Changing the Rules,” Greta Thunberg, TEDxStockholm, December 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

An edited version of this speech can be found in under the title, “Our house is on fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, Urges Leaders to Act on Climate,” The Guardian, January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate.2“Ibidem”. 2 “Ibidem”. 3 “School Strike for Climate—Save the World by Changing the Rules,” Greta Thunberg, TEDxStockholm, December 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAmmUIEsN9A&t=1m46s. 4 Asperger Syndrome, National Autistic Society, United Kingdom, https://www.autism.org.uk/about/what-is/asperger.aspx. 5 Greta Thunberg, Twitter, August 2019, https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1167916636394754049. 6 “Greta Thunberg: How One Teenager Became the Voice of the Planet,” Amelia Tait, Wired, June 2019, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis. 7 “Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC, Approved by Governments,” IPCC, October 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/pr_181008_P48_spm_en.pdf. 8 “The Limits to Growth,” The Club of Rome, 1972, https://www.clubofrome.org/report/the-limits-to-growth/. 9 “A Partner in Shaping History,” World Economic Forum, p. 55, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf.10“These 79 CEOs believe in global climate action”, World Economic Forum, November 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/open-letter-from-ceos-to-world-leaders-urging-climate-action/. 10 “A Partner in Shaping History,” World Economic Forum, p. 55, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf.10“These 79 CEOs believe in global climate action”, World Economic Forum, November 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/open-letter-from-ceos-to-world-leaders-urging-climate-action/. 11 “Global Emissions Have Not Yet Peaked,” Our World in Data, August 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#global-emissions-have-not-yet-peaked. 12 “A Breath of Fresh Air from an Alpine Village,” Swissinfo, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/tuberculosis-and-davos_a-breath-of-fresh-air-for-an-alpine-village/41896580. 13 “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” The New York Times, June 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html. 14 “What Is the UNFCCC,” United Nations Climate Change, https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-convention/what-is-the-united-nations-framework-convention-on-climate-change. 15 “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty. 16 “Ethiopia Secures Over $140 Million USD Export Revenue from Industrial Parks,” Ethiopian Investment Commission, October 2019, http://www.investethiopia.gov.et/index.php/information-center/news-and-events/868-ethiopia-secures-over-$-140-million-usd-export-revenue-from-industrial-parks.html.17Testimony based on an interview with Senait Sorsa by Peter Vanham, Awasa, Ethiopia, September 2019. 17 Testimony based on an interview with Senait Sorsa by Peter Vanham, Awasa, Ethiopia, September 2019. 18 “Interview with Senait Sorsa by Peter Vanham, Awasa, Ethiopia, September 2019” 19 .19“GDP Growth (annual %), Ethiopia,” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?

Indeed, the dangers posed by global warming have become a major worry for the next generation of youth these past few years, as they start to demand more urgent climate action. Inspired to a large degree by peers such as Swedish school student Greta Thunberg, hundreds of thousands of climate activists have been hitting the streets, giving speeches to whomever would listen and changing their own habits where possible. We understand their concerns and for this reason invited Greta Thunberg to speak at our Annual Meeting in 2019. Thunberg's foremost message was that “our house is on fire”86 and that we should act with an utmost sense of urgency. We hope we will heed the next generation's call to create a more sustainable economic system with more urgency than in 1973.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

As we try and move to a better post-pandemic world, we'll need to achieve similar results despite being in an economy that is fully up and running again. Notes 1 Greta Thunberg, World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, held in Davos, Switzerland, January 2019. An edited version of this speech can be found in under the title, “Our house is on fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, Urges Leaders to Act on Climate,” The Guardian, January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate.2“Ibidem”. 2 “Ibidem”. 3 “School Strike for Climate—Save the World by Changing the Rules,” Greta Thunberg, TEDxStockholm, December 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

An edited version of this speech can be found in under the title, “Our house is on fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, Urges Leaders to Act on Climate,” The Guardian, January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate.2“Ibidem”. 2 “Ibidem”. 3 “School Strike for Climate—Save the World by Changing the Rules,” Greta Thunberg, TEDxStockholm, December 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAmmUIEsN9A&t=1m46s. 4 Asperger Syndrome, National Autistic Society, United Kingdom, https://www.autism.org.uk/about/what-is/asperger.aspx. 5 Greta Thunberg, Twitter, August 2019, https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1167916636394754049. 6 “Greta Thunberg: How One Teenager Became the Voice of the Planet,” Amelia Tait, Wired, June 2019, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis. 7 “Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC, Approved by Governments,” IPCC, October 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/pr_181008_P48_spm_en.pdf. 8 “The Limits to Growth,” The Club of Rome, 1972, https://www.clubofrome.org/report/the-limits-to-growth/. 9 “A Partner in Shaping History,” World Economic Forum, p. 55, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf.10“These 79 CEOs believe in global climate action”, World Economic Forum, November 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/open-letter-from-ceos-to-world-leaders-urging-climate-action/. 10 “A Partner in Shaping History,” World Economic Forum, p. 55, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_First40Years_Book_2010.pdf.10“These 79 CEOs believe in global climate action”, World Economic Forum, November 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/open-letter-from-ceos-to-world-leaders-urging-climate-action/. 11 “Global Emissions Have Not Yet Peaked,” Our World in Data, August 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#global-emissions-have-not-yet-peaked. 12 “A Breath of Fresh Air from an Alpine Village,” Swissinfo, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/tuberculosis-and-davos_a-breath-of-fresh-air-for-an-alpine-village/41896580. 13 “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” The New York Times, June 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html. 14 “What Is the UNFCCC,” United Nations Climate Change, https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-convention/what-is-the-united-nations-framework-convention-on-climate-change. 15 “Global Extreme Poverty,” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty. 16 “Ethiopia Secures Over $140 Million USD Export Revenue from Industrial Parks,” Ethiopian Investment Commission, October 2019, http://www.investethiopia.gov.et/index.php/information-center/news-and-events/868-ethiopia-secures-over-$-140-million-usd-export-revenue-from-industrial-parks.html.17Testimony based on an interview with Senait Sorsa by Peter Vanham, Awasa, Ethiopia, September 2019. 17 Testimony based on an interview with Senait Sorsa by Peter Vanham, Awasa, Ethiopia, September 2019. 18 “Interview with Senait Sorsa by Peter Vanham, Awasa, Ethiopia, September 2019” 19 .19“GDP Growth (annual %), Ethiopia,” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?

Indeed, the dangers posed by global warming have become a major worry for the next generation of youth these past few years, as they start to demand more urgent climate action. Inspired to a large degree by peers such as Swedish school student Greta Thunberg, hundreds of thousands of climate activists have been hitting the streets, giving speeches to whomever would listen and changing their own habits where possible. We understand their concerns and for this reason invited Greta Thunberg to speak at our Annual Meeting in 2019. Thunberg's foremost message was that “our house is on fire”86 and that we should act with an utmost sense of urgency. We hope we will heed the next generation's call to create a more sustainable economic system with more urgency than in 1973.


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

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

Richard Rhodes (historian) in discussion with the author, November 12, 2019. 71. Brendan O’Neill, “The Madness of Extinction Rebellion,” Spiked, October 7, 2019, https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/10/07/the-madness-of-extinction-rebellion. 72. Greta Thunberg, “ ‘Our House Is on Fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, Urges Leaders to Act on Climate,” The Guardian, January 25, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com. 73. Greta Thunberg, “If standing up against the climate and ecological breakdown and for humanity is against the rules then the rules must be broken. #ExtinctionRebellion,” Twitter, October 15, 2019, 12:24 p.m., https://twitter.com/gretathunberg/status/1184188303295336448. 74.

Savannah Lovelock and Sarah Lunnon, interviewed by Sophy Ridge, Sophy Ridge on Sunday, Sky News, October 6, 2019, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArO_-xH5Vm8. 80. Ibid. 81. Lauren Jeffrey (British YouTuber) in discussion with the author, December 3, 2019. 82. Greta Thunberg, “School Strike for Climate—Save the World by Changing the Rules,” TEDxStockholm, January 27, 2019, https://www.ted.com. Malena Ernman, “Malena Ernman on daughter Greta Thunberg: ‘She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness,’ ” The Guardian, February 23, 2020. 83. Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 277, 283. 84. Ibid., 288. 85. Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London, Paris, and Melbourne: Cassell & Sons, Ltd., 1893), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5500/5500-h/5500-h.htm. 86.

