Scientific racism

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pages: 516 words: 159,734

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR by John Dower

anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, Scientific racism, seminal paper, South China Sea, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway

The original wartime U.S. national-character studies dealt with Japan, Germany, Burma, Siam, and Rumania, and those on Japan are generally regarded in retrospect as being by far the most interesting.2 A fundamental premise of the national-character approach was “the psychic unity of humankind”—the assumption, as Margaret Mead later expressed it, that “all human beings share in a basic humanity.” This reflected the antiracist influence of Franz Boas, who had been the immensely influential teacher of Mead and Ruth Benedict, among many others. Boas played a leading role in repudiating the theories of biological determinism, or “scientific racism,” which dominated the mainstream of European and American anthropological teaching throughout the nineteenth century. Many of the scholars who became associated with the national-character studies went out of their way to emphasize that the most recent and reliable work on racial differences by anthropologists in no way supported theories of biologically engendered superiority or inferiority in intellect or character.

This was not, however, a solitary stream, but one fed by two others: one that we may call slave words and colonial words, drawn from the experience of blacks and Chinese “coolies” in America, and from the colonial enterprise everywhere; and another stream of language which deserves the label “intellectual words,” involving the rationalization of racism beginning with the great debates among Spanish theologians and philosophers at the time of the conquistadores, and carrying through the “scientific racism” of the nineteenth century right up to the Pacific War. The image of the nonwhite in European eyes was initially shaped by the simultaneous encounter with black peoples in Africa and the natives of the Americas. The two were not treated identically. Blacks were enslaved, but until the eighteenth century were not seen as subjects capable of conversion to Christianity.

The impression that nonwhites remained, in effect, “natural slaves”—that is, persons destined to serve and subordinate themselves to the superior whites–was thus implicitly revitalized by the mainstream of Western rational inquiry and empirical investigation, a welcome finding indeed in an age of intensified empire building. Even with all the new theoretical language, scientific racism had a familiar ring. Here, for instance, is a well-known example of how nineteenth-century scholars used the concept of childishness to explain the characteristics of Asians and their place in the hierarchy of races: “As the type of the Negro is foetal, that of the Mongol is infantile. And in strict accordance with this we find that their government, literature and art are infantile also.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

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

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

(Besides, as I will discuss later, the ship has already sailed on selective breeding thanks to how we find partners in the twenty-first century, and liberals are more guilty of this selective breeding than anyone.) Both of these complaints, moreover, ignore an essential fact: none of the potential bad consequences of this way of thinking are inevitable if we make up our minds to prevent them. Ideas don’t bring about ugly regimes like eugenics and “scientific” racism. People do. But suppose you remain a skeptic about the genetic influence on intelligence. I can’t blame you. The topic is fraught. Even still, I would point this out: for whatever reason, different people end up with profoundly different academic ability. That, I hope, is indisputable. Not everyone is equally good at various academic tasks.

Moreover, we are the authors of our society’s destiny. Even if we had perfect knowledge at conception about a given child’s academic potential, there is no reason that we would be forced to act on this knowledge in an authoritarian way. And as for the notion that talk of natural talent must inevitably lead to “scientific racism,” I will argue that this way of thinking mistakes discussion of individual variation for discussion of group variation. “An individual’s academic talent is influenced by their genetic endowment” and “a race’s collective academic talent is the product of their genes” are two vastly different and incompatible claims.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) “no excuses” education reform norm referencing North American Free Trade Agreement Nurture Assumption, The (Harris) nurture versus nature debate Obama, Barack on education as anti-poverty program on education as economic leveler on education gaps Education Secretary Arne Duncan and end of No Child Left Behind on equal opportunity and goal of more college-educated youth 2012 State of the Union address universal pre-K initiative Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Office, The (television program) Office Space (film) opportunity, equality of and behavioral genetics and blank-slate philosophy of education and Dewey, John impossibility of and income inequality and liberalism and mobility and morality Obama, Barack on and poverty and progressivism and racism outcomes, equality of outcomes, plasticity of Palmer, Brian parenting and behavioral traits competitive parenting helicopter parenting and home environment and public policy under socialism and twin studies and universal childcare People’s Policy Project performance and achievement gaps pharmacy education phrenology Pinker, Steven The Blank Slate plasticity of outcomes Plomin, Robert positive liberty posters, aspirational and motivational postsecondary education degree creep and inequality master’s degrees and master’s programs PhDs professional degrees poverty and achievement gaps “controlling for poverty” “culture of poverty” and early childhood and equality of opportunity and mobility and selection effects and universal basic income and universal childcare premature birth professional degrees Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) progressivism and discomfort with inherent ability and education as economic leveler and educational funding and equality of opportunity and Medicare for All on negative and positive liberty and social inequality and social mobility and student loan debt forgiveness and universal childcare and veil of ignorance ProPublica pseudoscience and behavioral genetics eugenics phrenology pseudoscientific racism public schools, blame placed on Purdue University “race realism” race science racial achievement gaps racism Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) and aspirations to winning and behavioral genetics durability of and equality of opportunity pseudoscientific racism and “race realism” scientific racism structural racism and veil of ignorance Rand Education Rawls, John Reeves, Richard reform. See education reform movement reforms, realistic elimination of charter schools loosening standards lowering legal dropout age reduced focus on college education universal childcare and afterschool programs Regents Examination (New York) relative learning and blank-slate philosophy of education definition of and education gaps and education journalism and Flynn effect relative learning compared with and value of college degrees Republican Party and education policy and health care policy revolutionary socialism Roosevelt, Theodore Rove, Karl Rumsfeld, Donald San Diego Metropolitan Career and Technical High School Sanders, Bernie SAT and College Learning Assessment (CLA) and gender lack of research control for as norm-referenced and socioeconomics and test prep industry school choice school reform.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

Among many horrors, consider that on January 9, 1349, all of Basel’s Jewish children were separated from their parents and forcibly baptized and then the city’s six hundred adult Jews burned at the stake “on a sandbank on the Rhine.”12 Thousands were immolated in city-state-sponsored pogroms, and the members of some Jewish communities took their own lives before they could be tortured and killed by their neighbors. These atrocities happened despite repeated mandates from Rome. The Catholic Church’s power over Europe’s commercial centers was starting to wane, while the precedent that some people might be transformed into things had been set. SCIENTIFIC RACISM AND COLONIAL POLICY Blood purity, the state’s increasing power relative to Rome, and a body of literature sanctioning the idea of natural orders of humans were all in place. They were used to inform and propel new kinds of governance, and once again the site where new kinds of social-scientific control were practiced was the colonial frontier.

This is the context in which the modern liberal subject was made, at a colonial frontier. It shouldn’t be surprising that the modern legal person was defined and policed as strictly as the boundaries of the property that this person was allowed to own.32 Meld these concerns with eighteenth-century scientific racism, and it becomes easier to see how the liberal subject was born not only a man but white too. The limits of the liberal subject were never more clearly demonstrated than when slaves tried to claim self-ownership. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, promulgated in 1789 during the French Revolution, proclaimed all men free and equal.

See also fuel sources Cheap Food: overview, 32–34, 138–141; animal food industry, 155–58; climate change and, 159–160; industrialization and, 141–155; processed foods, 157–58. See also food systems Cheap Lives, 35–38, 189 fig. 6; overview, 35–38, 180–85; alternative nationalisms, 198–201; defined, 37; in Ireland, 190–92; liberal policing, 192–95; massive exclusion and, 24; nationalism and, 195–98; scientific racism, 185–190. See also governments Cheap Money: overview, 64–66; bankers and governments, 85–88; contemporary threads, 88–90; European silver, 71–74; finance of ecology, 67–70; Genoese banking, 74–77; global silver trade and, 81–85; monetary origins, 70–71; war financing, 78–81. See also bankers/banking; financial sector Cheap Nature: overview, 44–48; capitalism and, 24; Capitalocene appreciation, 62–63; early colonialism and, 48–51; Nature/Society split, 51–58; private property, 58–62.


pages: 678 words: 160,676

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

.… Attempts to overrule evolution—as by alleviating the plight of the poor—were both immoral and imprudent.”12 That version of social Darwinism, launched around 1870, reached its peak influence between 1890 and 1915 and swept through much of the intellectual and upper middle classes as the Gilded Age waxed and then began to wane. Social Darwinism gave birth to scientific racism,13 to eugenics, and to a pseudo-biological defense of laissez-faire capitalism. Scientific racism offered a convenient rationale for the contemporary efforts of Southerners and their Northern sympathizers of the so-called “Redemption Era” to impose Jim Crow oppression and ridicule on freed slaves. To wealthy residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, disturbed by muckraker Jacob Riis’s appalling photographs of destitute slum-dwellers of the Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives (1890), social Darwinism gave reassurance that they deserved their wealth.

This is clearly reflected in the number of black members of Congress, which did not rise significantly until after 1965, as Figure 6.7 illustrates—a clear “hockey stick” pattern of change.62 Black Americans’ exclusion from the mainstream was a concomitant of a widespread culture of white supremacy, as historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has documented in vivid detail in his book Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019). The most prominent example of this was the rebirth of the KKK in 1915 in response to the film Birth of a Nation. Scientific racism, the belief in the biological inferiority of nonwhite people, pervaded the academy and popular culture for decades before and after Reconstruction. Racist depictions of African Americans in entertainment and advertising, narratives of black men as sexual predators, and gruesome postcards celebrating lynchings were common in the South, but also the North, for much of the twentieth century.63 Only in the 1970s did representation of people of color in the media begin to break with the viciously racist stereotypes of the 1950s and 1960s.64 And racial intermarriage was feared and decried—as well as outlawed in many states—until the Supreme Court declared such legal restrictions unconstitutional in 1967, unleashing another long-delayed change.

In order to stave off the demonstration, FDR issued Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in federal agencies and defense industries employed in the war effort.113 World War II raised the hopes of both blacks and whites for a turning point in the struggle for racial justice. The scientific racism that had pervaded the academy and provided a basis for discrimination had been discredited in the wake of the Holocaust.114 Civil rights leaders and the international press highlighted the hypocrisy of fighting for human rights abroad, while tolerating racism at home.115 Thus foreign policy pressures became a major motivation for postwar and Cold War administrations to act on civil rights.


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

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

Since then, Banania’s advertising campaigns continue to convey what Anne McClintock calls “commodity racism,” where “mass-produced consumer spectacles” express “the narrative of imperial progress.”25 McClintock explains that commodity racism is distinct from scientific racism in its capacity to expand beyond the literate, propertied elite through the marketing of commodity spectacle. If, after the 1850s, scientific racism saturated anthropological, scientific and medical journals, travel writing and novels, these cultural forms were still relatively class-bound and inaccessible to most Victorians, who had neither the means nor education to read such material.

SILVER WIRE AND SMALL IRONS: EPIDERMALIZATION Epidermalization, Stuart Hall writes, is “literally the inscription of race on the skin.”23 It is the disassociation between the black “body and the world” that sees this body denied its specificity, dissected, fixed, imprisoned by the white gaze, “deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.”24 “Y’a bon” is the slogan for Banania, a banana flour–based chocolate drink first sold commercially in France in the early 1900s and popularized with a caricature of a smiling, red fez–wearing Senegalese soldier with his rifle at his feet gracing the drink’s packaging. Such commodity packaging is invested with the scientific racism, like that expressed by both Long and Barbot, which depicted Africans as servile, primitive, and ranked as an inferior species. An earlier campaign for this product featured an image of a woman, ostensibly a Caribbean woman, flanked by two banana bunches and holding an open can of Banania in each hand, pouring its contents onto the celebrating and joyous French masses pictured below.

See also panopticon Private Lives and Public Surveillance (Rule), 14 prototypical whiteness, 26–27, 92, 110, 113–18, 122, 162, 181n86 Public Enemy, 66 Pugliese, Joseph, 113 race: biometric information and, 25–27, 39, 70–74, 89–102, 108–20, 140–45; black mobility and, 11, 21, 24–25, 62–83, 91, 136–59, 161; epidermalization and, 5–7, 16–17; gender’s intersections with, 10–11, 26–29, 57–58, 94, 110–11, 128–29, 131–36, 156–59; racial baggage and, 28–29, 131–36, 148–49; sorting and, 14–18, 26, 55–57, 77–83, 93–102, 109–18; white racial frame and, 95, 180n60 racial epidermal schema, 49 racializing surveillance, 8, 16–18, 21, 32, 42, 50–58, 68, 78, 82, 91–92, 97–102, 114, 128, 161–64 “Racial Sensitivity” (Better Off Ted), 189n5 racism: antiblack racism and, 5, 9–11, 21, 61, 95, 105, 110, 143; black antiracist counterframing and, 108, 180n60; commodity racism and, 97–98; facial recognition technology and, 109–12, 112, 161–64, 180n71, 181n88, 189n5; gender and, 131–36, 156–59; policing strategies and, 13; racial baggage and, 28–29, 131–36, 148–49; scientific racism and, 95–97, 111–14; sexuality and, 10–11, 50, 96–97, 101, 146–51, 171n73; surveillance’s resistance and, 6–7, 9–10, 12–13, 21, 23, 31–32, 36–38, 173n124; TSA and, 131–56. See also airports; blacks; controlling images; epidermalization; gaze, the Ramsey, Cato, 74, 87 Ranger (ship), 85 reality television, 38, 63–69, 174n1, 174n6 RealTechSupport, 116–18, 181n97 Reddit, 18, 167n51 redditveillance, 18 Rediker, Marcus, 42, 48, 50 Regulation Act, 48 Reveley, Willey, 33 “Reverse Cowgirl” (South Park), 147–52, 187n64 Rhizome, 108 Rhode, Robin, 33, 58–59 Rhodes, Lorna, 40–41 Rice, Condoleezza, 28, 168n78 Richie, Lionel, 61 Rights of Passage (Salter), 175n19 Roberts, Charles, 53–54 Robeson, Paul, 44 Rodgers, Tara, 146 Rodriguez, Dylan, 10 Rogers, Aunt Ferebe, 167n63 Roth, Evan, 134, 155, 159 Royal Gazette, 54, 72, 85, 101 Rule, James, 14 “Run, Nigger, Run” (song), 22, 167n63 runaway notices, 11, 21–23, 26, 50–57, 71–73, 82, 91–93, 100, 179n43 Salter, Mark B., 135, 175n19 San Antonio International Airport, 138 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2 Scarred Chest (Thomas), 126 Scott, A.


She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

The eugenicists submitted The Kallikak Family as evidence that Buck’s children would be doomed. The Supreme Court approved the state’s petition, and Buck was sterilized. The court’s decision led to a boom in sterilizations in the years that followed. In the 1920s, Goddard’s work with the US Army also continued to fuel scientific racism. Eugenicists pointed to the difference between black and white soldiers on the army tests as proof of hereditary differences in intelligence between the races, and that the races should not be allowed to intermarry. The eugenicist Madison Grant declared that miscegenation was “a social and racial crime of the first magnitude.”