You can set up a wall to try to contain ten thousand and twenty thousand, one million people, but not ten million.”19 “Around the year 2030, in ten years, 250 days, and ten hours, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it,” said student climate activist Greta Thunberg, in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”20 2. Resilience Rising In early 2019, newly elected twenty-nine-year-old congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down for an interview with a correspondent for The Atlantic. AOC, as she is known, made the case for a Green New Deal, one that would address poverty and social inequality in addition to climate change.


pages: 489 words: 106,008

Risk: A User's Guide by Stanley McChrystal, Anna Butrico

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, fear of failure, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Googley, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, inflight wifi, invisible hand, iterative process, late fees, lockdown, Paul Buchheit, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, source of truth, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, work culture

outside the Swedish Parliament: Charlotte Alter, Suyin Haynes, and Justin Worland, “Time 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg,” Time, accessed December 14, 2020, https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/. father picked her up: Alter, Haynes, and Worland, “Time 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg.” Fridays for Future movement: Alter, Haynes, and Worland, “Time 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg.” “We are in the beginning”: Alter, Haynes, and Worland, “Time 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg”; “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit,” National Public Radio, September 23, 2019, https://npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit.

Climate Action Summit,” National Public Radio, September 23, 2019, https://npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit. Thunberg stresses that the clock: “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit.” She implores leaders to: “ ‘I Want You to Panic’: 16-Year-Old Issues Climate Warning at Davos,” uploaded by Guardian News, January 25, 2019, https://youtube.com/watch?v=RjsLm5PCdVQ. A year later, she lamented: Somini Sengupta, “Greta Thunberg’s Message at Davos Forum: ‘Our House Is Still on Fire,’ ” The New York Times, January 21, 2020, https://nytimes.com/2020/01/21/climate/greta-thunberg-davos.html. The determined Thunberg has: Alter, Haynes, and Worland, “Time 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg.”

Still, it chose to maintain its existing trajectory in the hope that Total Access would eventually prove profitable. the house is on fire ■ On the first day, Greta Thunberg sat alone outside the Swedish Parliament—holding her small sign and eating her packed lunch. She remained the length of the school day, until her father picked her up to bike home. This was the first day of the Fridays for Future movement that would spread across the globe as young students protested climate change. Though a small act, Greta Thunberg’s first school strike had ripple effects—prompting an international conversation about climate change. Her cause is for our world leaders to act—she shames those who do not, who willingly continue the status quo as the world continues to warm up.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

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

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

Erica Chenoweth, “The ‘3.5% Rule’: How a Small Minority Can Change the World,” Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, May 14, 2019, https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/​news/​35-rule-how-small-minority-can-change-world. 103. Fridays for Future, https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/. 104. Jonathan Watts, “ ‘Biggest Compliment Yet’: Greta Thunberg Welcomes Oil Chief’s ‘Greatest Threat’ Label,” Guardian (U.S. edition), July 5, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/​environment/​2019/​jul/​05/​biggest-compliment-yet-greta-thunberg-welcomes-oil-chiefs-greatest-threat-label. CONCLUSION: A NEW STORY 1. More on Sputnik from NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “Sputnik and the Dawn of the Space Age,” October 10, 2007, https://history.nasa.gov/​sputnik/. 2.

In Seoul, South Korea, the streets teem with elementary schoolchildren sporting multicolored backpacks and carrying banners that say CLIMATE STRIKE—in English, for the benefit of the media. In Bangkok, hundreds of teenage students take to the streets. With firm resolve and heavy hearts, they walk behind their defiant leader, an eleven-year-old girl carrying a sign: THE OCEANS ARE RISING AND SO ARE WE. All over the world, millions of young people—inspired by Greta Thunberg, the teenage girl who began a lone protest in front of the Swedish parliament—are engaging in civil disobedience to draw attention to climate change. Students understand the scientific projections and are terrified about the diminished quality of life on their horizon. They demand decisive action now.

The well-publicized pay gap (women are paid 20 percent less than men for the same work) is another manifestation and shows that many perceptions continue to be subjective and discriminatory.88 Before we can work to correct the imbalance of power and decision making, we have to acknowledge that it exists, often but not always based on structural unconscious bias. Right now that is still lost on many. Nonetheless many women have recognized the unique gravity of our situation on climate change. Intrepid leaders like Natalie Isaacs, Isra Hirsi, Nakabuye Flavia, Greta Thunberg, and Penelope Lea have mobilized millions of young people who are now demanding urgent climate action and implementing it themselves. Women are at the forefront of collaborative efforts to support each other in the face of our changing climate. In many countries, women’s intimate knowledge of the land means they are quicker to spot environmental changes, to learn from them, and out of necessity, find ways to adapt.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

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

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

Doyle Rice and Doug Stanglin, “The Kid Is All Right: Friday’s Worldwide Climate Protest Sparked by Nobel-Nominated Teen,” USA Today, 15 March 2019, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/14/climate-change-swedish-teen-greta-thunberg-leads-worldwide-protest/3164579002/. 3. Tessa Stuart, “Greta Thunberg Ups Climate Pressure Ahead of UN Summit: ‘This Has to Be a Tipping Point,’” Rolling Stone, 29 August 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/climate-crisis-activist-greta-thunberg-united-nations-summit-877973/, which explains that the Malizia II is “a 60-foot, solar- and wind-powered monohull belonging to the Principality of Monaco.” 4.

Initially her classmates were not interested in joining: “Passers-by expressed pity and bemusement at the sight of the then unknown 15-year-old sitting on the cobblestones with a hand-painted banner.”1 On 13 March 2019, Greta Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.2 In April 2019 she took the train to London to address climate change protesters there. Almost one thousand had been arrested by the end of the Easter weekend for blocking roads and bridges in the capital city of the United Kingdom. In the summer of 2019, still aged sixteen, as she was when she explained the situation very simply in London in April, Greta Thunberg crossed the Atlantic: “It took 13 days and 18 hours for the Malizia II to complete the journey from Plymouth, England across the North Atlantic, past the Azores, to New York City.”3 At the time of writing, Greta Thunberg was taking her message across the Americas.

It may mean nothing to you, depending on when you read this book. So much that we hyped as new and amazing at the start of the twenty-first century was, in hindsight, simply hype. CHAPTER 5. Climate Epigraph: Jacob Jarvis, “Greta Thunberg Speech: Activist Tells Extinction Rebellion London Protesters ‘We Will Make People in Power Act on Climate Change,’” London Evening Standard, 21 April 2019, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/greta-thunberg-tells-extinction-rebellion-protesters-we-will-make-people-in-power-act-on-climate-a4122926.html. 1. Jonathan Watts, “A Teen Started a Global Climate Protest. What Are You Doing?” Wired, 12 March 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/a-teen-started-a-global-climate-protest-what-are-you-doing/. 2.


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We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

suggested she deserves the Nobel Prize: Damian Carrington, “Greta Thunberg Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize,” Guardian, March 14, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/14/greta-thunberg-nominated-nobel-peace-prize. a reason she can be so strident: Charlotte Alter, Suyin Haynes, and Justin Worland, “Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg,” Time, December 2019, https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/. climate change in primary school: Greta Thunberg, “The Disarming Case to Act Right Now on Climate Change,” Ted Talks, January 28, 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/greta_thunberg_the_disarming_case_to_act_right_now_on_climate_change/transcript?

To make her as comfortable as possible, the audition was held at Bandy’s art center and her vocal parts were recorded at her house. The creation of fictional autistic female characters that are played by autistic people coincides with the fact that autistic women and girls are becoming public figures in areas only tangentially related to autism. Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish climate activist, is perhaps the most famous autistic person in the world. Her supporters have suggested she deserves the Nobel Prize. Just like Eryn Star, Thunberg was born a generation after me, which means she had the good fortune of growing up in a society that at least had a working knowledge of autism.

When I briefly talked with some kids from a campus autism group, I realized there were no other openly autistic people in the group itself; it was seen as more of a charity activity. I never went to a meeting, so it’s true, there were not many places to be accepted even then. However, kids from the generation after mine grew up understanding their autism and eventually owning it. There are kids, like Greta Thunberg, who are aware that their autism makes them better advocates. And kids like Chris and Cori Williams’ children, who grow up with families that love and accept them, and Lydia Wayman, who has people who support her. “That is absolutely amazing to me,” Ne’eman said. “They’ve grown up with this, with being connected to a community that has agency in a way that I never had.”


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

and “We’re fucked!” The news at the time was full of images of devastating flooding that immersed more than half of Venice under several feet of water. Greta Thunberg, then a little-known fifteen-year-old climate activist from Sweden, handed out leaflets that read “I’m doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.” Only a month before, the Guardian had introduced her to the world. “Following Sweden’s hottest summer ever, Greta Thunberg decided to go on school strike at the parliament to get politicians to act. Why bother to learn anything in school if politicians won’t pay attention to the facts?”

Starkly, he warned that it was probably already too late. What was needed was a massive redistribution of wealth to help those in the world’s poorest populations who were most exposed to the coming onslaught. Sitting out in the audience, the Big Oil titan wasn’t amused. The executive was likely even more put off by Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist whose world-on-fire rhetoric made the smug Davos elite squirm. (The previous year, she’d made headlines when she told the audience, “I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic.”) In her 2020 address titled “Averting the Climate Apocalypse,” she chastised world leaders for their failure to act: “Any plan or policy of yours that doesn’t include radical emission cuts at the source starting today is completely insufficient for meeting the 1.5 or well below two degree commitments of the Paris agreements.

“We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened,” the January 14, 2020, report said. “Although precise predictions are not possible, it is clear that the Earth is on an unsustainable trajectory. Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.” Skeptics might dismiss so-called Cassandras like Rupert Read or Greta Thunberg screaming civilization is finished, but this was J.P. Freaking Morgan wringing its hands about existential risk and ruin problems. Read leaked the report to the Guardian, which ran an article with the headline “JP Morgan Economists Warn Climate Crisis Is Threat to Human Race.” (The New Republic had a catchier headline: “The Planet Is Screwed, Says Bank That Screwed the Planet.”)


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What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth by Chris Goodall

blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, decarbonisation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, food miles, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, hydroponic farming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Ocado, ocean acidification, plant based meat, smart grid, smart meter

And shipping should run on hydrogen CHAPTER 6: SUSTAINABLE FASHION Without big changes, clothing alone will stop us achieving net zero CHAPTER 7: CONCRETE PROBLEMS Using less cement and other resources – and replacing fossil fuels in heavy industry CHAPTER 8: PLANT FOOD REVOLUTION The global climate costs of meat are not sustainable CHAPTER 9: REFORESTING BRITAIN Using forests and woodland to suck CO2 from the air CHAPTER 10: CARBON TAXATION The economist’s answer to the climate crisis CHAPTER 11: DIRECT AIR CAPTURE OF CO2 A vital technology for reducing carbon dioxide levels CHAPTER 12: SHOULD WE GEOENGINEER? Preparing to combat the worst consequences of climate change CHAPTER 13: WHAT WE CAN DO OURSELVES It’s not just governments – our own actions can make a real difference FURTHER READING ‘The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not’ Greta Thunberg at the United Nations 23 September 2019 WHAT WE NEED TO DO NOW FOR A ZERO CARBON SOCIETY Chris Goodall NOTES & SOURCES For sources of data throughout this book, most of them online, see the ‘What we need to do now’ section on my Carbon Commentary website (www.carboncommentary.com).

The UK has made decent progress in recent decades, cutting domestic emissions by 43 per cent since 1990, although a rising volume of imports with high carbon footprints are not included in this figure, nor international aviation and shipping. If all these factors are included, the figures may be closer to 10 per cent (as Greta Thunberg told the UK’s MPs in 2019). And it has to be said that most of these reductions have been achieved in relatively easy areas, for example, from the decommissioning of coal-fired power stations. In recent years, progress has slowed, just when it needs to be ramped up to lightning speed. Most independent sources see the UK missing its existing official targets from 2023 onwards.

But ‘vehicle-to-grid’ software and hardware is still an open field, which Britain could hope to dominate. We need to push governments and research organisations to concentrate their efforts on such technological developments. CHAPTER 5 FLIGHTS AND SHIPPING We need to fly less — the hardest challenge for zero carbon. And shipping should run on hydrogen Greta Thunberg’s August 2019 trip across the Atlantic in a racing yacht dramatically highlighted the climate impact of both air and sea travel. Long-distance transport is very difficult to decarbonise and aviation is perhaps the most difficult challenge on the road to a zero carbon society, particularly for the UK.


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

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

., https://twitter.com/noltenc/status/1176185011776761857. 8. Erick Erickson, “The Left’s Abusive Use of Greta Thunberg,” Resurgent, August 30, 2019, https://theresurgent.com/2019/08/30/the-lefts-abusive-use-of-greta-thunberg/. 9. Josh Hammer, “HAMMER: Using Children to Advance Your Political Agenda Isn’t Just Wrong. It’s Evil,” Daily Wire, September 24, 2019, https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-using-children-advance-your-political-josh-hammer. 10. Brendan O’Neill, “The Cult of Greta Thunberg,” Spiked, April 22, 2019, https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/04/22/the-cult-of-greta-thunberg/. 11. Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter, September 23, 2019, 11:36 p.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1176339522113679360. 12.

To borrow a term they like to mock, it triggers them—and most especially when the topic is raised by younger people. “A 16-year-old Swedish girl whose contempt for adults is breathtaking is an international hero,” complained the radio host Dennis Prager of the sudden celebrity of climate activist Greta Thunberg.6 Breitbart contributor John Nolte tweeted: “I can’t tell if Greta needs a spanking or a psychological intervention . . . Probably both.”7 Radio host Erick Erickson declared Thunberg a mouthpiece for manipulative adults. “No, I am not going to be lectured to by a 16 year old just because she gets access to a prince’s private yacht.”8 A contributor to the Daily Wire fumed: “The notion that policymakers ought to consider proposing policy due to the fraught and hysterical pleas of a 16-year-old is, naturally, insane.”9 The British anti-environmentalist journalist Brendan O’Neill wrote, “The green cult has pushed Ms Thunberg into the position of its global leader, its childlike saviour, the messiah of their miserabilist political creed . . .


pages: 154 words: 47,880

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

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

“Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place,” said Donald Trump in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2016. “If solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself,” said sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. As New York magazine’s Frank Rich put it: “Everything in the country is broken. Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community.

But these institutions don’t wield power on their own. Particular people have outsized influence over them. They include CEOs like Jamie Dimon, large investors, hedge fund and private equity managers, media moguls, key lobbying groups like the Business Roundtable, and major donors to political candidates and universities. As Greta Thunberg observes, “If everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame. Some people—some companies and some decision-makers in particular—have known exactly what priceless values they are sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money.” To comprehend the nature of these decision makers’ influence over the system, you’ll need to understand the role of wealth.

New America isn’t the only recipient of Google’s largesse. Despite its avowed concern about climate change, Google has made large donations to some of the most notorious climate change deniers in Washington, including the Heartland Institute, an anti-science group that has attacked teenage activist Greta Thunberg for “climate delusion hysterics,” and Heritage Action, which has alleged that the Paris climate accord is supported by “cosmopolitan elites.” Presumably, Google has made these donations because such groups don’t want government intruding on corporate America, especially Google. I’m aware of a nonprofit devoted to voting rights that decided not to launch a campaign against big money in politics for fear of alienating the wealthy donors it courts, and a liberal-leaning Washington think tank that released a study on inequality that failed to mention the role big corporations and Wall Street have played in weakening the nation’s labor and antitrust laws, presumably because the think tank didn’t want to antagonize its corporate and Wall Street donors.


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

If you are someone who scores extremely high on the SQ and extremely low on the EQ, and so have an Extreme Type S brain type—that is, if you’re a hyper-systemizer—this means you think differently compared to most people. That’s because your mind, in common with most autistic people, has a different operating system. Less focused on people and more focused on things and on patterns, your operating system struggles to function in some environments but in others it may confer what autistic climate activist Greta Thunberg calls “superpowers”: a talent at spotting if-and-then patterns, just like Jonah did as a child.31 Chapter 4 The Mind of an Inventor Over the decades I have watched as Jonah grew into a wonderful man with remarkable talents. Like a modern-day Linnaeus, Jonah also loves systemizing the world of plants.

Whether it’s math or history or something far more focused, like an extinct ancient language, if the child simply wants to study only that subject for their whole semester, or their whole school career, it would still constitute a valuable education and prepare them for a specialist occupation. They should be allowed to pursue their strong narrow interest, sometimes pejoratively called their “obsession.” Greta Thunberg, the Swedish autistic teenager, has a strong narrow interest in climate breakdown, and she has succeeded in raising awareness of the urgency of this issue for the future of the planet.28 I’ve met such people, and they blossom when given the opportunity. Daniel Lightwing, whom I diagnosed with Asperger syndrome when he was a student at my college, Trinity, in Cambridge, represented the United Kingdom in the International Math Olympiad.