Dobzhansky defined races as nothing more than “populations which differ in the frequencies of some gene or genes.” After World War II, a number of other geneticists and anthropologists joined Dobzhansky’s campaign. Their efforts culminated in an official statement from the United Nations condemning scientific racism as baseless. But Dobzhansky’s new allies pushed the attack further than he had. They demanded scientists give up the term race altogether. It was so fraught with dangerous assumptions that it had to be discarded. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu, for example, switched to using the term ethnic groups.

Science, July 28. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/smoking-mothers-may-alter-dna-their-children (accessed August 4, 2017). Baltimore, David, Paul Berg, Michael Botchan, Dana Carroll, R. Alta Charo, George Church, Jacob E. Corn, and others. 2015. “Biotechnology: A Prudent Path Forward for Genomic Engineering and Germline Gene Modification.” Science 348:36–38. Barkan, Elazar. 1992. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnes, L. Diane. 2013. Frederick Douglass: Reformer and Statesman. New York: Routledge. Baron, David. 2003. “DNA Tests Shed Light on ‘Hybrid Humans.’” National Public Radio, August 11. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?


pages: 350 words: 96,803

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

Army began widespread intelligence testing of new recruits, for the first time providing data on the cognitive abilities of different racial and. ethnic groups.7 These data were seized on by opponents of immigration as evidence for the mental inferiority of, among others, Jews and blacks. In one of the great early defeats of “scientific racism,” the anthropologist Franz Boas showed in a carefully constructed study that immigrant children’s head sizes and intelligence converged on those of the native-born when the children were fed an American diet. Others demonstrated the cultural bias embedded in the army intelligence tests (the tests asked children to identify, among other things, tennis courts, which most immigrant children had never seen).

Even if we do not posit any breakthroughs in genetic engineering that will allow us to manipulate intelligence, the sheer accumulation of knowledge about genes and behavior will have political consequences. Some of these consequences may be very good: molecular biology may exonerate genes from responsibility for important differences between individuals or groups, just as Boas’s research on head sizes debunked early-twentieth-century “scientific racism.” On the other hand, the life sciences may give us news we would rather not hear. The political firestorm set off by The Bell Curve will not be the last on this subject, and the flames will be fed by further research in genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and molecular biology. Many on the Left would have liked simply to shout down arguments about genes and intelligence as inherently racist and the work of pseudoscientists, but the science itself will not permit this kind of shortcut.

The reason for this is that since African-Americans are disproportionately represented in the U.S. criminal population, any suggestion that there is a genetic component to crime is thought to imply that blacks are somehow genetically predisposed to be criminals. No serious academic researcher working on this issue has ever suggested anything of the sort since the bad old days of scientific racism, but that has not prevented people from harboring deep suspicions that anyone even interested in this topic must have racist motives. Such suspicions were fed in the early 1990s by Frederick K. Goodwin, a noted psychiatrist and head of the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration.


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

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

One of Franklin’s goals, therefore, was to convert fear of colonial expansion into rejoicing that such expansion would further augment England’s imperial power.25 Edmund Morgan, one of Franklin’s leading biographers, writes that Franklin “took it as a given that the wealth of any country lay in the numbers of its people, and proceeded to show (before Malthus was born) that the growth of population was governed by economic opportunity, that economic opportunity in America would for a long time be almost unlimited because of the unique abundance of land, that population in America increased accordingly, by natural propagation, far more rapidly than population in England and more rapidly than English manufac- 20 chapter 1 turers would be able to supply. It was therefore unnecessary and unwise to restrain American manufacturing, unwise to do anything to discourage economic opportunity and growth within the empire.”26 Franklin is also well known for anticipating scientific racism and eugenics. He desired the preservation not only of the British Empire but also of an empire of Englishmen, a reactionary goal given the ethnic diversity of the colonies.27 Franklin disliked the immigration to the colonies of African slaves and also Germans (the latter with their “swarthy Complexion”).28 “This will in a few Years become a German Colony,” he lamented in 1749 after observing several thousand German immigrants arrive at Philadelphia’s docks.29 Like many in this era, Franklin assumed that human population growth followed the same biological laws as plants and animals.

This older republican line of thought merged with the newer doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” a racialized ideology claiming that the American people possessed not only the wherewithal and the right but indeed the duty to expand the boundaries of the United States and spread the trappings of their nearly perfect democracy across the entire continent. Notions of American exceptionalism and the superiority of America were as old as the first colonies, but Manifest Destiny expanded these ideas, emerging in the second quarter of the nineteenth century as the product of several factors: scientific racism and the social construc- 40 chapter 1 tion of a unique and superior “Anglo-Saxon race”; the development of an American Romantic movement; confidence resulting from astonishing technological and economic progress; and an impulse to rationalize slavery and the brutal treatment of Native Americans.

“Our population has become comparatively dense; our new lands are exhausted,” read the Democratic Quarterly Review in 1844.157 Expansion was thus needed to stave off the creation of permanent and hostile classes. More mundanely, westward expansion would reduce tensions between native-born and immigrant workers within the Democratic Party.158 According to historian Thomas Hietala, Democrats’ recourse to Manifest Destiny reflected a “crisis of confidence” more than it did the rise of scientific racism—and central to the anxieties prompting western adventures were fears of population growth and modernization.159 Many Democrats, especially in the South, supported several Jef- 42 chapter 1 fersonian policies designed to slow down modernization, such as keeping the public lands cheap and trade as free as possible—which would ensure that factories remained in Europe—but territorial expansion was absolutely essential.


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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

The standard case for the prosecution by the left may be found in a 2011 review in The Nation by the historian Jackson Lears: Positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. . . . Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the “fit” and the sterilization or elimination of the “unfit.” Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century.

Yet the qualities that we prize in humanities scholars—context, nuance, historical depth—often leave them when the opportunity arises to prosecute a campaign against their academic rivals. Science is commonly blamed for intellectual movements that had a pseudoscientific patina, though the historical roots of those movements ran deep and wide. “Scientific racism,” the theory that races fall into an evolutionary hierarchy of mental sophistication with Northern Europeans at the top, is a prime example. It was popular in the decades flanking the turn of the 20th century, apparently supported by craniometry and mental testing, before being discredited in the middle of the 20th century by better science and by the horrors of Nazism.

Darwin argued that humans are closely related members of a single species with a common ancestry, that all peoples have “savage” origins, that the mental capacities of all races are virtually the same, and that the races blend into one another with no harm from interbreeding.33 The historian Robert Richards, who carefully traced Hitler’s influences, ended a chapter entitled “Was Hitler a Darwinian?” (a common claim among creationists) with “The only reasonable answer to the question . . . is a very loud and unequivocal No!”34 Like “scientific racism,” the movement called Social Darwinism is often tendentiously attributed to science. When the concept of evolution became famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it turned into an inkblot test that a diverse assortment of political and intellectual movements saw as vindicating their agendas.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

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

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

Flynn also points to the importance of human subcultures, both ethnic and class, some of which encourage cognitive pursuits more than others, in helping to explain average differences between groups. The assessment of average group IQ differences is probably the most controversial subject in the whole of social science and uncomfortably connects intelligence research to an earlier era when it was closely linked to eugenics and so-called scientific racism. The study of intelligence in the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century did, indeed, attract people with a certain cluster of beliefs. “They thought of intelligence as being by far the single most important human trait, and therefore the one around which society should be organized; they believed it was genetically inherited; they believed that the world’s darker-skinned races were inferior in intelligence to its lighter-skinned ones; and they were concerned that unintelligent people were reproducing at a more rapid rate than intelligent ones, which would eventually bring down the IQ of the entire human species,” as American writer Nicholas Lemann sums it up in his book The Big Test.5 However, several generations later, intelligence research is now a respectable branch of psychology, and psychometric tests based on IQ are widely used in business and large organizations to select candidates for jobs.

., 28, 37–38 India, 223, 259 industrial revolutions, 41–42, 45, 51–52, 134, 143, 255–58, 270, 272–73 industrial societies: cognitive class and industrialization process, 32, 33–35, 41–42, 45, 51–52, 253 distribution of status of self-respect, 10–11 Inglehart, Ronald, 211 INSEE (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, France), 198 Instagram, 22 Institute for Public Policy Research, 79 instrumentalists, 212 intelligence: emotional intelligence (EQ), 13, 67, 71, 137–38, 168, 233, 237–38, 257–58, 299 eugenics and, 63–64, 73 forms of, 66–67 general intelligence (g), 56–71 impact of Internet on, 22 measuring, 56, 61–71, see also IQ/IQ-type tests nature of, 7–8, 57–59 scientific racism and, 63–64 social, 7, 21, 56, 66–67, 258 social selection based on, 34–35, 39–41, 46–53 “test-taking smarts” vs, 57, 70–71 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), 213–14 Internet: Covid-19 crisis and, 294, 298–99 free or near free services on, 273–74 geographic mobility and, 290 impact of broadband connectivity, 293 impact on intelligence, 22 job “matching” and, 208 massive open online courses (MOOCs), 298–99 Web-based start-ups, 297 IQ/IQ-type tests: A levels (UK), 35, 46, 57–60, 95–96, 98, 105, 108–10, 124, 141, 192 criticism of, 66–67, 253–55 eleven-plus (UK), 20, 65–66, 82, 100, 196 Flynn effect, 6, 63, 67–68 general intelligence (g), 56–71 human virtue and, 55 innate vs. learned abilities and, 71–75 introduction of concept, 64 job selection and, 69–71 mass elite and, 14–15 measuring intelligence, 13, 14, 21, 39, 56, 61–71 nature of intelligence, 7–8, 57–59 SAT (US), 20, 52, 64, 65–68, 80, 114–15, 117, 287 socioeconomic status and, 78–82, 83–84 Ireland, 68, 177 Israel, national service requirement, 297 It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 276 Japan, 27, 68, 144, 194, 218, 223, 239, 293–94 Jensen, Arthur, 73 Jeste, Dilip, 302 Jiankui, He, 280n Johnson, Alan, 174 Johnson, Boris, xii, 155, 171, 179, 287 Johnson, Paul, 109–10, 170–71 Johnson, Tom, 109–10, 170–71 Jospin, Lionel, 88 Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 70 Katz, Lawrence, 117 Kaufman, Alan S., 65 Kellaway, Deborah, 226 Kershaw, Sam, 200–201 Keynes, John Maynard, 45n, 53, 301 Kimball, David, 160 knowledge economy, 133–52 Anywhere-Somewhere divide and, 12–20, 125–31 cognitive-analytical ability as gold standard of human esteem, 3–5, 11–12, 28, 162 decline in top occupational classes, 268–71 decline of graduate pay premium, 262–64 future of, 143–44, 253–74, see also future gender and, 151–52 globalization and, 258–61 graduate pay premium, 105, 116–17, 136, 139, 145, 152, 262–64 graduates moving to non-graduate jobs, 24, 265–68 “graduatization”/income divergence of the labor market, 133–52, 234–39 high-skill occupations in, 97, 135–36, 138, 148, 259, 268–71 low-skill occupations in, 25–26, 120–21, 135–36, 152, 198, 202–3 middle-skill occupations in, 107–11, 129–31, 135–36, 150–52, 198, 209 nonrepayment of student loans, 268 privileging of key cognitive employees, 141–44 robots and artificial intelligence and, 23–25, 255–58, 270, 272–73, 298 supply of knowledge workers and, 23, 24, 265–68 see also college/university education; professions Kohn, Melvin, 68 Koolhaas, Rem, 185 Krugman, Paul, 23, 257–58 Labaree, David F., 49 Lamont, Michèle, The Dignity of Working Men, 204–5 Lampl, Peter, 18 language: Head (cognitive) work and, 184–85 Heart (care) work and, 182–86 political cognitive domination and, 178–79 religion and, 181, 184 Lasch, Christopher, 278 Lauder, Hugh, The Global Auction (with Brown and Ashton), 23, 144, 258–60 Layard, Richard, 281, 288 Leary, Alison, 236–38 Lemann, Nicholas, The Big Test, 50, 52, 64, 66, 117, 287 Leslie, Charlotte, 172–73 Lewis, Paul, 108, 150 lifelong learning, 95, 107–9, 296–301 Lind, Michael, The New Class War, 18 LinkedIn, 265–66 Locke, John, 42 loneliness, 222–23 low-skill occupations, 25–26, 120–21, 135–36, 152, 198, 202–3 Lucas, David, 13, 58, 180–86 Lupu, Noam, 172 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 41 Mackenzie, Polly, 56 Macron, Emmanuel, 118 Mair, Peter, Ruling the Void, 167 Manthorpe, Jill, 242 manual sector, see Hand (manual) work Markovits, Daniel, The Meritocracy Trap, 112 Marmot, Michael, 207 Marshall, Alfred, 45 Marx, Karl, 34, 211 mass elite, nature of, 14–15 massive open online courses (MOOCs), 298–99 Maxwell, Elaine, 237–38 Mayhew, Ken, 264, 266, 267 Mazzucato, Mariana, 286 McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary, 277, 283, 300 McKinsey & Company, 142, 270 Mental Health America, 222 mental well-being: deaths of despair (Deaton) vs., 10–11, 136, 206–7, 220, 222 family breakdown and, 220, 221–25, 292–93 happiness research and, 11, 16–17, 220, 288, 302–3 impact of media on, 37, 278–81 loneliness and, 222–23 rebalancing of Hand, Head, and Heart work, ix–xiii, 4–5, 20–29, 257–58, 275, 277–78, 284–301 religious decline and, 35–36, 221 status and, 206–7 work satisfaction and, 208–11 meritocracy, 75–89 based on education, 6–12 critique of, 7–8 family background vs., 6–9, 41, 115, 118, 125–26, 156 hereditary, 6–9, 48, 77, 115, 118, 156 inequality of esteem vs. equality of esteem, 9–11, 285–87 moral worth vs., 11 need for cognitive diversity and, 88–89, 281–84 nepotism vs., 41 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and, 31, 41 patronage vs., 41 in postindustrial society, 35 professional training and certification, 39–43, 44, 53 reciprocity and, 87 requirements of, 7–8 selection into cognitive classes and, 75–84, 87–88 in selection systems vs. society, 8–9 skepticism concerning, 7–8, 77, 81, 84–85, 87, 88, 100, 112 see also cognitive aptitude Merkel, Angela, 120, 156, 162 MG Rover, 194–95 middle-skill occupations, 107–11, 129–31, 135–36, 150–52, 198, 209 Milanovic, Branko, 194 Miliband, David, 174, 276 mindset (Dweck), 60, 67 Mirabeau, 153, 154 moral leadership, Head (cognitive) work and, 4, 11, 19, 55 Morant, Robert, 46 Morris, Estelle, 121n motivated reasoning, 20 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 58 multiple intelligences, 67 Murray, Charles, 55, 71, 221 The Bell Curve (with Herrnstein), 78, 83 Coming Apart, 7, 52, 80, 81, 180, 279–80 Musk, Elon, 14 Myers-Briggs personality tests, 63 Napoleon Bonaparte, 44, 48 National Health Service (NHS, UK), 148, 170, 217–18, 221, 225, 231, 232, 234, 236, 238–39, 241, 242, 245, 249, 289 National Institute of Economic and Social Research (UK), 265 National Opinion Research Center (NORC), 191, 222 Neave, Guy, 98 nepotism, 41 Netherlands, 24, 81, 98–99, 155, 222, 239 Newman, John Henry, The Idea of a University, 49 Newton, Isaac, 42 Nightingale, Florence, 234 Norman, Ian, 236 Northcote-Trevelyan Report, 31, 41 Northern Ireland, 161, 239, 241 Norway, 213 nursing, 147–48, 217–18, 225, 227, 229, 232–42 cognitive dimensions of, 233 emotional intelligence and, 233 graduatizing of, 234–39 medicine vs., 237–38 men in, 244–45, 293–94 pay protections, 232, 233, 237 status of, 236–37 upgrading, 291–92 Nursing and Midwifery Council (UK), 147 O levels (UK), 95–96 Obama, Barack, 14, 113, 156, 158 Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), 103 Office of National Statistics (ONS, UK), 210n, 221, 246, 266, 268 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 120, 121, 124, 135, 141, 208, 209, 262, 265, 294 Ormerod, Paul, 246 Orwell, George: Animal Farm, 153 Politics and the English Language, 182 Oxford/Cambridge (UK), 41–42, 44–52, 84, 97–98, 101–2, 156, 172–73, 263, 264 Parker, Dorothy, 53 Pathfinder Programme, 289 patronage, 41 Paul, St., 184 Payne, Christopher, 246 “peak” Head, 20–29, 38, 93 Pemberton, Nancy, 205 personality traits, 63, 67, 69 Peterson, Jordan, 178 Pew Research Center, 140, 212, 248 Piketty, Thomas, 129–30 Pinker, Steven, 299 Plato, The Republic, 154 Plomin, Robert, Blueprint, 72–73, 74 policing, graduatization of, 148–49 political cognitive domination, 95, 103, 153–86 alienation and, 154–55, 159–61, 175–78, 276 Anywhere-Somewhere divide and, 13–14, 160 Brexit Britain and, 10, 32, 154–55, 160–61, 164–66, 185–86, 213–14 education levels and, 155–58 family policy and, 163 in France, 156 in Germany, 156 globalization and, 161–62, 175 higher education and, 172–74 immigration and, 160–61, 162–63, 168, 169 language and, 178–79 “lay politics” vs., 153–54, 177 need for cognitive diversity and, 282–83 political participation “pyramid,” 157–58, 175–77 problems with, 158–64, 284 technocratic depolitization and, 166–78 Trump election in 2016 and, 32, 154–55, 159, 161, 169, 214–15, 220 in the UK, 154–57, 160–68, 179–80, 185–86, 213–14 in the US, 156, 158, 160–61, 162, 180 values and, 180–86 polytechnics/“new universities” (UK), 98, 100–102, 105–8, 115, 119, 263 populist movement, xiii, 12, 112, 177, 204–6, see also Brexit Britain; Trump, Donald postindustrial societies: cognitive class disenchantment in, 32, 35–39 cognitive-analytical ability as gold standard of human esteem, 3–5, 11–12, 28, 253, 287 distribution of status of self-respect, 10–11, 37–38 power, meaning vs., 21 practical intelligence, 67 precariat, 211 professions: automation of work in, 23–25 decline of, 259, 261–62 graduate pay premium, 105, 116–17, 136, 139, 145, 152, 262–64 graduatization of, 147–51, 234–39 growth in, 138–39 Head (cognitive) work and, 38, 39–40, 97 as high-skill occupations, 97, 135–36, 138, 148, 259, 268–71 income divergence with Hand (manual) and Heart (care) work, 133–41 training and certification, 39–43, 44, 53 women in, 26 Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone, 168, 221 Pythagoras, 197 Rauch, Jonathan, The Happiness Curve, 302 Rawls, John, 84, 87 Rayner, Angela, 125 Rees, Martin, 299 Reeves, Richard, 80, 111–12 Reich, Robert, The Work of Nations, 111, 161–62 religion: erosion of belief systems in postindustrial societies, 35–36, 221 language and, 181, 184 mind vs. body and, 11 rebalancing and, 301–2 urbanization process and, 34 Research Institute of Industrial Economics, 78 Resolution Foundation (UK), 150 Rise of the Meritocracy (M.