On the genetic association between autism and mathematical ability, see S. Baron-Cohen et al. (2007), “Mathematical talent is linked to autism,” Human Nature 18, 125–131. 31. See J. Monroe (2019), “Go, Greta: Autism is my superpower too,” Guardian, April 27, www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/27/jack-monroe-autism-is-my-superpower-like-greta-thunberg; N. Prouix (2019), “Becoming Greta,” New York Times, February 21; S. Baron-Cohen (2020), “Without such families speaking out, their crises remain hidden,” part of L. Carpenter (2020), “Greta and Beata: How autism and climate activism affected the Thunberg family,” Times (of London) Magazine, February 28; and G.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

In short order, I had emails from one CEO demanding to know why I was going political, while others wanted to know whether they could invite the activists in and how they might declare a “climate emergency,” a key XR demand. Soon, the tempo picked up dramatically. A few weeks later, I was in Barcelona chairing a discussion session with four young activists, all schoolgirls, two from XR and two from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement. All girls, several were understandably nervous about going on stage in front of a big audience, but they hit the proverbial ball out of the park. So I was fascinated shortly afterward to see a discussion between Thunberg, a one-person Green Swan,22 and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the American politician who lit up the presidential debates by calling for a Green New Deal.

., Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers7, ExxonMobil, Jair Bolsonaro, and Vladimir Putin •Carbon increasingly brought back into technological, economic, and ecological loops via policy incentives and investment in the circular economy, promoting resilience and regeneration •Icons of Green Swan carbon futures: e.g., James Lovelock, Margrethe Vestager, Tesla, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Greta Thunberg 4. Other examples •Outbreak of World War I; “Spanish flu” epidemic, 1918–1920; ecological impact of e.g., DDT; dissolution of the USSR for those living there; 9/11 attacks; the opioid crisis in the US; “The Great Hack”8; Brexit; “Insectageddon”9; spread of meat-based diets and fossil-powered cars across a growing global population; death of more than 500 million animals in Australian brushfires in 2019 •Impact of “Earthrise” image of our planet; rapid rise of environmentalism; restoration of Loess Plateau, China; rise of renewable energy; electric vehicles; green bonds; Denmark’s “Green Transition”; London declared a National Park City; development of plant-based alternatives to eggs, meat, poultry, and fish; Stanford University $73 trillion Green New Deal plan for 143 countries; EU €1 trillion Green Deal © Volans 2019 Figure 8: The Swanspotter’s Guide, 1.0 Clearly, this is very much a work in progress.

To see the signatories for free, see here: https://jeremyleggett.net/2019/04/22/letter-to-the-times-by-business-leaders-supportive-of-extinction-rebellion-of-which-i-am-proud-to-be-one/. 22.For me, at least, other one-person Green Swans would include Rachel Carson (author of books like Silent Spring), Wangari Maathai (the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize), James Lovelock (proponent of Gaia Theory), James Hansen (long-time climate scientist and activist), and the late Tessa Tennant, a long-time colleague and friend who pioneered sustainable investment. 23.Emma Brockes listens in to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg, “Show Up. Stand Up. Act,” Guardian Weekend, June 29, 2019. 24.Somini Sengupta and Alexander Villegas, “Tiny Costa Rica Has a Green New Deal. It Matters for the Whole Planet,” The New York Times, March 12, 2019. 25.Molly Taft, “Inside the Growing Climate Rebellion at Amazon,” Fast Company, June 11, 2019. 26.


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

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

Fiona Harvey, “Paris Climate Change Agreement,” Guardian, December 14, 2015; Suzanne Goldenberg, John Vidal, Lenore Taylor, Adam Vaughan, and Fiona Harvey, “Paris Climate Deal,” Guardian, December 12, 2015 (secretary-general); Remarks by President Obama on the Paris Agreement, October 5, 2016; “Donald Trump Would ‘Cancel’ Paris Climate Deal,” BBC News, May 27, 2016 (Trump). 7. Global Climate Project, Global Climate Report 2019; Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2011), pp. 422–28. 8. Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (New York: Penguin, 2019), pp. 10, 62, 96–99; Charlotte Alter, Suyin Haynes, and Justin Worland, “2019 Person of the Year—Greta Thunberg,” Time, December 11, 2019; Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer, and Angela Valenzuela, “Why We Strike Again,” Project Syndicate, November 29, 2019. 9. Mark Carney, “Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizons—Climate Change and Financial Stability,” Speech, September 29, 2015. 10.

The result is greater warming for the earth—thus known as the “greenhouse effect.”7 As the climate consensus has crystallized, concern and fervor have risen, fueled by the fear that an approaching “tipping point” will lead to “runaway climate change.” The growing dread is reflected in the vocabulary; “global warming” and “climate change” have given way to “climate crisis” and now “climate emergency” and “climate catastrophe.” The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg became the voice of this urgency, beginning when, in August 2018, as she put it, she “school-striked for the climate” outside the Swedish Parliament. Her message became zero carbon. “Expansion of airports,” she told the British Parliament in the spring of 2019, “is beyond absurd.” At the U.N.

Now there are two eras for energy and climate—“Before Paris” and “After Paris.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey unveil the “Green New Deal” in 2019 that would use “massive federal investment” to eliminate oil, gas, and coal and make the United States carbon free by 2030. In August 2018, Greta Thunberg, then aged fifteen, skipped school to protest on climate. In little more than a year, she became a global climate phenomenon, with millions of Twitter followers, a speech to the United Nations Climate Summit, and selection as Time Person of the Year. Photovoltaic technology “is a bit magical,” says pioneer solar researcher Martin Green.


pages: 250 words: 75,151

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

The fact that Barack Obama, arguably the single most iconic figure of contemporary progressive politics, could not see the fundamental problem of taking part in a closed event with and for very rich people in a five-star palace in Stockholm speaks volumes to the blind spots privileged elites have regarding the discrimination that they too dole out. The organisers of Brilliant Minds invited Greta Thunberg to give the opening keynote. She pointed out to those assembled that flying around the world in private jets to celebrate their own brilliance and pontificate about sustainability and ‘making the world a better place’ was denying reality. That contrary to what they seemed to think, this behaviour could actually be worse than saying or doing nothing at all.

I feel I owe it to all these people to share their stories. Not just the ones who agree with me.’ In December 2018, having walked 1,500km, Berenice arrived in Katowice, where she met a young woman I once met sitting under an umbrella outside the Swedish parliament as I was passing by with my daughter and our Labs: Greta Thunberg. Together, they have laid the foundations of the climate youth movement. In terms of political weight, these new nomads might seem to represent very little. Stalin’s question ‘the Vatican, how many tanks?’ comes to mind. But this hardly captures the momentum the transnational and translocal movements of climate protesters, many of whom are migrants or children of migrants, are garnering.

I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the nomads I met and interviewed in the process of researching this book, many of them at length, for their precious time and invaluable insights: Habib Kazdaghli; Alhaji Siraj Bah; Farzad Ban; Alia Wingstedt; Max Karlsson; Niall Saville; Emmanuella Zandi; Ankit Desai; Tania Beard; Paola Audrey; Ciku Kimeria; Jan H. Christiansen; Miguel Jonsson; Catherine Mayer; Alok Alström; Arnaud Castaignet; Gwamaka Kifukwe; Karoli Hindriks; Aida Hadžialic; Ibrahima Tounkara; Ben Sock; Yeb Saño; Greta Thunberg; Vic Barrett; Sani Tahir; Vybarr Cregan-Reid; presidents Kersti Kaljulaid and José Ramos-Horta; Joi Ito; Guyonne de Montjou; Max Ajl; Lu Gigliotti; Ramazan Nanayev; Julien Rochedy; Sigurlína Ingvarsdóttir, Peter Smith, Nic Cary and Xen Herd; Kevin Anderson and Keri Facer; Nasita Fofana; Ays¸em Mert; Gareth Dale; Anjuli Pandit; Silja Voolma; Philippe Douste-Blazy; Lauren Proctor; Phoebe Tickell; Lennart Olsson; Stan Cox, Bryan Thompson, Pheonah Nabukalu and Fred Iutzi at the Land Institute; Sohnia van der Puye; Ilse van der Velden; Ben Anderson; Spencer Wells; Glenn Chisholm; Beta Grétarsdóttir; Eva Vlaardingerbroek; Efua Oyofo; Muyabwa Moza; Harper Reed; Anna-Hope Kabongo; Karim Sy and Keita Stephenson; Niki Jaiswal; Sophia Rashad; Matt Yanchyshyn; Matteo De Vos; Patrick Chadwick; Monika Karapetian; Nour Sharara; Gordon Cyrus; Paul da Silva; Asad Hussein; Assa Traoré; Noura Berrouba; Rabbi Stephen Berkowitz; and last but not least Franco Rivas.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

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

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

We helped pull together an international ‘emergency coalition’ to reject weak language that would have condemned them to extinction. While we in the Global North might only just be feeling the effects of climate change, the majority world has long since known the tragedy that the climate crisis brings. Support is also being provided to the youth-led school strike movement started by Greta Thunberg, and to the newly emerging Birthstrike movement which is taking off in many countries to support people who are choosing not to bring children into this world unless, and until, conditions improve. In the US, the Sunrise Movement is building bi-partisan support for a ten-year mobilization and investment plan called the Green New Deal.

Investment on this scale will allow us to explore a new economic model, designed to improve life for everyone while protecting the natural environment we depend on, and measuring our success by people’s well-being, instead of company profits. This is about a paradigm shift in the way the world is structured and the way we live our lives. As Greta Thunberg told world leaders in December: ‘If solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.’ We need to harness the energy in people’s anger with the status quo into a movement that gathers in classrooms, living rooms, churches and village halls across the country.


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

(Pew says the first millennials were born in 1981, but politics moves a little slower than everything else, so I extended the window to 1980 in order to include Carlos Curbelo.) Unfortunately, that meant leaving out exciting Gen X-ers such as Rep. Ayanna Pressley (b. 1974), former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum (b. 1979), and GOP senator Josh Hawley (b. 1979), and powerful Gen-Z activists like Emma Gonzalez (b. 1999), David Hogg (b. 2000), and Greta Thunberg (b. 2003). They are all poised to make their mark on American politics, and they would be great characters in another book. If I had been writing in the mid-twentieth century, I would have followed the convention of calling public officials by their last names, mostly because so many of the white men in power at that time had the same first names: John, Michael, Robert, or James.

Young people all over the world were realizing that the adults weren’t going to make their governments address climate change—so they would have to do it themselves. In 2018, a few months after the release of the IPCC report, a soft-spoken fifteen-year-old Swedish girl with Asperger’s syndrome named Greta Thunberg gave an electrifying speech at the annual United Nations climate talks in Poland that excoriated adult leaders for failing to act boldly to prevent climate catastrophe. “You say you love your children above all else,” she told a room full of world leaders, her two long braids hanging over her shoulders.

Middle and elementary school kids brought homemade signs to the Women’s March, looking around a sea of terrified and furious adults. Teenage activists led the March for Our Lives protests against gun violence in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Students poured into the streets for the Global Climate Strike, led by sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg. College kids mobilized first-time voters to massively increase their turnout in the 2018 midterms. And after a whistleblower revealed in late 2019 that Trump had asked the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on a political rival, young people watched as Democrats pushed for impeachment and Republicans twisted themselves into knots to excuse his behavior.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Appealing to moral principles to mobilize people for change is also a universal source of power. If you think back to social change icons like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa or, more recently, Malala Yousafzai, their ideals are what enabled them to influence others. This is also how, in 2019, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future mobilized an estimated 4 million people in 163 countries to march, protest, and join strikes for climate action.68 But while moral appeals are powerful, they are not always virtuous. Painting “other” individuals or groups or nations as “immoral” is a tried-and-true strategy for mobilizing people.

To illustrate the process of social change and the role of power in it, we will draw on the experiences of three activists who are playing or have played pivotal roles in contemporary movements. For narrative purposes, we will consider each of the three roles independently. But remember, agitation without innovation means complaints without ways forward, and innovation without orchestration means ideas without impact.8 PUTTING AN ISSUE ON THE PUBLIC AGENDA In August 2018, Greta Thunberg, the teenager who has since become the face of the youth climate movement, drew the now-famous words “Skolstrejk för Klimatet” (School Strike for Climate) onto poster board and started skipping school, first every day and later every Friday, to protest her government’s inaction on climate change on the steps of the Swedish Parliament.

See also Paul Slovic, “ ‘If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act’: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” Judgment and Decision-Making 2, no. 2 (2007): 79–95. 17 Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike? 4 Million People, Activists Estimate,” Vox, September 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/20/20876143/climate-strike-2019-september-20-crowd-estimate. 18 Greta Thunberg, 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 24), Katowice, Poland, 2018. 19 Henry David Thoreau, A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, eds. Sophie Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Ticknor and Fields, 1866). 20 George Hendrick, “The Influence of Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ on Gandhi’s Satyagraha,” The New England Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1956): 462–71; Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is an Uprising (New York: Nation, 2017); Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (New York: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973). 21 Erica Chenoweth and Maria J.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

almost certainly fired by an Israeli soldier: Agence France-Presse, “Shireen Abu Aqleh Killed by ‘Seemingly Well-Aimed’ Israeli Bullet, UN Says,” The Guardian, June 24, 2022. “In many ways, nothing has really changed”: Angela Davis, interview by Alonzo King (audio recording), City Arts & Lectures, May 24, 2022. “Build back better. Blah, blah, blah”: “Greta Thunberg Mocks World Leaders in ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’ Speech,” BBC News channel on YouTube, September 28, 2021, at 0:06–0:52. “They even succeeded in watering down”: “Greta Thunberg: ‘COP26 Even Watered Down the Blah, Blah, Blah,’” BBC News, November 15, 2021. “At some point you’d have to live”: Tamara Lindeman, “Loss,” on the album Ignorance (Fat Possum Records, 2021). 9. The Far Right Meets the Far-Out “World Wide Walkout”: Naomi Wolf, @DrNaomiRWolf, “#walkoutwednesday,” Gettr post, November 3, 2021.

Angela Davis, in the spring of 2022, put the tension of the historic post–George Floyd protests like this: “In many ways, nothing has really changed at all, but at the same time, everything has changed.” Beyond Blah, Blah, Blah These are difficult themes to write and talk about, because all we have are those very same cheapened words. Which is why I greatly appreciated Greta Thunberg’s various interventions during the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, which essentially consisted of making fun of people saying things about climate change while doing very little about climate change. The shaming took the form of her repeating, many times, the words “Blah, blah, blah.” It is worth recalling that Thunberg’s first protest was her refusal, as a young girl, to speak.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

If we refocused society around need rather than artificially-created wants — Jason sets out powerfully how distorted our lives are by advertising, reminding us that basically that is all that titans such as Facebook and Google are — we could recalibrate a world where together we could become more satisfied, and less separated. We need to make this change. We all know this. We cannot wait. We have to change systems if we are to stop the growth juggernaut from barrelling over us all. As XR’s greatest supporter, Greta Thunberg, most memorably put it, speaking earlier this year to global ‘elites’: ‘We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of endless economic growth. How dare you!’ We have to change systems not for any ideological reason, but simply because the emergency demands it.

Those who call for a shift towards well-being as the sole solution tend to miss this point. If we want to release our society from the grip of the growth imperative, we have to be smarter than that. Five Pathways to a Post-Capitalist World We cannot save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Greta Thunberg Once we understand that we can flourish without growth, our horizons suddenly open up. It becomes possible to imagine a different kind of economy, and we’re free to think more rationally about how to respond to the climate emergency. It’s a bit like what happened during the Copernican Revolution.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

It is not the free world that has to become like China to beat China. It is the other way around. If China wants to ‘beat’ the free world, then China has to become free. 8 BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PLANET? ‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!’ GRETA THUNBERG, AT THE UN’S CLIMATE ACTION SUMMIT 2019 When I read In Defence of Global Capitalism again, I am struck by a startling oversight. I flip back and forth but find it nowhere. Where is climate change? I write about the environment, resources and emissions, but I do not address with one word what almost everyone today considers to be the most serious threat to our planet.

A common line of argument is that the problem is the whole idea of an ever-growing economy with ever more planes and trucks ferrying people and goods across the continents around the clock. Leftists like Naomi Klein claim this is the inevitable result of global capitalism and ever-increasing production. But even a climate activist like Greta Thunberg complains that world leaders only talk about money and ‘some technical solutions’.2 This alludes to the widespread perception that we cannot rely on the growth and technology that have created the problems to solve them. Many greens want ‘degrowth’ and say we should consume less, travel less and settle for less to give the planet a chance.


pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

An electric car takes twice as much carbon to produce than a conventional one. My point is that this highlights just how unsustainable our lifestyles have become.[2] We are becoming addicted to a way of living in which flying is regarded as essential by many, and an aspiration for most. Even Greta Thunberg, in her noble efforts to get world leaders to take climate change seriously, had a support team flying backwards and forwards to the 2019 UN summit on climate change as she sailed in a ‘zero carbon’ yacht. They had, it was claimed, no option. Very few of us could afford the costs of Greta’s yacht.