How Democracy Ends, 165 Russell Group (UK), 80, 102, 107, 125, 130, 263 Ryle, Gilbert, 38 Sacks, Jonathan, 21, 179 Salvini, Matteo, 155 Sanandaji, Tino, 78 Sanders, Bernie, 14 Sarmiento-Mirwaldt, Katja, 171 SAT (US), 20, 52, 64, 65–68, 80, 114–15, 117, 287 Saunders, Peter, 77 Savage, Michael, 191, 191n Scargill, Arthur, 139 Schleicher, Andreas, 294 School21 (UK), 300 scientific management: digital Taylorism, 23–25, 144, 258–61 Taylorism, 97, 260 scientific racism, 63–64, 73 Scotland, 48, 49, 97–98, 122–23, 128, 239, 241 Scruton, Roger, 183 Seagram Building (New York City), 184–85 secondary education: A levels (UK), 35, 46, 57–60, 95–96, 98, 105, 108–10, 124, 141, 192 credits increase and, 116 decline of shop and home economics classes, 112, 195–97 effectiveness of, 113 eleven-plus (UK), 20, 65–66, 82, 100, 196 free public education, 43–44 General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs, UK), 95–96, 141, 192, 198, 262 high school graduation (US) and, 14–15, 35, 40, 51, 95–96, 98–99, 116, 118, 124 O levels (UK), 95–96 Sennett, Richard, The Hidden Injuries of Class (with Cobb), 190 service job categories, 144, 260–61 Shakespeare, William, 58, 181 signaling effect, of education, 94–96, 121–26, 267, 271 Singapore, 85 Skills and Employment Survey (UK), 266 Smith, Adam, 42 Snedden, David, 49 social gradient (Marmot), 207 social intelligence, 7, 21, 56, 66–67, 258 social justice, importance of, 28 social media: Covid-19 crisis and, xiii, 16 digital giants and, xiii, 16, 33, 273 mental well-being and, 37, 278–81 social mobility, 75–84 Anywhere-Somewhere divide and, 13–20, 287–91 assortative mating and, 79–83 in class stratified societies, 34–35 college/university education and, 6, 103, 105, 125–31, 253–55, 268–71 downward vs. upward, 76, 265–68 in fair society, 8–9 “genetics of success” and, 75 geographic mobility and, 17–19, 125–31, 273–74, 277, 287–91 graduates moving to non-graduate jobs, 24, 265–68 “leaving” mentality and, 126–31, 164 selection into cognitive classes and, 75–84, 268–71 in the UK, 75–78, 80–81, 126–31 in the US, 78–84 socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and, 78–82, 83–84 Sommers, Tim, 83–84 Soskice, David, 104–5, 126–27, 129 Soskice, Frank, 104 Spearman, Charles, 64 Speckesser, Stefan, 265 St George’s Hospital (Tooting, South London), 233, 234–37, 245 Standard Occupational Classification schema (UK), 146–47 Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, 64 Star Trek (TV series), 303 State of Mental Health in America (Mental Health America), 222 status, 203–15 career vs. job and, 211–12 cognitive aptitude correlation with socioeconomic, 78–82, 83–84 decline for Hand (manual) work, 4–5, 13, 15, 189–95, 203–15 distribution of status of self-respect, 10–11 gender divide in, 190–92, 213–14 “graduatization”/income divergence of the labor market, 133–52, 234–39 income inequality vs., 28, 37–38 measuring, 203–15 mental well-being and, 206–7 objective/subjective, 203–4 shift to Head (cognitive) work and, 214–15 sources of, 190 work satisfaction and, 208–11 STEM education, 101–2, 108, 111, 236, 265, 268 Stern, William, 64 Sternberg, Robert, 67 Stewart, James, 276 Strachey, John, 61 Suh, Jooyeoun, 246 Sullivan, Louis, 184 Sumption, Jonathan, 155 Sunstein, Cass, 285 Susskind, Daniel: The Future of the Professions (with R.


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

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

Miller jumped into the fray in response to a work that he himself called “the most thorough and comprehensive treatment of the Negro problem, from a statistical standpoint, which has yet appeared.”10 In 1896, a statistician at New Jersey’s Prudential Insurance Company—a German émigré named Frederick Hoffman—published one of the most influential works of American scientific racism. Hoffman’s book Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro presented hundreds of pages of data that purported to prove the innate degeneracy and criminality of African Americans and that predicted the eventual extinction of the Black race in the United States.11 Hoffman built his case on census data and then, thanks to the support of a Census Bureau statistician, published his book with the stamp of approval of the American Economic Association.12 Hoffman worked hard at making racism look like a reasonable, objective stance, and his work heralded a new conversation for a post-slavery nation that sought to cast African Americans throughout the country as a problem.

Frederick L. Hoffman, “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Publications of the American Economic Association 11, no. 1/3 (1896): 1–329. 12.  Walter Willcox, a Census Bureau chief statistician, championed Hoffman’s piece for the AEA. Mark Aldrich, “Progressive Economists and Scientific Racism: Walter Willcox and Black Americans, 1895–1910,” Phylon 40, no. 1 (1979): 1–14 at 8. 13.  Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 55. 14.  Miller, A Review of Hoffman’s Race Traits, 6, 19. 15.  

Bibliography Ackermann, Kevin, and Taylor Savell. “Count and Increase.” USApportionment.org. https://usapportionment.org/countandincrease.html. Agar, Jon. The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Aldrich, Mark. “Progressive Economists and Scientific Racism: Walter Willcox and Black Americans, 1895–1910.” Phylon 40, no. 1 (1979): 1–14. Altmeyer, Arthur J. “Three Years’ Progress Toward Social Security.” Social Security Bulletin 1, no. 8 (August 1938): 1–7. Aluko, S. A. “How Many Nigerians? An Analysis of Nigeria’s Census Problems, 1901–63.” Journal of Modern African Studies 3, no. 3 (1965): 371–92.


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

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

His work helped to break the yoke of providential theories which entrenched and legitimated gross gender and economic inequality. But his own prejudice and racism also led to early social scientific classifications of human worth that were later ‘refined’ and enlisted in the service of full-blown systems of scientific racism: to the rise of equally abhorrent and, in ways, even more inhumane treatments of enslaved peoples than in earlier eras. They were more inhumane because the new, flourishing social sciences of the 19th century conferred ‘scientific’ respectability on slavery that earlier eras lacked. Kant and his friends fought religious oppression only to bequeath the world new forms of racial categorization and subjugation.

., 196 Rosenfeld, Sophia, 58 Ross, David, 269–70, 272–3 Rumsfeld, Donald, 52 Samuelson, Paul, 134, 152 sanctioned ignorance, 40–2 Sand, George, 166–7, 324–6 Sanofi-Aventis, 269–77 Sarch, Alexander, 231–2, 233–5, 304 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 293–4 Schiebinger, Londa, 11 Schwartz, Anna, 54–5, 59–61 science, 8, 64–7 scientific racism, 48, 319 Scotland Yard, 112–14 Scott, Tom, 207, 212 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 53–4 self-interest, 125–6, 126, 136, 139–40 Seroxat, 250–2, 282 servitude, 41–2, 44, 155–6 Shapiro, Aaron, 79 shared prosperity theory, 123, 136, 147 Sherman, Rachel, 117–18 Shine lawsuit, 115–16, 117 Simons, Henry, 246 Simpson, Jeffrey, 28 Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam James, 27 Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle, 255 slavery, 43–4, 205; see also servitude Smarsh, Sarah, 84 smarts see strong/smart groups Smith, Adam, 9; Britain a nation of shopkeepers, 192; criticism of monopoly protections, 127–9; criticisms of merchants, 247, 320; economic classes of society, 138–40, 143; and economic inequality, 136; on government regulation, 20–1, 121, 126–7, 136–7, 140–1; his mother’s influence, 125; inevitability of conflict, 186; misrepresentation of his ideas, 142–6, 310–12; on relative poverty, 142–3; on self-interest, 126, 136; strategic and wilful ignorance of, 122–3; tiered justice system, 121; timing and motives for helping the poor, 245; trade protectionism, 186, 190–1; on wealth distribution, 142–4, 191; Wealth of Nations, 6–7, 121, 125–6, 136, 169, 189, 245; Wealth of Nations abridged versions, 144–6 Smith, David, 109–10 snowmobile fallacy, 241–3 social silence, 53 Société Générale, 120 Socrates, 45, 63 Somin, Ilya, 94–5, 96 Sorel, Georges, 17 Soviet Union, uncomfortable facts, 5, 13 Spivak, Gayatri, 40–1 SSRI drugs see antidepressants Standard Oil, 4, 211–14 Steinzor, Rena, 244–5 Stewart, Maria W., 130–1 Stigler, George, 133, 246–7, 248 strategic ignorance: autocratic exploitation, 69–71; business practices, 20, 205; Carnegie, 208–10; corporate anonymity, 45–6; definition, 3; of drone strikes, 91–2; economic theory, 122–3; emancipatory nature, 315–17; exposure efforts treated as inexcusable, 269–70; Ford, 79–81, 98; MHRA’s non-prosecution record, 291–2, 293–4; and political networks, 22; Rockefeller, 213–14 strong/smart groups, 16–17, 69–71, 77, 173–4, 312–13 student loans, 185 Suez crisis, 31 suicide rates, 307 Sun, 114–15 Sutherland, Kathryn, 145–6, 159 Syll, Lars, 187 Symons, Baroness, 32 taxation, Paine’s proposals, 184, 308 Taylor, Gordon, 105–6 Taylor, Harriet, 7, 60–1, 153, 157–60, 166, 299 Taylor, Helen, 157–60 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 68 Teicher, Martin, 280 Temple, Robert, 287–8 Tett, Gillian, 53 Thalidomide, 254, 256–8 think tanks, 65 Thomas, Richard, 110, 111 Tillerson, Rex, 214 tobacco industry, 51 Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in America, 197–200, 309, 322–3; and divine providence, 322–4; French workers, 325–6; government regulation of industry, 20–1, 197–200, 301; prejudice against women, 166–7, 324–6 torture, 72–5 trade: free trade, 17–13, 57, 200–1; mercantilism, 169–70, 171; protectionism, 186, 188, 190–1; Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory, 186–8; US policy, 171, 188, 190, 217 Trefgarne, George, 179–80 Trump, Donald: class myths of voter support, 81–4, 162, 163; elite ignorance, 90–1, 93–4; on history, 314; on Obama, 82, 148–9; presidential election, 19; selective use of facts, 92–4; on torture, 73–4; and truth, 17; wealthy backers, 83–4 truth, liberating potential, 9–10 United Kingdom: male enfranchisement, 42; market interventionism, 43–4; military interventions, 14–15; Suez crisis, 31; trade policies, 44, 57, 186, 190–1; weak regulation of pharmaceutical companies, 252–3, 278, 291–2 United States: conscription, 14–15; drone strikes, 91–2; in-country inequality, 14–15, 36–7; labour oppression, 129–30; laissez-faire policies, 194–5; military interventions, 14–15, 68–9, 185; New Deal, 196; origins myths, 169; suicide rates, 307; trade policies, 171, 188, 190, 217; War Crimes Act (1996), 73; workplace deaths, 219–20 United States Department of Justice, 102, 238, 252, 261 Unser, Bobby, 242–3 unwitting ignorance, 42, 122–3 useful unknowns, 51–6, 257, 277 utilitarianism, 8, 155 ‘veil of ignorance’, 8–9, 46 Viner, Jacob, 300, 302–3 Vinson and Elkins, 235 Vioxx, 258–62 von Eschenbach, Andrew, 273 voter ignorance: Brexit, 82–3, 89–90, 162; collective, shared problem, 243–4; definition, 94; justification for disenfranchisement, 70, 156, 174; political knowledge test, 66–7, 95–6; solutions, 94–5; Trump election, 19, 162; see also democracy, and disenfranchisement War Crimes Act (1996) (US), 73 Washington Consensus, 34 Washington Post, 89, 171, 217, 257 Watkins, Sherron, 235 Watson, Mathew, 187, 188 wealth: evidence of intelligence, 77, 81; financial oligarchy, 65; ignorance and inherited wealth, 139; inherited wealth, 117–18; and morality, 162–3; and racism, 84–7; US voter support for Trump, 83–4, 162, 163 wealth inequality: effect on social wellbeing, 135, 147; God’s will, 75–7; growth, 137; in-country inequality, 36–7; India-England, 129; legitimisation, 75–6; as natural law, 71; relative poverty, 143 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 6–7, 121, 125–6, 136, 169, 189; abridged versions, 144–6 Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 67 welfare systems, 185–6 wellbeing, and inequality, 135, 147 whistle-blowers, 40, 262–3 White, William Allen, 81, 97, 111–12 white-collar crime, Mens Rea Reform Act, 236–44 Whittam Smith, Andreas, 102 Whittamore, Steve, 107–8, 109, 110 wilful ignorance: definition, 21–2, 228–9; difficult to prove, 22; Enron, 21–2; equal culpability thesis, 233–5; financial law, 239–40; first court appearances, 227–8; Grenfell Tower fire, 24–6; ‘ignorance doesn’t excuse’ principle, 231–3, 239–40; News International, 274–5; and reckless ignorance, 235; Rupert Murdoch, 101–2; suspected fraud Ketek trials fraud, 271–2, 274–7 Williams, Zoe, 90 Williamson, Kevin, 83 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 20–1, 163, 317; economic fairness, 122; family background and social norms, 268, 269; legacy, 151–2; on mixed education, 312; ‘Rights of Men’ rebuttal of Burke, 149, 150–1 women: domestic violence, 59; ignorance of co-authorship, 7, 60–1; minority women, 59 Woods, Kent, 285–6, 290–1, 292 workplace health and safety, 217, 218–19, 238 World Bank: disputed assumption of neutrality, 221–2; Employing Workers Indicator, 225; institutional ignorance, 33–4; presidents, 219–20; weakened labour protection, 137, 218–20 Zinn, Howard, 196


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Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

When the Spanish colonized the New World, they debated whether the indigenous people they found had souls; the Catholic church, at least, concluded that they did and tried—ineffectively—to prevent the worst depredations of the local settlers. In the nineteenth century, the situation was different. The scramble for Africa occurred after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and the rise of a doctrine of “scientific racism” asserting that the existing hierarchy among the world’s races was the result of the inherent biological superiority of white Europeans over everyone else. These views emerged despite the steady spread of democracy and representative government in Europe and North America, and they legitimated the use of force against nonwhite people.

The argument that uneducated people could not exercise the franchise responsibly was vulnerable to the spread of mass public education, which most European societies began to implement toward the end of the nineteenth century. The same was not true for novel antidemocratic arguments based on biology. After publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, a school of “scientific” racism sprang up to explain and justify not just the ongoing colonial conquest of non-European peoples but also the failure to grant equal rights to blacks, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Women as well were held to be insufficiently rational to be granted the vote, and in any event destined by their biology to be unqualified for male workplace occupations.14 It is important to note that all of these nineteenth-century antidemocratic arguments accepted many of the modern conceptual foundations underpinning democracy.

Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 186. 12. Ibid., pp. 4–5, 32. 13. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939); Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings (New York: Praeger, 1966). See the discussion of Mosca and Pareto in Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, pp. 50–57. 14. On scientific racism, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981). 15. Bruce E. Cain, Regulating Politics? The Democratic Imperative and American Political Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 16. The contemporary rational choice version of this Marxist tale can be found in Carles Boix, Democracy and Redistribution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Daron Acemoglu and James A.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

From a very early point in its scientific development, the study of heredity became braided into racist ideas in order to justify racist actions, and the enthusiastic appropriation of genetics by racists continues well into the twenty-first century.1 To avoid any mention of race leaves a vacuum that would be filled with errors and that would be interpreted as a tacit approval of scientific racism. At the same time, because discussions of genetics in relationship to class structure and to redistribution of resources have been poisoned by decades of race “science,” well-intentioned people often feel that they need to reject information about genetic influences on social and economic outcomes outright, in order to preserve their commitment to antiracism.

At the same time, because discussions of genetics in relationship to class structure and to redistribution of resources have been poisoned by decades of race “science,” well-intentioned people often feel that they need to reject information about genetic influences on social and economic outcomes outright, in order to preserve their commitment to antiracism. It is critical, then, to separate the empirical reality of genetic influences on individual differences in socioeconomic attainments from the racist rhetoric about differences between human groups. In this chapter, I aim to clarify why today’s genetically inflected incarnation of scientific racism is both empirically wrong and morally blinkered. I will first describe what geneticists mean by ancestry and why it is false to collapse the idea of ancestry with race. I will then describe how genetics research has been done by predominantly White scientists using predominantly White research participants—a situation that creates conditions for false comparisons between racial groups and risks exacerbating inequities between racial groups.


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the ‘noble savage’, which he didn’t really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the ‘myth of the stupid savage’ – even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications – from Darwinian evolutionism to ‘scientific’ racism – to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgements no longer seemed threatening.

But it’s hard to avoid the impression something else is going on here. The degree of erasure has been extraordinary, and far more than is warranted by mere suspicion of an overstated or outdated theory. Among academics today, belief in primitive matriarchy is treated as a kind of intellectual offence, almost on a par with ‘scientific racism’, and its exponents have been written out of history: Gage from the history of feminism, Gross from that of psychology (despite inventing such concepts as introversion and extroversion, and having worked closely with everyone from Franz Kafka and the Berlin Dadaists to Max Weber). This is odd.

Holding up any particular subset of recent foragers as representatives of ‘early human society’ is essentially a matter of picking cherries. 8. Hrdy 2009. 9. Will, Conard and Tryon 2019, with further references. 10. For important reviews and critiques of the ‘Human Revolution’ idea see McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Mellars et al. 2007. 11. The term ‘Venus figurine’ is still widely used, but has links to scientific racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when direct comparisons were drawn between prehistoric images and the anatomy of modern individuals considered living specimens of humanity in its ‘primitive’ forms. A tragic example is the life story of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited around Europe as a ‘freak’ owing to her large buttocks under the stage name ‘Hottentot Venus’.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

is not really a question at all but a rhetorical comment implying that there is much more to monetary success than intelligence, whatever that means and however it might be measured. The use of the results of IQ tests to “prove” the innate superiority or inferiority of culturally distinct peoples has a long and controversial history. In the early part of the twentieth century, “scientific racism” developed in the social sciences, particularly in anthropology. During World War I, the U.S. Army used the newly developed IQ tests to sort candidates for induction. Interestingly, the results showed that potential inductees sorted themselves fairly neatly into four relatively discrete groups: northern whites, northern blacks, southern whites, and southern blacks.