The simple fact is that the continuing growth of conventional shipping and world trade, and of airports and aviation, is incompatible with limiting climate change. Short of a technological transformation, and quickly, if climate change is to be mitigated, shipping and air travel will have to diminish. To see how the combination of fibre and communications technology and reducing transport demand works, consider the admirable case of Greta Thunberg sailing on a high-tech, low-carbon racing yacht to the UN conference in New York in September 2019. She decided not to fly. Good. She decided to go by a zero emissions boat. Good, but incredibly expensive for all but a small global elite. Why didn’t she just stay at home and engage with the UN conference delegates by video link?


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

A plethora of organisations determined to drive change and to support the traumatised and displaced. Widespread disagreement about tactics and priorities. Decentralised activism launching huge public actions. The willingness to disrupt and the courage to sacrifice time, effort and personal reputations. Emergent, unexpected leadership, in Iris Long and Greta Thunberg. All amid a crisis so large and terrifying that many institutions and individuals feel paralysed, preferring to turn a blind eye or hope that a miracle (or miracle worker) will spontaneously save the day. But there are further lessons to be taken from the AIDS crisis, lessons that apply to any existential crisis.

Like the director general at CERN, or the leaders of backbone organisations, like Richard Hatchett or Sophie Howe, Oliver Burrows or Fiona Wilson, an effective leader’s principal asset isn’t power but the ability to make a better future feel possible, practical and meaningful. They will need the moral authority to be honest about sacrifices and they will have to resist the rhetorical allure of over-simplified fantasies. Where will they come from? From everywhere, identified by courage and energy or, like Iris Long in the AIDS fight or Greta Thunberg in the climate crisis, they may emerge unpredictably, living evidence of the huge impact of small surprises. Such leaders are characterised by rational optimism, a grounded belief in human capacity. They don’t accept that, as a leading psychologist put it, ‘We’ve seen the enemy and it’s us.’ They scoff at the goal proposed by a science technologist ‘to defeat mother nature’.


pages: 456 words: 101,959

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

Percussionists were whipping drumsticks around; viola players were gossiping and laughing; violinists were tuning their instruments, filling the air with screeching, high-pitched peals. I coped by folding my arms tight across my chest and screwing a pissed-off expression onto my face. The grimacing, somewhat irritated expression that Autistic climate activist Greta Thunberg is now famous for[20] is very similar to how I used to react to loud noise and social chaos. I had already started to cultivate a grumpy, goth persona to protect me from seeming weak. Instead of showing that I was overwhelmed, my mask told other people to stay far away. Chris didn’t have that option.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17 https://southseattleemerald.com/​2018/​12/​05/​intersectionality-what-it-means-to-be-autistic-femme-and-black/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18 Chris’s name and some details have been changed to preserve his anonymity. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19 https://truthout.org/​articles/​as-an-autistic-femme-i-love-greta-thunbergs-resting-autism-face/. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 Woods, R. (2017). Exploring how the social model of disability can be re-invigorated for autism: In response to Jonathan Levitt. Disability & Society, 32(7), 1090–1095. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 Chapter 4 Bellini, S. (2006).


pages: 268 words: 35,416

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

After all, San Franciscans are used to the best of everything: scenery, what with the city being surrounded on three sides by glittering water and muscular mountains; food and drink, thanks to the bounty of local farms, orchards, and vineyards; even sustainability (the city’s green approach would make Greta Thunberg burst into applause). Not that it’s all plain sailing. The City by the Bay is no stranger to challenging times. Between earthquakes and dot-com crashes, residents have rebuilt the city several times over. And it always bounces back better than ever. And little wonder; pioneering is in the blood.


pages: 495 words: 114,451

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

But he’d also heard from a number of companies that he’d pitched the campaign to that coral already seemed like a lost cause. “We’re considering shifting our focus to highlight climate change,” he said of The Ocean Agency’s future direction. Just a month earlier, the world had been captivated by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish sixteen-year-old who had spoken with passion and anger before the United Nations, accusing the adults in the room of destroying her childhood and stealing her future. She said they had denied her a habitable planet in order to chase “the fairy tale of ever-expanding economic growth.”

Ken Caldiera, one of the climate scientists in the conversation Andrew Revkin posted, included a clip from an old email he’d written: Economists estimate that it might cost something like 2% of our GDP to convert our energy system into one that does not use the atmosphere as a waste dump. When we burn fossil fuels and release the CO2 into the atmosphere, we are saying “I am willing to impose tremendous climate risk on future generations living throughout the world, so that I personally can be 2% richer today.” As Greta Thunberg and tens of thousands showed us in the summer of 2019, teenagers have already heard that message loud and clear. And the ones I spoke to believed they deserved to know what the options were, even if these had intimidating names like geoengineering. * * * — After the Reef Futures meeting in Florida, I followed up with Dan Harrison about the Australian cloud-brightening program.


pages: 197 words: 53,831

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

According to analysts at UBS, 2019 was the year the world really woke up to climate change, following a report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the previous year, which set out a stark difference in outcomes for people around the world even in the event of a 2 degrees change versus a 1.5 degrees change. This growing sense that climate change, far from being a niche concern, was the most important problem the world faced thrust it into the mainstream. Politicians and celebrities alike burnished their green credentials. New poster children for the movement emerged – literally, in the case of Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental activist who shot to fame at the age of just 15, having pioneered the movement for school students to strike over the climate in 2018, and who told attendees of the 2019 Davos summit that ‘our house is on fire’. Waking up to climate change in the investment world means looking to see where risks can be avoided and profits can be made.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

I have suggested, for example, that using its existing TFS scheme (the UK’s equivalent of the ECB’s TLTROs), the Bank of England could make 5-year loans available to UK banks at −2 per cent fixed interest rates, contingent on these loans being extended to the private sector at negative rates to fund investments in decarbonization such as wind energy. Wind power already accounts for as much as 25 per cent of UK energy generation – why not target 50 per cent or 75 per cent? Dual interest rates turn recession and low inflation into a huge opportunity to finance a boom in sustainable energy. My beef with Greta Thunberg is not with her ambition – it’s with her fear. We can do this. It’s a complete myth that we lack the resources to overhaul our economies. In fact, the economic system is crying out for it. This dovetails nicely with our final policy proposal: an overhaul of fiscal policy. There are two aspects to this.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Whether you’re a baby boomer addicted to watching cable news, a millennial hooked on Twitter conflict, or a zoomer who comes home from school fearing the end of the world because of climate change, I’m here to tell you to cool your jets. Psychologists have a word for this behavior: catastrophizing. When we catastrophize, we engage in an irrational thought process that leads us to believe something is far worse than it actually is. Take, for example, the remarks of sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, which she delivered angry and teary-eyed at the 2019 Climate Action Summit: “You have stolen my dreams and childhood with your empty words. . . . People are suffering. People are dying,” she pontificated. “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales about economic growth.


pages: 184 words: 60,229

Re-Educated: Why It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Life by Lucy Kellaway

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, lockdown, Martin Wolf, stakhanovite, wage slave

Now that I’ve spent longer teaching there is another reason I try not to put ability labels on students: the word is too narrow. Last year I had a student called Desiree who, no matter how hard I tried to explain it, could not comprehend that the demand curve slopes downwards. One day I decided to stage a fake World Economic Forum press conference at Davos, and got my class to play Prince Charles, Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg. With some misgivings I gave Desiree the part of Trump, and found that although the simplest academic tasks defeated her, being President of the United States was well within her reach. Desiree electrified the class with a Trump-like contortion of her bottom lip and the way she pointed and shouted ‘Fake news!’


pages: 205 words: 61,903

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

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

The world was changing, and environmentalists, union leaders, immigrants, and the anti-war movement were all coming to recognize global corporatism as the central cause of many of their complaints. Schwab responded by convening a trickle of panels at WEF’s conference at Davos about global warming and poverty in the global south. Even young climate activist Greta Thunberg was invited to Davos, twice. Her admonition that the assembled world leaders, corporate chiefs, and bankers not depend on carbon offsets and as-yet-uninvented technologies to solve climate change was ignored, twice. The headline that they let her speak at all was probably all they were looking for.


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Classification: LCC GF86 .O36 2020 (print) | LCC GF86 (ebook) | DDC 613.6/9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019024066 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019024067 Ebook ISBN 9780385543019 ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0 For Amy, Mike, and Josephine Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is. —Greta Thunberg These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it? —Annie Dillard CONTENTS Cover Also by Mark O’Connell Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph 1. Tribulations 2.


Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

We need to support and inspire our young people to embrace struggles for prosocial causes, which need to be tied to sacred values. The young then need opportunities to fuse their identities with others engaged in the same endeavor. Movements such as Extinction Rebellion are already walking this path. Saving the planet has become a sacred cause, and thanks to people such as Greta Thunberg, there is a visible group to identify with. As part of this undertaking, we can harness our willingness to spite, harming our own short-term material interests and those of some corporations to promote the long-term interests of both us and our planet. We can bring altruism’s shady relative back to serve the light.


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

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

The United States has some of the highest per capita emissions in the world, so more Americans equals more emissions, which is bad. But fundamentally this is too limited a way of looking at the climate problem. US per capita emissions are high, as are emissions in all rich countries, because from the way the contemporary world is structured, high living standards necessarily involve burning tons of fossil fuels. Greta Thunberg, after attracting incredible media attention for sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a low-emissions way, thanked the people who helped her sail and then remarked that “we can’t require from everyone to rely on people like this to sail you across an ocean, that is absurd.” In other words, we can’t just ask people to give up the fruits of prosperity.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

Mass protests had broken out in Lebanon, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Unrest over the economy and, more generally, growing inequality was feeding a global wave of populism while demands for more action on climate change inspired a rising tide of protests around the world, led by younger generations rallying behind Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg. Around the dinner table, my children talked about how excessive consumerism and waste was contributing to global warming. They pointed out that young professionals in their generation were turning to start-ups in search of inspiration and fulfillment at work because they were disillusioned with large traditional employers.


pages: 241 words: 75,417

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

In other words, any Green Deal for Europe carries risks of further estrangement between East and West. Across much of Western Europe, the demands for radical measures to address the climate crisis are growing louder. The rise of Green political parties, riding a wave of enthusiastic support from young people such as the Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who has mobilized millions of climate change activists around the world, is emerging as one of the strongest countervailing forces to right-wing populist nationalists. In the 2019 European elections, Green parties triumphed in the EU’s three biggest economies. Led by the soaring popularity of the Greens in Germany, pro-environment parties performed strongly across much of Northern and Western Europe.


pages: 318 words: 73,713

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

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

The restaurateurs fought against it with their only weapon at hand, punching-up shame. * * * Kids are the very best shamers—in part because it’s so much harder to accuse them of incivility. They embody innocence and hope, and they rarely have any skin in the game, whether power or money, so their motives are pure. They have only their values. A perfect example is Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who in 2018 launched a solitary campaign to shame polluters and save the planet from global warming. She mobilized student strikes around the globe. Attempts to shame her, including mocking tweets from the White House and efforts to graft her image onto pornography, fell flat and made those doing it look desperate and immoral.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

In the eighteenth century the Portuguese embassy in Rome organized a theatre production: free for Portuguese citizens but with an entry fee for all other nationalities. Some cheeky Romans masqueraded as Portuguese to get free entry – and the name stuck.6 Flygskam is a word from Sweden, home of Greta Thunberg, that literally means ‘flight shame’. Passenger numbers at Sweden’s ten busiest airports decreased by 5% in the summer of 2019 compared with the year before.7 In the same period, train use increased by 1.5 million journeys, meaning that we could add tågskryt, or ‘train brag’, to our lexicon as well.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

His panel included such luminaries as anthropologist Jane Goodall, musicians and philanthropists Bono and will.i.am, Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres, and CEO of Sompo Holdings Kengo Sakurada. In the audience was a sixteen-year-old Swedish activist named Greta Thunberg. “When I asked her to say a few words,” Benioff wrote, “little did I know she would outshine everyone in this room full of star power the moment she shyly took the microphone from me.”13 Thunberg proceeded to direct a scathing verdict on who was to blame for the climate crisis. “Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money, and I think many of you here today belong to that group of people,” she charged.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1 (accessed February 5, 2019). 15.  Damian Carrington, “School Climate Strikes: 1.4 Million People Took Part, Say Campaigners,” The Guardian, March 19, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/19/school-climate-strikes-more-than-1-million-took-part-say-campaigners-greta-thunberg (accessed March 20, 2019). 16.  Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis—Version 12.0, 2018, https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-120-vfinal.pdf (accessed March 12, 2019); Naureen S. Malik, “Wind and Solar Costs Keep Falling, Squeezing Nuke, Coal Plants,” Bloomberg Quint, November 8, 2018, https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/wind-and-solar-costs-keep-falling-squeezing-nuke-coal-plants (accessed March 12, 2019). 17.  


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

The German anti-fascist Amadeu Antonio Foundation called this ‘management of indignation’.34 The opportunities offered by livestream rebellion can take positive shape, such as the solidarity marches of #jesuischarlies and #noussommesunis in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan terrorist attacks in Paris. the#FridaysForFuture movement led by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is another example of such positive online mobilisation. But they can also lead to hateful and potentially violent riots against perceived enemies. The global far right’s ultimate goal is to galvanise young people online into joining their ‘resistance’ against globalism and liberalism. To do so they build armies of tech-savvy and social-media-savvy agents of change who might set the scene for a dramatic tipping point in redesigning the political systems and power relations in both Europe and the US.


pages: 438 words: 84,256

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

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

Governance problems in capitalist economies Governance scores Government bonds, regulatory preference for Government-owned banks GPS GPs Gratton, L. Great demographic reversal Great Depression Great Financial Crisis (GFC) ‘Great Moderation’ Great Reversal Great Reversal of Demography and Globalisation Greece Green, Damian Greta (Thunberg) Growing corporate monopolisation Growth Growth, declining Growth, determined of real interest rate Growth, probable deceleration of Growth economies, now facing demographic headwinds Growth (g) relative to real interest rates (r) Growth model, consumption based Growth rate, underlying sustainable rate of (g*) Guangzhou Guatemala Guilds Gulf Gutiérrez, G.


pages: 297 words: 84,447

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

Simply put, Mark and the other star builders want to stop the human-caused climate change that is tipping the planet into a new and dangerous phase. Climate change threatens our way of life, especially our most vulnerable people. That’s the A-side; the B-side features the related challenges of pollution and habitat destruction. There’s clamor for change—though, so far, not a lot of concrete progress. Teenage climate campaigner Greta Thunberg is touring the world telling politicians and officials to do more. In the UK, the Extinction Rebellion movement has protested by blocking streets and gluing themselves to government buildings. They want net zero carbon emissions by 2025. In the US, Democrats have campaigned for a Green New Deal that includes a commitment to net zero by 2030.


pages: 297 words: 83,528

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, cryptocurrency, DeepMind, driverless car, family office, glass ceiling, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, index card, lockdown, microdosing, nudge theory, post-truth, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, the High Line, TikTok

And no one cares about our politics. They just pay full attention to Cyrus, who tells story after story of the platform, the Viking death rituals, the Wonder Woman prayer circle in Madras, the Bhagavad Gita recital group in Dallas, the little cluster of communities that have formed around the worship of living people, Greta Thunberg, Margaret Atwood, Malala Yousafzai. What would Greta/Margaret/Malala do? These are the things the WAIs ask themselves. They do not want to try the latest skin-firming cream, they are not interested in celebrity gossip. They do not bow to influencers because we don’t give them any. They are the curious, the wondering and wandering, hungering for connection, searching for meaning.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

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

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

William Nordhaus, for example, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on climate change, has suggested that people ought to accept that a certain amount of global warming is baked into the cake, and that we will be able to adapt to it—but that we ought to work on curbing global warming outside of that range.22 Experts in The ScienceTM, however, have no problem proposing radical solutions to climate change that just coincidentally happen to align perfectly with left-wing political recommendations. Those who disagree are quickly slandered as “climate deniers,” no matter their acceptance of IPCC climate change estimates. Thus the media trot out Greta Thunberg, a scientifically unqualified teenaged climate activist who travels the world obnoxiously lecturing adults about their lack of commitment to curbing climate change, as an expert; they ignore actual scientific voices on climate change. After all, as Paul Krugman of The New York Times writes, “there are almost no good-faith climate-change deniers . . . when failure to act on the science may have terrible consequences, denial is, as I said, depraved.”


pages: 279 words: 90,888

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

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

Climate Crisis The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned starkly that from 2019, there were only eleven years left in which a programme to limit global warming to 1.5°C might succeed. Tipping points are visible in the form of melting glaciers, shrinking ice packs, lethal and unpredictable flooding, droughts and forest fires, from California to Australia, Africa to the Amazon. ‘Our house is burning,’ was environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s message. The joint endeavour of households, business and the state urgently has to alter how we drive, how we build and heat our homes, as well as our eating habits, water use, air travel and more. In places, and in patches, the work has begun. Take one example: in September 2018 the Highways Agency and local authority began upgrading a three-kilometre stretch of the A421 into Milton Keynes.