., 1 , 2 Matthew effect, 1 , 2 matrix of domination, 1.1-1.2 Medicare, 1 , 2.1-2.2 mentors, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 meritocracy affirmative action and, 1 American promotion of merit, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 coping strategies, 1 , 2 credentials, lack of as a barrier, 1.1-1.2 as a desired outcome, 1 discrimination as the antithesis of merit, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 education as a merit filter, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 employment opportunities, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 entrepreneurial success, 1 fairness of the system, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 folklore of, 1 government spending and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 in the hiring process, 1.1-1.2 , 2 human capital factors, 1 , 2 , 3 income based on merit, 1 inheritance as a nonmerit factor, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 intergenerational wealth transfers, 1.1-1.2 legacy preferences as nonmerit based, 1.1-1.2 , 2 luck as a nonmerit factor, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 market trends, 1.1-1.2 meritocratic aristocracy, 1.1-1.2 nepotism as nonmeritorious, 1.1-1.2 the new elite as extra-meritorious, 1 noblesse oblige increasing potential for, 1 nonmerit factors suppressing merit, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Barack Obama as example of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 the past, reverence for, 1 physical attractiveness as a nonmerit factor, 1 , 2 pure merit system, 1.1-1.2 reform movements and, 1 , 2 self-employment as an expression of, 1 social and cultural capital as nonmerit factors, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10 , 11 structural mobility and, 1.1-1.2 talents and abilities of the merit formula, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 taxes and nonmerit advantages, 1.1-1.2 Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Microsoft, 1.1-1.2 middle class America as not middle class, 1 asset building, 1 cultural capital, 1.1-1.2 deferment of gratification, 1 education and, 1 , 2 , 3 Great Recession affecting, 1 home ownership, 1 inner cities, flight from, 1 , 2 Barack Obama, background of, 1.1-1.2 old class vs. new, 1.1-1.2 precarious status of, 1.1-1.2 sports choices of, 1 upper-middle class, 1 , 2 T The Millionaire Mind (Stanley), 1 M millionaires, 1 , 2 , 3 minority groups affirmative action, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 asset accumulation, 1.1-1.2 core employment, underrepresentation in, 1 disadvantages of, 1 discrimination experiences, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 education issues, 1.1-1.2 as inner city dwellers, 1 opportunities expanding, 1 , 2 , 3 self-employment and, 1 social capital, lack of, 1 , 2 , 3 moral character, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Mormons, 1 Murray, Charles, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 Muslims, 1.1-1.2 N National College Athletic Association (NCAA), 1 nepotism, 1.1-1.2 , 2 net worth affirmative action and, 1 defined, 1 by income group, 1 of minority groups, 1 of Barack Obama family, 1 of one percenters, 1 , 2 , 3 of Walton heirs, 1.1-1.2 wealth scale, 1.1-1.2 new elite, 1 , 2.1-2.2 noblesse oblige, 1.1-1.2 O Obama, Barack, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 Obama, Michelle, 1.1-1.2 occupations attitude as a factor, 1 , 2 blue-collar jobs, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 CEO salaries, 1.1-1.2 , 2 changes in opportunities, 1.1-1.2 , 2 cultural capital and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 the disabled and employment difficulties, 1 discrimination, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 downsizing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 education linked to, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12.1-12.2 , 13 , 14.1-14.2 fastest growing jobs, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 health hazards, 1 nepotism and, 1 , 2 occupational mobility, 1.1-1.2 , 2 occupational segregation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 outsourcing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 physical attraction and occupational success, 1 self-employment and, 1 self-made men, 1.1-1.2 social capital and occupational opportunities, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 wages, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 white-collar jobs, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 1 old boy networks, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 old money, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 Outliers: The Story of Success (Gladwell), 1 , 2 outsourcing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ownership class, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 P Paterson, Tim, 1 Peale, Norman Vincent, 1.1-1.2 pensions, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 pink-collar ghetto, 1.1-1.2 poverty children affected by, 1 , 2 culture-of-poverty theory, 1.1-1.2 , 2 full-time work below poverty level, 1 as a matter of attitude, 1 meritocracy and, 1 , 2 minority rates of, 1 , 2 poverty threshold, 1 regional variations in poverty rates, 1.1-1.2 , 2 senior citizens and poverty rates, 1 U.S. poverty rates, 1 T The Power of Positive Thinking (Peale), 1.1-1.2 P Protestants and the Protestant ethic, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Puritan values, 1.1-1.2 R racism and racial issues affirmative action, 1.1-1.2 athletes and, 1 crime and the legal system, 1.1-1.2 disabilities, disproportionate experience of, 1 discrimination and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 in education, 1.1-1.2 employment, affecting, 1 Great Recession worsening racial equality, 1 home ownership, 1 ideologies of inequality, as part of, 1 income gaps, 1 language skills and, 1 Obama, election of, 1 , 2 scientific racism, 1.1-1.2 segregation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 social capital and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 white flight, 1 , 2 random-walk hypothesis, 1 recession See Great Recession references, 1 , 2 , 3 retirement as part of the American Dream, 1 , 2 delayment as a coping strategy, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 home ownership and funding of, 1 as jeopardized, 1 , 2.1-2.2 proposed supplementation, 1 self-employment and, 1 , 2 , 3 right attitude, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 T The Rise of Meritocracy, 1870–2033:An Essay on Education and Equality (Young), 1 , 2 R Rivera, Lauren, 1 Rosenau, Pauline Vaillancourt, 1.1-1.2 S Schmitt, John, 1.1-1.2 schools See education segregation educational, 1 , 2 , 3 occupational, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 racial, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 residential, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 of the wealthy, 1.1-1.2 white flight, 1 See also discrimination self-employment American Dream, as exemplifying, 1 franchises, 1 freelancing, 1 , 2 income, 1.1-1.2 irregular economy and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 petty bourgeoisie and, 1 psychological characteristics, 1 rates of, diminished, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 risk, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 subcontractors, 1 taxes, 1.1-1.2 , 2 women and minorities, 1.1-1.2 self-help books, 1 , 2 self-made individuals, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 sexual harassment, 1.1-1.2 Shapiro, Thomas, 1 , 2.1-2.2 slaves and slavery, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 small businesses, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 Smith, Adam, 1 social capital benefits of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 defined, 1 , 2 , 3 discrimination and, 1 , 2 economic opportunities, having access to, 1 , 2 , 3 education and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 mentorship as a form of, 1 nepotism and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 racism and lack of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 restricted access, effects of, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 social climbing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 of U.S. presidents, 1.1-1.2 weak ties, 1.1-1.2 social climbing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 social clubs, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 social mobility athletic and artistic abilities, associated with, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 cultural capital as a factor in, 1 education link, 1 , 2 , 3 hard work as a factor, 1 individual merit, 1 integrity hindering, 1.1-1.2 marrying for money, 1 reduction of opportunities, 1 , 2 during Republican administrations, 1 role of government, 1 , 2 social climbing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 status attainment, 1 through self-employment, 1 social reform movements, 1.1-1.2 Social Register, 1 social reproduction theory, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Social Security, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Lears), 1.1-1.2 T the South, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 S Stanley, Thomas, 1 status-attainment theory, 1.1-1.2 Stevens, Mitchell, 1 stock market, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 student loans, 1 , 2.1-2.2 success athletic success, 1 , 2.1-2.2 attitudes associated with, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 birth timing and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 cultural capital, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 discrimination, achieving success through, 1 education, as a factor in, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 entrepreneurial success, 1 , 2 , 3 God’s grace, success as sign of, 1 , 2 hard work and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 human capital factors, 1 individualism as key to, 1 intelligence as a determinant, 1 luck as important, 1 meritocracy myth and, 1 mind-power ethic as success formula, 1.1-1.2 moral character and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 parental involvement, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 the right stuff, being made of as key, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 small businesses and, 1 social capital increasing likelihood of, 1 , 2 , 3 suburban living as marker of, 1 10,000 hour rule, 1 women and, 1 , 2 supply side, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 Survival of the Prettiest (Etcoff), 1.1-1.2 Swift, Adam, 1.1-1.2 T talent and abilities American aristocracy, 1 American Dream, leading to, 1 of athletes and celebrities, 1 education enhancing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 functional theory of inequality, 1 jobs matched to talent, 1 success achieved through, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 talent-use gap, 1 upward mobility and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 taxes capital gains, 1.1-1.2 estate taxes, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 government policies linked with, 1 , 2 incentives and credits, 1.1-1.2 income taxes, lowered by Republicans, 1 irregular economy, avoiding, 1.1-1.2 progressive taxation, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 property taxes and school funding, 1.1-1.2 self-employment and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Social Security affected by, 1 , 2 the South and lower taxes, 1 tax breaks for the wealthy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 of urban areas, 1 , 2 Thurow, Lester, 1 , 2.1-2.2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1.1-1.2 , 2 tracking, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1.1-1.2 U Unequal Childhoods (Lareau), 1 upper class charitable giving and, 1 cultural capital, holders of, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 deferred gratification, capability of, 1 distinctive lifestyle, 1.1-1.2 , 2 education, 1 , 2 endogamy, tendency towards, 1.1-1.2 as exclusive, 1.1-1.2 , 2 as isolated, 1.1-1.2 one percenters as members, 1 Plymouth Puritans as wellspring, 1 political power, 1.1-1.2 social clubs, frequenting, 1.1-1.2 virtues found in, 1 WASP background of, 1 women of, 1 , 2 , 3 upward mobility attitudes as affecting, 1 barriers to, 1 through college education, 1 credentialism and, 1 downward mobility, vs., 1 through entrepreneurialism, 1 glass ceiling as limiting, 1 integrity as suppressing, 1.1-1.2 irregular economy, as avenue, 1 marriage as a means of, 1.1-1.2 Michelle Obama as example, 1 slowing rates of, 1 See also social climbing See also social mobility V Vedder, Richard, 1 , 2 virtue, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 W Walmart, 1 Walton, Sam, 1 , 2 , 3 wealth accumulation gaps, 1 , 2 , 3 advantages of wealth inheritance, 1 , 2.1-2.2 capital investments, 1 charitable giving and the wealthy, 1 , 2.1-2.2 culture of, 1 , 2 discrimination and, 1 , 2 distribution as skewed, 1.1-1.2 Forbes magazine listings, 1.1-1.2 gambling, attainment through, 1 government intervention, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Great Recession affecting, 1 guilt feelings, 1.1-1.2 hard work as negligible, 1 inequalities of, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 lottery, wealth attainment through, 1 luck as a factor, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 marriage rates, affecting, 1 nepotism aiding in transference of, 1 old money, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 one percenters, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ostentatious displays of, 1 political power, 1.1-1.2 property ownership producing, 1 , 2 pursuit of as a moral issue, 1.1-1.2 , 2 race affecting, 1 social and cultural capital, converted to, 1 , 2 the superwealthy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 tax breaks for the wealthy, 1 taxes on, 1.1-1.2 transfers of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 women and, 1 See also inheritance See also self-employment Weber, Max, 1.1-1.2 welfare, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), 1.1-1.2 , 2 white-collar crime, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Wilson, William Julius, 1 , 2 Winfrey, Oprah, 1.1-1.2 Wisconsin school, 1.1-1.2 women attractiveness as a success factor, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 discrimination against, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 economic disparities, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 educational attainment, 1.1-1.2 , 2 family concerns, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 glass ceiling, experiencing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 inferiority, feelings of, 1.1-1.2 labor force participation, increasing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 mentorships, access to, 1 , 2.1-2.2 occupational disparities, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 political underrepresentation, 1.1-1.2 self-employment and, 1.1-1.2 as trailing partners, 1 of the upper class, 1 , 2 , 3 working class American Dream and, 1 cultural capital, lack of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 economic instability, 1.1-1.2 education issues, 1 , 2 , 3 hard work and, 1 health risks, 1 home ownership, 1 lower class value stretch, 1 nepotism, effect of, 1 the new lower class, 1 women and incomes, 1 work See hard work See occupations Y Young, Michael, 1 , 2 About the Authors Stephen J.


The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

Such changes have made both racism and the ideology of martial conquest, appropri- 117 martial ethic, the cult of victory or the obsession with achievement (which some critics still see as the "dominant sports creed") , , ate to an earlier age of empire building, increasingly anach- but from the collapse of conventions that formerly restrained ronistic. rivalry even as they glorified it In the United States, the transition from Theodore Roose' s jingoism to Woodrow Wilson s ' velt liberal neocolonialism al- ready spelled the obsolescence of the older ideology of AngloSaxon supremacy. The collapse of "scientific" racism in the twenties and thirties, the integration of the armed forces in the Korean War, and the attack on racial segregation in the fifties and sixties marked a deep-seated ideological shift, rooted in changing modes of exploitation. Of course the relation between material life and ideology is never simple, least of all in the case of an ideology as irrational as racism.

Asked to keep one eye open, cool and detached, in appraising half the students, we were to keep the other eye winking as the rest of the students were passed from grade to grade and eventually into a world that would be all too happy to teach them, as they drifted churlishly from disappointment to disaster, what , - " , tration have turned the first-year curriculum into "a playpen of self-exploration." Schooling and the New Illiteracy : 143 142 : The Culture of Narcissism " " able, on the grounds of cultural deprivation. Cultural anthropology, which overthrew scientific racism in the thirties, provided educators with a new excuse for their failure to educate lower-class children: thev came from culturalh' deprived back- grounds and were therciore unreachable. As Kenneth B. Clark " pointed out, Social scientists and educators, in the use and practice of the concept of cultural deprivation, have unintentionally provided an educational establishment that was already resistant to change . . with a justification for continued inefficiency, much more respectable and much more acceptable in the middle of the twentieth century than racism.


A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

bank run, disinformation, fake news, Ford Model T, indoor plumbing, Scientific racism, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois

As Barr framed the big picture, she said, “This is a struggle for the rebirth of the White Race and the preservation of civilization.” Within a generation or two, she warned, white Protestants would be replaced by an inferior breed. The Jews were behind this plot. Her ideas were backed by influential academics and proponents of scientific racism. Madison Grant, a Yale-educated New York zoologist, had been trying to prove for years that southern Europeans were lesser humans than those from the north; they had low foreheads, he claimed, in addition to being both slothful and oversexed—a seeming contradiction. His book The Passing of the Great Race was a favorite of many Klansmen, and was later embraced by Hitler, who called it “my bible.”

., 354 Roosevelt, Theodore, 43, 108, 163 Rowbottom, Harry, 181 Rushville, Indiana, 97, 256 Russia, 59, 107, 127, 167, 171 Ruth, Babe, 68 S Saint Patrick’s Day (Indianapolis, 1923), 78, 80–82, 84 Salvation Army, 69 Sawyer, Reuben, 131 schools, 7, 93 Black, 6, 114, 229 eliminating Catholic schools, xvi, 131, 186, 328 Jews driven out of, 250 mandatory Bible reading in, 186 nutrition education in, 187–89, 194 segregation in, xvii, 19, 114, 229, 287, 346 teaching evolution in, 246–47 Schultze, Ed, 296–97, 299 scientific racism, 55 Scopes, John T., 246 Scopes Monkey Trial, 246–47 segregation, xvii, 345 ends with integration, 346 of federal workforce, 20, 133 in Indiana, 13–14, 46, 68–69, 114 in Indianapolis, 333, 346 and Klanswomen, 56 of neighborhoods, 74–75, 108–9, 170, 229, 287, 309, 333, 352–53 in South, 18–20 in US military, 346 See also schools: segregation in Severin Hotel (Indianapolis), 220–21, 223, 258 Seymour, Indiana, 349–50 Shank, Lew, 170 Shapiro, Louis and Rose, 58 Sheridan, Philip H., 7 sheriffs answering to Stephenson, 318, 322–23 bribed by Stephenson, 282 deputies of, 62–63, 181, 307, 329 Klan-backed, 307 and Klan vigilantes, 8, 85, 134 Klansmen as, 17, 47, 223, 241, 341 protecting Stephenson, 261 refusing to arrest Klansmen, 8, 100–103 Shipp, J.


pages: 430 words: 111,038

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

., ‘Rhodes, Rhodesia and the Rand’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2007, 1:1, 74–90, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057077408707924 Pitzer, Andrea, ‘Concentration Camps Existed Long Before Auschwitz’, Smithsonian Magazine, 2/11/2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/concentration-camps-existed-long-before-Auschwitz-180967049/ Popović, Ana, et al., ‘Late Victorian Scientific Racism and British Civilizing Mission in Pears’ Soap Ads’, Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture 2015, 3, 99–112, https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=674205 Popperfoto, ‘British Royalty, pic: November 1921, HRH Edward, Prince of Wales pictured in Aden, as his car passes local people, with their banner “Tell Daddy we are happy under British rule”’, Getty Images, 2020, https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/november-1921-hrh-edward-prince-of-wales-pictured-in-aden-news-photo/79621695 ‘Population, Houses, and Families’, Vision of Britain, 2017, https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/EW1861GEN/3 Porter, Andrew, ‘Empires in the Mind’, in P.

II: The Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 440 and 465. 16 Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Fourth Estate, 2019, pp. 47–50; Hugh Schofield, ‘Human zoos: When real people were exhibits’, BBC News, 27/12/2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16295827. 17 Ana Popović et al., ‘Late Victorian Scientific Racism and British Civilizing Mission in Pears’ Soap Ads’, Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture 2015, 3, 99–112, https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=674205. 18 Judith M. Brown, Nehru, Routledge, 2014, p. 13; Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883–1947, Manchester University Press, 2014; David Gilmour, The British in India: A Social History of the Raj, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018. 19 Mahmud, ‘Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Race’; Pradeep Barua, ‘Inventing Race: The British and India’s Martial Races’, Historian 1995, 58:1, 107–16, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449614. 20 Sanjoy Chakravorty, The Truth about Us: The Politics of Information from Manu to Modi, Hachette India, 2019.


pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Jones , Social Darwinism , p. 106; Gould , Mismeasure of Man , pp. 75-76; Pick , Faces of Degeneration , p. 165. 58 Cf. Kevles , In the Name of Eugenics . 59 W.R. Greg , “ On the Failure of Natural Selection in Man ,” Fraser’s Magazine (1868), quoted in G. Jones , Social Darwinism , p. 102. 60 L.P. Curtis , Apes and Angels . 61 Barkan , Retreat of Scientific Racism . 62 L. Clark , Social Darwinism in France , pp. 154-58. 63 Mosse , Toward the Final Solution , pp. 58-61. 64 S. Gilman , Freud, Race, and Gender , pp. 20, 101. 65 Lombroso , Antisemitism and the Jews (1893), discussed in S. Gilman , ibid, p. 101. 66 Haeckel , Riddle of the Universe , pp. 1-2, 8. 67 Darwin , Evolution of Man (New York, 1896). 68 Haeckel , Riddle of the Universe , pp. 350-52. 69 Gasman , Scientific Origins of National Socialism .

Timothy Dwight , “The Conquest of Canaan,” quoted in Tuveson , Redeemer Nation , p. 107. 6 Quoted in Mathiopoulos , History and Progress , p. 128. 7 Marcell , Progress and Pragmatism , p. 18. 8 Hostadter , Social Darwinism in American Thought , and Bannister , Social Darwinism: Science and Myth . 9 Lombroso-Ferrera , Criminal Man , p. 183; Barkan , Retreat of Scientific Racism , pp. 105-06; Boller , American Thought in Transition; Mathiopoulos, History and Progress , p. 117. 10 Wood , Creation of the American Republic , p. 35. 11 Ibid., p. 571. 12 J. Adams , “Defense of the American Constitutions,” in Political Writings, pp. 160-63; Wood , Creation of the American Republic , pp. 571-74; J.

Dell, New York, 1962. Bannister, Robert . Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought . Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1979. Barash, Jeffrey A. Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning . M. Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1988. Barkan, Elazar . The Retreat of Scientific Racism . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992. Barker, Ernest . Traditions of Civility . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1922. Barnouw, Dagmar . Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity . University of Indiana Press, Bloomington, 1988. Barzun, Jacques . The Culture We Deserve .


pages: 691 words: 203,236

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

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

RACISM, ANTI-RACISM AND IMMIGRATION A new feature of the discussions around immigration in the 1910s and 1920s was racism. American intellectuals considered anti-Catholic bigotry a backward sentiment, but hailed eugenics, the science of improving the inherited characteristics of individuals, to be modern and scientific. Eugenics was connected with scientific racism, which ranked different ethnic groups as more or less advanced. This meant Catholic Irish and Germans were now ‘Nordics’, considered by some race scientists to be on par with Anglo-Protestants, an interpretation which many of the Old Immigrant representatives endorsed. Some race scientists demurred, ranking the Irish lower down the pecking order.

For instance, when it was discovered that African-Americans were under-represented in the prison population, eugenicists improvised an ad hoc argument that this was only because blacks worked on plantations so couldn’t get into trouble. When Franz Boas measured skull sizes in a scientific manner and disproved eugenic arguments that immigrant groups had smaller brains, his work was ignored. Scientific racism fed into the 1911 Dillingham Commission report which warned that the present American immigration policy would introduce a lower-quality population stock to the country, leading to criminality and endangering democracy.32 It thereby concluded that the country must reduce immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

There was sporadic agitation against immigration in France, but the French state’s military struggles with its British and German rivals acted as a force for integration.13 This didn’t mean things couldn’t turn sour: between the 1880s and early 1900s anti-Semitism reached its height in France, as exemplified in the Dreyfus Affair. This was primarily driven not by immigration but by an elite discourse grounded in both the time-hallowed ‘killer of Christ’ brand of religious anti-Semitism and the new scientific racism. Countries which are small and prosperous, notably Switzerland, are disproportionately affected by immigration. Between 1850 and 1910, Switzerland’s foreign-born share rose from 3 to 15 per cent, making it an outlier in Europe. Switzerland is German-, Italian- and French-speaking and these immigrants came largely from these surrounding countries, but poor southern Italians were over-represented.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

By ‘the Right’, I don’t mean the American Republicans or the British Conservatives or the French Gaullists, but the deep right of the counter-revolution that raged against the American and French Revolutions and the slow evolution of Britain into a democratic society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it took the form of aristocratic reaction and ethnic nationalism. In the twentieth, ‘scientific’ racism and fascism. The themes and arguments of the vile tradition appeared with remarkable consistency in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran, the Sudan, as well as the ideologies of the Islamist terror groups. As early as 1770, one Cornelius de Pauw, a Dutch naturalist, sounded like half the novelists and playwrights in Britain today (and all the novelists and playwrights in France) when he poured scorn on everything American.

St John 236 Philip the Fair of France 340, 341 Philippines 81 Philosophers’ Magazine 101 Philosophy and Literature 99 pink poets 219, 220 Pinter, Harold 74, 168, 178 Mountain Language 52 poets 222–3 Pol Pot 30, 50, 93, 166, 167 political correctness 114, 213 political cults 60–2 Pollitt, Harry 238–9, 243–4 Ponchaud, François 167 Cambodia: Year Zero 167–8 Poos, Jacques 136–7 post-modernism 377, 381 Pottins, Charlie 65–6 poverty 116 Powell, Anthony 113 Power, Samantha 128–9 Preston 308–9 Pritt, D.N. 242–3 Prospect 179 Protestant work ethic 201 Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The 36, 344, 345, 346, 349 public service ethos 194–5 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 305–6, 309 Question Time 367 Qutb, Sayyid 264–5, 267, 294, 348, 369, 370 Our Battle with the Jews 348 race relations 201 racism 309–10, 352 radicalism 103, 105, 106, 124 ‘rage of party’ 152–3 Rashid, Shanaz 299–300 Reagan, Ronald 196, 201 Redgrave, Corin 57, 59, 61, 64, 67, 247 Redgrave, Deirdre 61 Redgrave, Michael 242, 243, 244, 247 Redgrave, Vanessa 57, 59, 62, 67 religion 361 militant 27 religious fundamentalism 110 Republic of Fear (Makiya) 31, 45–6, 52, 70, 84, 330 Republicans 85, 211 Respect 309, 310 Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) 173–4, 295 revolutions (1848) 355 (1968) 21, 22 Reza Pahlavi, Mohammad 26 Richardson, Natasha 62 Rifkind, Malcolm 140–1, 142, 143, 144, 147–8, 150, 154 Rippon, Geoffrey 56 Rix, Mick 302 Robin Hood 368 Robison, John 340 Roe v Wade 212 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 83 Rose, General Sir Michael 154 Rose, Jonathan Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes 207, 208 Rosenberg, Harold 183 Roth, Kenneth 325 Roy, Arundhati 178 Royden, Dr Maude 236 Rumsfeld, Donald 47, 48 Rushdie, Salman 371 Russell, Bertrand 21, 78, 228, 233, 235, 236 Russia, tsarist and Jews 344 Ruzicka, Marla 320 Sackur, Stephen 318 Saddam Hussein 7, 25, 30, 32, 33, 73, 76–7, 281–2, 314, 352, 365 capture of 318–19 decline in condemnation of by left 74–5 and Galloway 291–2, 293 genocide of Kurds 5, 7, 24, 48–9, 50–2, 127 and indoctrination of Iraqis 34 initial condemnation of by left 5–6 invasion of Kuwait 6, 70, 72–3 and Iraqi Communist Party 38 legacy 38 purges of Baath Party 35, 42–4 trial of 50 and unions 297 and war with Iran 28, 32, 44, 47–8 Said, Edward 73, 75–7, 92–3, 95, 274 Orientalism 75 Salazar, António 1 Saleh, Hadi 302–4 Salih, Barham 328–9 Sarajevo 153–4 Sartre, Jean-Paul 103, 348 Satanic Verses 184 sati 101–2 satire 113–14 Saudi Arabia 249, 350 Schanberg, Sydney 167 Schmidt, Paul 234 Schroeder, Gerhard 313 Scientific American 97 ‘scientific’ racism 262 Scottish Highland Clearances 118 Scowcroft, Brent 72, 135, 142 Second World War 195, 226, 239, 245 Serbia/Serbs 169, 172 see also Bosnian war Shaun of the Dead 124–5 Shaw, George Bernard 190 Shia Muslims 35 Shultz, George 52 Simms, Brendan 143, 148 single mothers 200 Six Day War (1967) 21, 36 Smollett, Peter 246 social democracy 11, 94 Social Text 99 socialism 27, 355, 360, 373, 375 death of 11, 12, 93–4, 103, 108, 213, 374, 381 Socialist Alliance 309 Socialist Worker 300 Socialist Workers Party (SWP) 54, 295–6, 296, 307 Sokal, Alan 99 Sokal hoax 98–9 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 3 Somalia 359 Soros, George 139 Soviet Union 4 collapse of 87–8, 94 invasion of by Hitler (1941) 246, 248 and Iraq 37–8, 40 pact with Nazi Germany (1939) 237–9 Spain 327 anti-war demonstrations 280 Spanish Civil War 122, 123, 218, 223–5, 237, 248 Spanish socialists 327–8 Srebrenica massacre (1995) 130–1, 149–50, 171, 177–8 Stalin, Joseph 4, 30, 49, 50, 218, 226, 247, 248 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 46–7 Stop the War Coalition 290, 295, 305 student protests (1968) 22 suburbanization 221 Sudan 50 suicide bombers 10, 350 Sullivan, Andrew 271 Sunni Arabs 35 Swain, Jon 167 SWP see Socialist Workers Party Syria 349, 350 seizure of power by Baath Party 31 Tadic, Dusko 174 Taliban 260, 271, 277–8 Tantawi, Mohammad Sayed 306 Tanweer, Shezad 257, 258 Tavistock, Marquess of 236 Taylor, A.J.P. 56 Telegraph 292 Templars see Knights Templars Thatcher, Margaret 54, 114, 143, 144, 184, 185, 189, 195, 196, 199, 337 Thatcherism 184–5 theory/theorists 96–101, 103–4, 104–5, 106, 112, 114, 115, 117, 213–14, 293, 321 Thirties 217–21, 356 Tippett, Sir Michael 185 Tocqueville, Alexis de 42 totalitarianism 29, 37, 38–9, 119–20, 359–60, 361 Tourish, Dennis and Wohlforth, Tim On the Edge 63 trade unions 14, 93, 193, 199, 297–9, 355, 360 Trnopolje camp (Bosnia) 131–4, 171, 174, 175–6 Trotsky, Leon 54, 57 Trotskyists 52, 53, 67, 87, 248, 295 Tudeh Party 27 Tudjman, Franjo 127 Turkey 162–3, 170 Uday Hussein 292 Ulbricht, Walter 239 United Nations 72, 129, 149, 357 United States 367 and Bosnian War 135, 145 and Gulf War 72–3 helps Iraq in Iran – Iraq war 46–8 and Iran 26 oil and policy towards Middle East 84 revolt of masses against rich liberals 210 see also Bush, George W.; Iraq War universities 204 University of California Press 45 van Gogh, Theo 335 Versailles, Treaty of 228, 250 victimhood 78–9 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 165–6 Vietnam War 21, 22, 93 Voltaire 164 Vulliamy, Ed 129, 130, 173, 176 Wall Street Crash (1929) 194–5, 218, 219 Walzer, Michael 355 Watson, Fiona 326 Waugh, Evelyn 113, 159 weapons of mass destruction 47 welfare state 195, 197, 199, 200–1, 355 Wells, H.G. 190 West Germany weapons sales to Iraq 47 Weston, Jon 134 Wheatcroft, Geoffrey 184–5, 278–9 Wheen, Francis How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World 278 Williams, Ian 129 Williams, Ralph Vaughan 244 Williams, Raymond 241–2 Willmott, Peter 199 Wilson, Harold 56 Windsor, Duke of 234 Withey, Lynne 45–6 Wittgenstein 105 Wolf, Naomi 183 Wolfowitz, Paul 80–2, 83, 84 Wolin, Richard 264 women priests 236 Woolf, Leonard 232 Woolf, Virginia 190–2, 228, 232, 236, 299 Woolworths 221 Workers’ Revolutionary Party see WRP working class 189–94, 196, 202–8, 210–11, 221–2, 379–80 World Social Forum 115 World Trade Organization 115, 117 WRP (Workers’ Revolutionary Party) 53–5, 57, 58–60, 63–4 downfall of 66–7, 68 and fascist conspiracy theory 65 and Iraq 65–6, 67, 68 and Irene Gorst 59–60 soliciting funds from Arab tyrants 64–5 see also Healy, Gerry Yeats, W.B. 219 Yom Kippur War 55 Younes, Nadia 326 Young, David 65 Young, Michael Family and Kinship in East London 199 Young, Stuart 65 Yugoslavia, former 85, 127 see also Bosnian war; Kosovo war Zarqawi, Abu Musab 286–7 Zimbabwe 117, 118, 351 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I could not have written this book without the help of many people who gave me their time without complaint.


The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

banks create money, barriers to entry, book value, British Empire, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, cotton gin, creative destruction, desegregation, double helix, financial innovation, Joseph Schumpeter, manufacturing employment, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration

In another case, the federal judiciary took the Calhounian argument for the independence of slave property from majority control and made it, in the form of the so-called Lochner Doctrine, a defense of rampant industrial power in the face of attempts to regulate workers’ safety, consumer health, and environmental impact. In yet another case, scientific racism had a long history after the fall of the Confederacy. It was used to justify anti-Semitism, the extermination of native peoples around the world, brutal forms of colonialism, and the exclusion of immigrants. And it continued to be used to justify discrimination against the descendants of the enslaved.

Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years’ View, Or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850 (New York, 1854–1856), 2:695–696. 34. CG, February 19, 1847, 453–455. 35. New Bedford Mercury, October 1, 1847; Gloucester Telegraph, October 28, 1846; CG, January 4, 1848; Reginald Horsman, “Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 152–168. 36. Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, KY, 1971); Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 608–610. 37. Joel Silbey, Party over Section: The Rough and Ready Election of 1848 (Lawrence, KS, 2009). 38.

See also Native Americans Reeder, Andrew, 374 Relf, Richard, 86–87, 89 Religion Christianity, 210–213 evangelical Protestantism, 198–207 Religious freedom, 201 Resistance, 101, 112–113, 116, 117, 147, 264, 281–282 Reynolds, Samuel, 179 Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 388 Rice, David, 12 Richards, John, 89 Right-handed power, and capitalism, 90 Rives, Francis, 92–93, 107, 182, 206–207 Rives, William, 277 Roberts, John, 285–286, 295 Robertson, William, 100 Rogers, Charlotte, 150 Royall, Anne, 93, 258–259 Runaway slaves/fugitives, 14–15, 123, 144, 168–169, 172, 180, 191–192, 347 in Boston, 309–310 during Civil War, 400 as galley slaves, for punishment, 76 in northern states, 172, 312–313, 313–314 Runnels, Hiram, 286 Rust, George, 293 Rutherford, C. M., 358, 361–362, 363 Rutledge, John, 10–11, 12 Sable Venus, 236, 237 (photo) Sanford, Eliza Irene, 368 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 267 Schumpeter, Joseph, 86 Scientific racism, 415 Scott, Dred and Harriet, 368–369, 376–379 Scott, Winfield, 328–329, 357 Secession/secessionists, 387–395, 414 Second Bank of the United States (B.U.S.) establishment of, 91–92 Jackson’s veto of, 269, 270 Panic of 1819 and, 156, 228, 229 Panic of 1837 and, 277–278 slave trade, cotton, politics and, 230, 231–233, 238–239, 244–245, 248, 249–254, 255, 255 (photo), 257 Secret resistance/left-handed power, 112–113 Seneca Falls Convention, 1848, 334 Seward, William, 339, 371, 388–389 Sexual desire, slave trade, and financial risk, 233–235, 236–237, 243–244.


Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology) by Geoffrey C. Bowker

affirmative action, business process, classic study, corporate governance, Drosophila, government statistician, information retrieval, loose coupling, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Occam's razor, QWERTY keyboard, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, sexual politics, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, William of Occam

The rational classifying activity masked a wrenchi ng and denied history. As racial anxieties ran riot through the sober prose of categorical bioscience, the taxonomies could neither pinpoint nor contain their terrible discursive prod­ uct. (1997, 234) Alth ough a vag ue conception of eugenics and other forms of scientific racism are woven throughout a the debates about apartheid, this lack of appears repeatedly. Dr. M. Shapiro, at a Medico-legal Society in Johannesburg in 1952, wryly scientific definition of race meeting of noted that: the Where for purposes oflegal classification, the question arises whether a person is White, Coloured, Negroid or Asiatic, the policeman and the tram conductor, unencumbered by biological lore, can make an assessment with greater con­ viction, and certainly with fewer reservations, than can the geneticist or an­ thropologist.

Purity and Danger: A n Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo . London : Routledge and Kegan Paul. Douglas, Mary. 1 986. How Institutions Think . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Douglas, Mary, and David L. Hull. 1 992. How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman among the Social Sciences. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dubow, Saul. 1 995. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge : Cam­ bridge University Press. Dumas, Alexandre. 1 85 8 . La Dame aux Camilias ; Preface de Jules Janin. Ed. illustre par Gavarni. Paris: G. Havard. Duncan, Thomas, and Tod F. Stuessy. 1 984. Cladistics: Perspectives on the Recon­ struction of Evolutionary History .