pages: 265 words: 93,354

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

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

I mean, they treated an all-expenses-paid trip to meet Michelle Obama like it was an offer to shovel cow dung on Old McDonald’s farm, so you’re foolin’ yourself if you think my parents will view hanging out with you as anything other than precious time they could spend driving to and from a Redbox kiosk to rent a DVD. Yes, my brother hooked them up with a Netflix account. Yes, I got them HBO Max. Yes, they pay for Hulu. But apparently, it’s not enough and they need to waste gas and pollute the planet so they can get the latest direct-to-video John Cena movie. Honestly, I wanna tell on them to Greta Thunberg so she can give them a stern talking-to about how they’re contributing to climate change, so they will stop going to Redbox to rent wack movies. But I digress. The point is my parents are delightful and you will never meet them, so the next best thing is me sharing three key facts that’ll give you deep insight into Phillip and Octavia Robinson.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Thousands in kayaks—“kayaktivists,” of course—helped persuade Shell it didn’t really want to drill in the Arctic; dozens of states and countries have now banned fracking; and some have gone so far as to stop new oil and gas exploration. It’s a movement now, and one increasingly led by kids, indigenous nations, communities of color. In the fall of 2018, a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg staged a “school strike,” sitting on the steps of Parliament instead of going to class on the theory that she couldn’t be bothered if the government couldn’t be bothered to care about the climate. Her action galvanized sentiment across northern Europe, and on the other side of the globe, Australian schoolchildren were soon on strike, too, and occupying the foyer of their Parliament.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

But she took the trouble to meet with everyone she could, seeking to understand how focusing on sustainability could help the company as a whole and trying to ensure that everything she did solved a problem for one of her colleagues. Within a few years she was able to spearhead a major shift in how the company measured and managed itself. Greta Thunberg was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl when she began protesting climate change outside the Swedish Parliament. If it’s really a climate emergency, she said, why aren’t we doing anything? A year later an estimated 1.6 million students from 125 countries left school to join a global climate strike.


pages: 535 words: 103,761

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

Writing in 1942, one of America’s leading social scientists, Talcott Parsons, indicated that ‘a tendency to the romantic idealization of youth patterns seems in different ways to be characteristic of modern Western society as a whole’.4 His point was echoed in the early 1960s, when a social scientist remarked; ‘Yet we still share with the ancient Greeks the wish that “youth should not be spoiled by old age.” We try to stay young.’5 In the 21st century the romantic idealisation of youth has acquired unprecedented momentum. The media’s sanctification of Greta Thunberg is underwritten by the claim that the young are putting right the problems created by their parents’ generation. The sentimentalisation of youth developed in parallel with growing scepticism directed at the ways of the older generations. At the turn of the 20th century it appeared to many that the ways of the old were fast being displaced by rapid social, technological and cultural change.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

‘It’s a tough thing to be asked to do,’ said presenter Joanna Gosling, which invited the question ‘Then why ask them to do it?’ All over the country these past few years, I’ve been to festivals and events where smart, informed, impassioned young people are making their case and engaging with politics. Some within the BBC clearly think young people are more Vicky Pollard than Greta Thunberg and live in terror of being thought ‘bo-ring’. As I write, Radio 4’s attempts to make itself more youth-friendly are highly contentious within that network. Producers joke that it can only be a matter of time before Stormzy is presenting Gardener’s Question Time. There’s another rub too, another danger in courting youth.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Chapter Seven INTO THE EMERGENCY ROOM Every January, heads of state mingle with the titans of finance and industry in the Swiss alpine ski resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum’s series of highfalutin, invitation-only seminars, meetings, and parties. As it has swelled in influence, the event has grown to attract celebrities and activists as well. In 2020, for example, central players such as European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde and financier George Soros were joined by climate activist Greta Thunberg and Bollywood star Deepika Padukone, an ambassador for mental health. The Big Idea in 2020 was “stakeholder capitalism,” featuring seminars on gender parity and the technological arms race. During a dinner-panel discussion on January 23, 2020, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke up during a discussion on climate change and trade.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

.‡ In the run-up to the 2019 British general election, Green Party activists in a number of swing constituencies in England noticed something unusual on Facebook. Paid-for adverts had started appearing, calling on voters to “support your local Green candidate”. The ads, illustrated with a photograph of fresh-faced climate activist Greta Thunberg, were not posted by the Greens. They had been bought by Thomas Borwick in the name of a company he owned called 3rd Party Ltd.55 (One Twitter user joked that the name Plausible Deniability must have already been taken.) Why was the deputy chairman of a local Conservative association buying ads in support of the Greens?


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Steve Silberman, in his book NeuroTribes, argues that neurodiversity should be viewed as different operating systems instead of through diagnostic labels. He writes, “The kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have grown up to become the architects of our future.” Another unlikely person who has recently captured the world’s attention is a single-minded young girl from Stockholm with Asperger’s. Greta Thunberg’s monotone delivery and limited eye contact would not suggest a person with the ability to transfix the world and motivate a new generation of climate activists, but Thunberg calls her difference her superpower. When I talk to autism groups, I like to share one of my favorite scientific papers, “Solitary Mammals Provide an Animal Model for Autism Spectrum Disorders” by J.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

The chapter entitled ‘Johnny’ begins, ‘I would like to tell about the man, the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humoured, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions – an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved.’111 Epilogue: The Man from Which Future? ‘For Von Neumann the road to success was a many-laned highway with little traffic and no speed limit.’ Clay Blair Jr, 1957 ‘I am here to say, our house is on fire.’ Greta Thunberg, 2019 Over lunch in Los Alamos in 1950, Enrico Fermi suddenly asked his friends, ‘But where is everybody?’ Everyone burst out laughing. Fermi had been thumbing through a copy of the New Yorker and come across a cartoon blaming the recent disappearances of dustbins on extra-terrestrials. The ‘Fermi Paradox’ is the name now given to the conundrum of why the human race has not made contact with any alien species despite some estimates suggesting they should be legion in our galaxy.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

What is encouraging is that I have found in my interviews with young adults – the generation born between 1994 and 2004 that I have called Generation K, whose lives have been documented by digital cameras since birth, and are entering secondary school and university with the spectre of doxxing and leaked nude images hanging over their heads – that many are extremely cognisant of the flaws and indeed the dangers of their so-called ‘native’ digital territory, perhaps even more so than their elders. As Generation K makes a name for itself in activism – from Greta Thunberg to Malala Yousafzai to the survivors of the Parkland shooting who rallied more than a million people worldwide in protest of gun violence – perhaps they will also lead the charge when it comes to holding social media to account and recognising the profound dangers of tech addiction. CHAPTER SEVEN Alone at the Office Forty per cent.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

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

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

“What really stood out was one rite they came up with,” Dylan told me. “It was the most popular idea by far. They agreed the most significant rite of passage for teens of the future would be the first time you personally, directly experienced a devastating consequence of climate change. This was still two years before Greta Thunberg and three years before the school strikes for climate. It was definitely a strong early signal of that movement.” For us at the institute, this tiny experiment planted a seed for bigger possible action in the future. We’ve started creating more youth trainings and including teens in more of our future workshops.


pages: 678 words: 148,827

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, classic study, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, impulse control, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, overview effect, Paradox of Choice, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

—Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1959) Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends, and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people. Greta Thunberg, seventeen-year-old autistic climate change activist18 In the 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, filmmaker Werner Herzog and his camera crew take the viewer on a remarkable tour of the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Named for one of its 1994 discoverers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, the Chauvet Cave contains some of the best-preserved paintings ever unearthed, dating to 32,000 years ago.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Jeff Bezos and his global empire appeared, at least in the moment, totally unbound from the laws of corporate gravity that slowed the growth of large enterprises, inhibited their agility, and clouded the judgment of senior leaders with exorbitant wealth. New obstacles appeared, of course, but Amazon swiftly navigated those as well. On September 20, 2019, thousands of Amazon employees left their desks to join technology workers and students from around the world in a general climate strike organized by the teenage activist Greta Thunberg. In Seattle, they gathered in front of the Spheres at 11:30 a.m., holding signs that read, “Amazon, Let’s Raise the Bar, Not the Temperature,” and “No AWS for Oil and Gas,” while arguing that the company had to rethink its devotion to greater selection, faster shipping, and delighting customers, regardless of the environmental cost.