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Somerset, 200 Mayer, Marissa, 78 Mayfield Capital, 154, 156, 159, 162–63 McAfee, 382 McCorvie, Ryan, 16–17 McDonald’s, 82, 450 McEachen, Matthew (“MRM”), 41, 46, 62–63 call to, 123 CEO position, 249 chaos monkey suggestion, 103 codebase and, 66, 73, 184, 234 coding, 146 comrade-in-arms, 91 as daredevil, 136–37 deal details and, 251–52 earnestness, 68 Facebook and, 223, 225 family, 135, 205 getting to know, 88 irritation, 102–3 lost with, 109 paying off mortgage, 494 as resourceful savior, 100–101 as steadfast, 67 McGarraugh, Charlie, 14–15 McLean, Malcom, 447 media publishers, 387 MediaMath, 390 Menlo Park, 84 bedroom community, 338 conferences, 119 headquarters, 469 moving to, 337 schools, 306 meritocracy, 74 Merkle, 384 mesothelioma, 81 Miami drug trade, 304 Michelangelo, 334 Microsoft Adchemy and, 153–54, 161–62 Atlas, 383, 453–55 calendar, 340 dogfooding, 43 monopolist, 286 program managers, 272 middle managers, 359 Miller, Arthur, 104 Miller, Frank, 434 Milton, John, 475 minimum viable product (MVP), 434 miracles, 51 misleading, offensive, or sexually inappropriate (MOSI), 310 Mixpanel, 62 mobile commerce, 484–89 mobile data, 382, 477, 484, 486 Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), 448 monetary value, 317–19 monetization bet, 4 data-per-pixel, 274 digital, 184 Facebook, 5, 209, 275, 278, 298, 318, 425, 444 folly, 361–72 Google, 186 growth, 141 influences, 9 savvy, 486–89 tug-of-war, 379 Twitter, 190 zero-sum game, 319 money fuck-you money, 102, 415–16 investors, 74 outside, 155 pre-money valuation, 212 seed, 96 of VCs, 174 Moore’s law, 25 MoPub, 476–77, 479–81 morality, 226, 256, 284 Morgenstern, Jared, 218 Morishige, Sara, 183 Morris, Robert Tappan, 60–61 Mortal Kombat 3, 178 Moscone, George, 181 Moskovitz, Dustin, 284 Motwani, Rajeev, 138 Museum of Natural History, 366 My Life as a Quant (Derman), 16 MySpace, 283–84 N00b, 269 Nanigans, 480–81 Narasin, Ben, 128–31, 143–44 NASDAQ, 405, 410 National Socialism, 356 native ad formats, 448–49 Neko, 482 Netflix, 83, 103, 328 Netscape Navigator, 286 Neustar, 384, 386 New Rich, 357 New York Times, 448, 486 New Zealand, 318 News Feed addictive, 482 ads, 482–84, 488, 492 click-through rates, 487 content, 309 creation, 2 distribution, 364 as magic real estate, 362 spamming users, 372 versions, 444 newspaper advertising, 36–37 Nielsen, 385 1984 (Orwell), 433 noncash valuation, 212 no-shop contract, 201 Nukala, Murthy crossing paths, 167–68 ego, 42–43 greed, 44 hazing by, 71 immigrant worker, 72 lecture from, 65–66 manipulative rage, 136 pep rally, 36 saying good-bye to, 73 self-preservation and, 162–63 tantrums, 45 as tyrant, 158 vindictiveness, 134 wooing by, 154 Obama, Barack, 299–300 obscenity, 268 OkCupid, 54 Olivan, Javier, 410 Omnicom, 437, 443 on-boarding, 260–67, 271 one shot, one kill motto, 298 one-on-one, 434, 457, 469 online dating, 54–55 Opel, John, 148 Open Graph, 280, 364 optimization, 276, 302 Oracle investors, 111 job at, 193 logo, 124 product shindigs, 181 recruiting, 70 Orkut, 379 Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, 193, 203, 253 Orwell, George, 433 outside money, 155 Ovid, 316 Oxford English Dictionary, 80 Page, Larry, 112, 428, 431 Pahl, Sebastien, 119 Palantir, 272 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 265–66 Palo Alto bosom of, 116 climate, 123 downtown, 333, 338 East, 404 hub, 109 old, 112, 158 posh, 84 shuttles, 289, 339 Stanford grads, 63 Pamplona running of bulls, 106–7 Pan-Arabism, 356 Pansari, Ambar, 210 Paper, 283 Parse, 155 Patel, Satya, 249–50 Patton, 369 Payne, Jim, 476 PayPal, 78, 124 personal wealth, 415 personally identifiable information (PII), 395 photo sharing, 286, 490–91, 493 photo-comparison software, 310 Pickens, Slim, 102 Piepgrass, Brian, 374 pings, 188, 327, 422 PMMess, 347–51, 407, 409 poker playing, 396–97 polyandry, 483 Polybius, 172, 316, 336 Pong, 150 Ponzi scheme, 16 pornography, 167, 262, 268, 312, 314, 315 post-valuation, 212 pregnancy, 58–59 pre-money valuation, 212 La Presse, 37 privacy Facebook and, 316–29 Irish Data Privacy Audit, 278, 320–23 PRIZM Segments, 385 product development, 47, 94, 191, 220, 334, 370, 389 product managers (PMs) as Afghan warlords, 273 earning money, 302 everyday work, 294 Facebook, 4, 6–7, 10, 91, 97, 202, 210, 271–79 Google, 192 habitat, 341 high-value, 246 ideal, 219 information and, 295 internal and external forces and, 316–17 last on buck-passing chain, 327 managing, 276 stupidity, 313 tech companies, 272 tiebreaker role, 292 product marketing manager (PMM), 277, 366 product navigators, 272 production, 94 product-market fit, 175 programmatic media-buying technology, 38 Project Chorizo, 296 pseudorandomness, 75 publishers, 37, 39 Putnam, Chris, 284 Qualcomm, 70 quants, 16–18, 24, 29, 141, 207 Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS), 149 Rabkin, Mark, 3, 312, 389, 398, 435 Rajaram, Gokul, 8, 10 accepting offer from, 248 banter with, 472–73 as boss, 3 bribery, 471 FBX and, 435 go big or go home ethos, 300 in great debate, 459 influence, 202 insubordination toward, 465 interview with, 221–22 leadership, 309 loss of trust, 468 lot with, 373 management of, 434 middle manager, 463–64 one-on-one and, 469 as product leader, 276–77 riding by, 346 stripping of duties, 452 word of, 252 Ralston, Geoff, 93 Rapportive, 96–97, 106 real-time bidding (RTB), 40–41 real-time data synchronization, 38 Red Rock Coffee, 84 RedLaser, 51 Reesman, Ben, 308, 389, 399–400, 475, 477 relativity, 25 replicating portfolio, 247–48 retargeting, 9, 381, 395, 438, 461 return of advertising spend (ROAS), 81 revenue dashboards, 274–75, 295–96 Right Media, 37–38 The Road Warrior, 134 Roetter, Alex, 185, 190, 493–94 romantic liaisons, 55–56 Romper Stomper, 202 Rosenblum, Rich, 21–22 Rosenn, Itamar, 368 Rosenthal, Brian, 389, 390 Ross, Blake, 444 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 303 rounds, 156 routing system, 324 Rubinstein, Dan, 312–13 Ruby on Rails, 155 Russia, 375–76 Sacca, Chris, 128, 141, 143 acquisition advice, 187–88, 212–13, 245–47 on deals, 205–7 ignoring inquiries, 201 pseudoangel, 113, 117–19 wisdom, 202 Safari, 484 safe sex, 58 safeguarding role, 315 sailboat living, 307, 332, 337–38 salaries, 358 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), 181 Sandberg, Sheryl, 2, 10 data joining and, 465 gatekeeper, 4–5 intimates, 3–4 leadership, 410 managerial prowess, 311–13 meetings, 371, 382, 459 PowerPoint and, 7 recommendations to, 462 schmoozing, 367 wiles of, 408 Sarna, Chander, 67–68, 71, 72 sausage grinder, 296 scale, 300 Scalps@Facebook, 314 scavenging foray, 116 schadenfreude, 16–17 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 282 Schrage, Elliot, 3–4, 410 Schreier, Bryan, 123–25 Schrock, Nick, 400 Schroepfer, Mike, 2 Schultz, Alex, 374 scientific racism, 122 Scoble, Robert, 100 Scott, George C., 24, 369 security, 314–15 seed money, 96 Sequoia, 122–25, 130, 159 severance package, 470–71 severity-level-one bug (SEV1), 323 sexual molestation, 17 Shaffer, Justin, 219–21, 444 Shakespeare, William, 120, 427, 456 Shapiro, Scott, 378, 459 Shelly, Percy Bysshe, 337 Shockley, William, 122 shuttles, 289, 339 Siegelman, Russell, 146, 201, 213, 397 angel investor, 110–13 commitment, 141–43 negotiations, 116–17 Silicon Valley.

* Fairchild Semiconductor occupies a legendary place is US tech history. Founded by William Shockley, a Nobel laureate and the inventor of that central artifact of our electronic age, the transistor, Fairchild is known for having recruited and then antagonized the team that eventually became Intel. Shockley ended his career embroiled in polemics about scientific racism and eugenics. He rather famously contributed his seed to a sperm bank of recognized geniuses and Olympians. By the time of his death, he was a bitter, broken man of ruined reputation, estranged from all family and colleagues; his children learned of his death via newspaper obituaries. Don’t come to Silicon Valley looking for sanity, dear reader


How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

But Drumont’s writing started to outline a modern variant of this age-old hatred. He moulded together several types of anti-semitism. The first was an ancient Catholic suspicion of the ‘Christ-killers,’ bolstered by a still-present reactionary hatred of the French Revolution. The second was a pseudo-scientific racism based on the physical characteristics of individuals. The third was a left-wing hostility towards capitalism, and especially banking, which Jewish people were seen to embody. The fourth was the notion of a plot by Jewish outsiders to undermine the integrity of the nation. Dreyfus was found guilty.

In Germany, it was the ‘volk,’ which translated as the people with a racial connotation. The will of this racial grouping was encapsulated by the leader. The race was singular, pure and good, but it had been undermined by an international Jewish conspiracy. With only minor changes, this conspiracy followed the anti-semitic formulation of the Dreyfus Affair – pseudo-scientific racism, left-wing hostility towards capitalism and right-wing anxiety around the integrity and security of the nation. As in 1890s France, the conspiracy theory could be moulded to fit any historical circumstance. Jews were responsible for undermining the war effort in 1918 and therefore for Germany’s military defeat.


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

What were considered enlightened views of human nature shifted away from a Christian emphasis on a common soul of man, made in the image and likeness of God—to rigid taxonomies based on supposedly inherent physical traits, above all, race. This was the pattern identified by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as the dialectic of Enlightenment: rational methods could be put in the service of irrational ideologies and prejudices; separation from inherited tradition could create new forms of coercion. Scientific racism reinforced hierarchical distinctions between animality and humanity, wildness and civilization, by assuming they were rooted in irrefutable observation and measurement. Positivist certainty reasserted a mechanistic vision of the nonhuman world and an explicit rejection of vitalism. The rise of positivism was evident in the transformation of biological thought.

This point of view was one that many Americans found reasonable by the early twentieth century. The revaluation of animal consciousness betokened the spread of dawning doubts into a reconfiguration of value. The Anglophone imperial gaze had depended on conventional assumptions of hierarchy, often ratified by scientific racism, to maintain the gazer’s sense of mastery over various subaltern groups. But by the 1880s and ’90s, even as white domination was being consolidated in the extermination of Native Americans, the establishment of Jim Crow, and the acquisition of overseas empire, the imperial gaze had begun to turn back in on itself, revealing troubling truths about the gazer.


pages: 187 words: 62,861

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

His work looked to culture, instead of biology, to explain human differences across societies and races, spawning the birth of modern anthropology as a new scientific basis from which to attack the assumptions that certain races, religions, and cultures were superior to others. The first generation of this modern scientific nature/nurture debate continued for several decades, and it was only the horror of Nazism that put it to rest, at least for a time. Repulsed by the Nazi uses of eugenics and scientific racism, the scientific and academic community had by the 1950s finally settled the battle more or less completely on the culture side. • • • But it was not forever that the biologists would be banished from the debate over the mysteries of human nature and sociality. The vehicle that brought them back into the picture in the 1970s was the resurgence of interest in animal behavior.


pages: 555 words: 163,712

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, computer age, defense in depth, European colonialism, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, plutocrats, Scientific racism, undersea cable

In March 1940 Fellers wrote a paper against America entering the war. “The bitter criticism in America of Herr Hitler is strongly tinged with British and Jewish propaganda,” he wrote. He decried immigration of Jewish refugees, a view that was unremarkable in the officer class. He attacked the ban on Japanese immigration, an exceptional position when “scientific racism” and the yellow peril were accepted truths in that class.29 He went to the Republican convention in 1940 and favored isolationist candidate Robert Taft. He despised Roosevelt. But the mission to Madrid meant that he now was assigned full-time to military intelligence. Ultimately, it meant that Bonner Fellers would be one of Roosevelt’s valued sources on a war that Fellers had opposed as fervently as Lindbergh did.

The biography of Bonner Fellers is based on numerous documents in the Bonner Frank Fellers Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives including, HBF B17 F1, Military Record and Report of Separation, November 30, 1946; B17 F5, Oral History Interview, 1967; B17 F6, Oral History Interview, 1973; B17 F13, Travel Documents, 1923–1938; B19 F19, Fellers to Clarke, May 7, 1940; B21 F6–8, Frazier Hunt Correspondence; 29/36, “We Are Headed for War” (notes for a lecture); B20 F31, Herbert Hoover Correspondence; B21 F4, Frederick Howe Correspondence; B30 F3, Travel Notes, 1922–1939; B38 F12, Military Career Correspondence, 1940–1941. Additional sources include the Bonner Fellers website, www.bonnerfellers.com (accessed March 25, 2015); Megan Rosenfeld, “Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers, Ret., Dies,” Washington Post, October 10, 1973, B8. 28. Budiansky, Battle of Wits, 38. 29. On “scientific” racism, anti-Semitism, and fear of the “yellow peril” in the US Army in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in military intelligence and at the War College and West Point, see Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 30.


pages: 641 words: 182,927

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

The emphasis here was on tracking the colonial American and European antecedents of present-day families, identifying forebears who had achieved distinction, and learning the origins of surnames. As anxieties grew over increased immigration, this exploration of the colonial heritages and English and Dutch antecedents of middle- and upper-class New Yorkers suffused genealogy with nativism and scientific racism and strengthened its capacity to legitimate social relations.41 Genealogy had close links to other social practices that expanded its cultural appeal. A new kind of social organization that venerated family heritage and colonial history, the patriotic hereditary society, came into vogue in the 1880s.

Existing institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded significantly in the late nineteenth century, due in large measure to the money, leadership, and networks of the upper class. Needless to say, this support had significant costs. As scholars who have examined the links between leaders of the Bronx Zoo and the Museum of Natural History and the ideologies of scientific racism and nativism have shown, major cultural organizations amply reflected the apprehensions and ambitions of upper-class and upper-middle-class New Yorkers.73 A study of two key institutions—the Metropolitan Opera and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—will help us understand how elites imagined New York as a great city, worked out their inner conflicts, and related to the public.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

In the enthusiasm for the materialist but deeply erroneous pseudo-discoveries of the nineteenth century—nationalism, socialism, Benthamite utilitarianism, hopeless Malthusianism, Comtean positivism, neopositivism, legal positivism, elitist Romanticism, inverted Hegelianism, Freudianism, phrenology, homophobia, historical materialism, hopeful communism, left anarchism, communitarianism, social Darwinism, scientific racism, racial history, theorized imperialism, apartheid, eugenics, tests of statistical significance, geographic determinism, institutionalism, intelligence quotients, social engineering, slum clearance, Progressive regulation, cameralist civil service, the rule of experts, and a cynicism about the force of ethical ideas—much of the clerisy mislaid its earlier commitment to a free and dignified common people.

The history of northwestern Europe and then of other places exhibits a mechanism of weak irreversibility, a ratchet in free trading and bourgeois dignity that seems at length to have prevailed. Let us again pray that the comparable and opposite ratchet, of government taxing and spending, such as Robert Higgs discerns, does not overwhelm betterment.9 Why northwestern Europe? It is not racial or eugenic, a hardy tradition of scientific racism after 1870 to the contrary, revived nowadays by some economists and evolutionary psychologists forgetful of the history.10 Nor is it the traditions of the Germanic tribes of the north, as the Romantic Europeans have been claiming now for two centuries. Consider the explosive economic successes of highly non-European and non-Germanic places such as India and China, and before them Korea and Japan, and for a long time the economic successes of overseas versions of all kinds of ethnic groups, from Jews in North Africa to Parsees in England to Old Believers in Sydney.

Part IX The History and Economics Have Been Misunderstood 56 The Change in Ideas Contradicts Many Ideas from the Political Middle, 1890–1980 The rhetorical and ethical change around 1700, I say, contrary to the materialist persuasions of many of my colleagues, caused modern economic growth, which at length freed us from ancient poverty. As Jane Jacobs put it, the ethical code for commerce slowly replaced the ethical code for guardianship.1 Hierarchy seemed less natural, though given a second life around 1890 by scientific racism. Modern economic growth did not corrupt our souls, contrary to the antibourgeois rhetoric of the modern clerisy since 1848, and contrary also to an older line of aristocratic and priestly sneering at bourgeois life. The rhetorical and ethical change at the national level was necessary for the first Industrial Revolution and then for the Great Enrichment.


pages: 266 words: 76,299

Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, correlation coefficient, Drosophila, European colonialism, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, sexual politics, the scientific method, twin studies

As privileged members of society, more often than not they end up defending existing social arrangements as biologically foreordained. I discuss the general message in an obscure debate within eighteenth century embryology, Engels’s views on human evolution, Lombroso’s theory of innate criminality, and a twisted tale from the catacombs of scientific racism. The final section pursues the same theme, but applies it to contemporary discussions of “human nature”—the major impact of misused evolutionary theory upon current social policy. The first subsection criticizes as political prejudice the biological determinism that has recently deluged us with killer apes as ancestors, innate aggression and territoriality, female passivity as the dictate of nature, racial differences in IQ, etc.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

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

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

The Impact of Agricultural Trade Policies on Developing Countries (Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute). Doussin, Jean-Pierre (2009) Le Commerce équitable [Fair Trade] (Paris: PUF, Que sais-je ?). Drescher, Seymour (1992) ‘The Ending of Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism’, in Inikori, Joseph E. and Engerman, Stanley L. (eds) The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas and Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 361–96). Duménil, Gérard and Lévy, Dominique (2011) The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).


pages: 231 words: 71,299

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

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

Chapter 2 The Jews In many ways, contemporary white supremacy is not a new ideology. Its means of dissemination may be technologically novel, as it throws tendrils out across social-media sites, chat apps, and blogs. But its central ideas are a mélange of influences plucked from predigital decades—a bigot’s pastiche that encompasses everything from nineteenth-century scientific racism to late-twentieth-century dystopian racist fiction. In 2019, many of the ideas put forth by the likes of Henry Ford, George Lincoln Rockwell, and William Luther Pierce have returned to a certain prominence. Copies of The International Jew are available online, both for free and for sale in dozens of separate iterations; at the time of this writing a handsomely bound paperback edition was for sale on Barnes & Noble’s website.


pages: 741 words: 199,502

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

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

For the United States, founded on ideals of liberty and equality, that record was a fatal flaw that in my view ensured the eventual unraveling of the American project.[1] Among scholars, the opening of the twentieth century saw a scientific backlash not only against the idea of a racial hierarchy but against the idea of race itself. Its most prominent spokesman was Franz Boas, a pioneering anthropologist and a fierce opponent of what he labeled “scientific racism.”2 A British anthropologist who studied under Boas, Ashley Montagu, took his mentor’s position to new levels of passion (“Race is the witchcraft, the demonology of our time”) and set the rhetorical tone for today’s academic orthodoxy. The book from which that quote is taken, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, was originally published in 1942 and remained in print throughout the rest of the century.3 In the 1970s and 1980s, the backlash against the concept of race got new ammunition with two propositions: The genetic differences among human populations are insignificant, and humans left Africa too recently for important differences to have evolved.

The reasons are legitimate, not political, and they are both historical and scientific. Historically, it is incontestably true that the word race has been freighted with cultural baggage that has nothing to do with biological differences. The word carries with it the legacy of nineteenth-century scientific racism combined with Europe’s colonialism and America’s history of slavery and its aftermath. Scientifically, it is an error to think of races as primordial. Part of the story I will tell describes the repeated cycles of mixing, isolation, and remixing that have gone on among the populations that left Africa.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Through coded language and symbols of affinity, this ideology turned personal frustration into camaraderie and a sense of purpose. Not all schemes of redemption and vengeance inspired by this online movement have been chimeras. Numerous American terrorists in recent years have been, by their own accounts, radicalized online and indoctrinated into extreme forms of misogyny, scientific racism, pro-Nazi historical revisionism, and other branches of “red pill” philosophy. Elliot Rodger, the misogynist mass shooter who killed six people near the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014, was a red-pilled “incel”—involuntary celibate—and a self-professed fascist, not to mention a YouTube vlogger who, after his crime, racked up millions of views.


pages: 273 words: 83,802

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

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

Intended for a middle-class audience, one London weekly newspaper described ‘the Bethnal Green poor’ as ‘a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing’.13 But over the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the racial hierarchy was solidified. Forming a justification for colonialism and slavery since the colonisation of the Americas in 1492, and then backed up by the scientific racism of eugenicist Frances Galton, as well as academics, politicians and thinkers – in other words, significant sections of the elite – it increasingly came to be believed that visible differences were a sign of much deeper ones. Humans have inherited a biological essence related to skin colour and bodily features, they said, and this biology decides our abilities.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Darwin’s “pro-social” view of nature: Jason G. Goldman, “7 Questions with . . . Eric M. Johnson,” Scientific American, September 3, 2010, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/7-questions-with-8230-eric-m-johnson. community-minded version of Darwin: Of course, we mustn’t forget that critics find evidence of “scientific racism” in his work, citing examples like this sentence from The Descent of Man: that at “some time the civilized races of man will exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” the late scholar and activist David Graeber wondered: David Graeber, “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?


pages: 332 words: 89,668

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

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

The end result of this was twofold: an emphasis on social uplift that came from within the black community, and exasperation with white Progressivism.89 Some Progressives, like Theodore Roosevelt, believed that the potential for democracy was, at least in part, racial—that Anglo-Americans possessed more of the genius for self-government than anyone else. “Scientific racism” proposed a hierarchy of the races, with the white Anglo-Saxon at the top and other, “less advanced” cultures lower in the hierarchy. Africans and Aboriginal peoples were considered to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, but other nonwhite people were also held to be inferior. The Progressive period thus saw limitations on immigration from places like China (the Exclusion Act of 1882) and Japan (the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908), and by the 1920s, successive Immigration Acts that drastically cut back permissible immigration from southern and eastern Europe.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

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

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

But the Niger and other inland regions proved more treacherous than explorers had reckoned. Above all, the free-labour colonies in West Africa turned out to be troubled experiments. This, together with the Indian rebellion of 1857, spread doubts about whether non-white subjects could be refashioned in their masters’ image. A harder, scientific racism began to colour the imperial mindset. This more aggressive stance was partly a reaction to the difficulties European traders and missionaries encountered on the ground. Commerce and consumption did in fact continue their forward march in the second half of the nineteenth century. In West Africa, many indigenous traders followed the evangelical script.

In a pioneering study, the literary scholar Thomas Richards argued that these imperial adverts showed the ‘homogenizing power of the commodity’.137 Ads for Bovril and Pear’s soap used African settings and placed indigenous people all over the world in the same subservient position: as grateful recipients of civilizing goods. The nineteenth century, Anne McClintock has argued in an influential study of race and gender, saw a shift from scientific racism to ‘commodity racism’. Exhibitions, advertisements and branded goods meant that ‘as domestic space became racialized, colonial space became domesticated.’138 The Pear’s Soap advert of a white boy scrubbing a black boy to white purity and progress is a classic example. Yet, looking through adverts and newspapers of the period, what is noteworthy is not that racial images appear but that they do so far less often than we might expect.

B. 305–6, 528 print culture 47 see also books Prittwitz, Moritz von 116 privacy 94, 223, 236, 245–6, 377, 398, 546; durables and the privacy of the home 253; private lifestyles and socialist regimes 333, 375–6, 377; for those suffering from mental illness 555 private consumption see consumption: private privatism 392, 399 privatization 329, 375–7, 391, 535, 596 production: and class/caste 381; colonialism and tropical production 78–9, 80, 90, 91, 162–3; and company leisure see company leisure activities; and company towns 524–8, 534; consumption as ‘sole end’ of 3, 54, 100, 151; consumption subordinated to 11, 41; corporate-led consumption see company services, and corporate-led consumption; empire writing out the colonial producer 173; environmental damage from 683 see also pollution; factory production 146 see also factories; leisure from high productivity 287; as a man’s role 11, 43; mass see mass production; monopolized by husbands 43; national products 297–300; outsourced 683; politics of productivity 294; separation from consumption 246; standardized see standardization; united with consumption in the home 269, 270; war production 529 ‘progressive individualism’ 237–8 propaganda 69, 126, 277–8, 293, 616, 644 property prices 423, 428 prosperity gospel 610–11, 615 Protestant American teenagers 613 Protestant revival in China 607 Providence, water consumption 187, 188 Provident Clothing and Supply Company 412 Provident Loan Society 412 prudence 109, 116, 236, 593 see also thrift Prudential 500 Prussia 205, 264, 415 Pu Zhongqian 47 Public Citizen 555 public consumption 331, 335, 373, 537, 538, 540, 541, 542–4, 548 see also public services; social spending; welfare; cities as providers of 183; public support for cultural consumption 546–7 public housing 243, 553–5, 681 public services 1–2, 278, 331, 548–61 see also electricity; gas; water, running; American 450; and consumer politics 391; ‘consumerization’ of 548; fairness in 549, 561; and Ombudsmen 557–8; protection of ‘service to the citizens’ 389; utility networks 175–6, 180, 181, 183, 188–9, 220, 248, 670, 681 public space see space public spending see social spending Puddletown, Dorset 511 Puget Sound golf association 529–30 Pugh, Sarah 156 Pullman Palace Car Company 524 puppets 105; puppet theatres 105, 472 purchasing power see spending power purgatory 405 Purimix 328 Puritanism 75, 99, 218; Puritan values 118; Puritan work ethic 450, 455 Pythagoras 105 Qing dynasty 48, 49, 52, 110 Quakers 128, 237 Que Choisir 276 Queensland 166 queueism 277 Quito 64, 208 Quran 619, 620; Challenge Board Game 618; instructors 620 race: American racism 136; commodity racism 171; and credit 423–4; ethnic food and racial prejudice 600–601; exotic goods and racism 168–9; hardening of racial thinking 121, 129; hierarchies destabilized by Second World War 305; racial asymmetry 121; scientific racism 129, 171; segregation 305, 577; tourism and the racial state 291 radio 259, 263, 264–6, 267–9, 284, 311, 346, 464, 471, 681; clubs 264; collective listening 265; French law on French content of broadcasts 353; hobbyists 264; in India 366, 388; legislation for listener protection 265; and morse code 264; and printed circuits 657; programmes exhorting self-denial 306; Roosevelt’s radio chats 287; sets/receivers 4, 14, 223, 247, 263, 264–5, 270, 279, 280, 290, 293, 294, 295, 333, 366; ‘social authoritarianism’ of 266; Volksempfänger 290 radioactive waste 684 Radiofiduciaire 411 Radiola 264, 265 rag-and-bone men 628, 633, 635 rag pickers 626, 628, 629, 630, 633–4 rag trade 628–9 railways 609 Rajput 362 Ramadan 618 Ramanandis 142 Ramey, Valerie 445 Ramsay, Allan 101 rare-earth elements 684 Rathje, William 650, 651 ‘rational recreation’ 216, 456, 545–6 rationing 276–7, 328 Rauschenberg, Robert 637 Rawls, John 95 Reader’s Digest 306, 310 reading 217, 307, 320, 354, 456, 457, 459, 460–61, 467, 475, 507; clubs 351; by the elderly 506; in national time-use surveys 454, 458–9; shared reading aloud 462 Reagan, Ronald 553; Tax Reform Bill (1986) 427 Reagan administration 544, 553 rebranding 4, 167, 256, 299–300, 419, 566 recession 287, 403, 405, 420, 426, 428, 521, 668, 683 record industry 263, 268, 685 see also music: recordings and broadcasting recreation see also dance; games; play; sports: as collective endeavour 528–9; companies subsidizing commercial recreation 532; companyfacilitated 525, 526–31, 535–6; and Congo women 472; defining generations 506; and delinquency 217; demands 305; as developmental 219; for the elderly 503–6, 509, 511–12, 516; family activities 340; family spending on 148, 339; investment in public 219; in Japan 359, 473; leisure as primarily recreational 469; moral defence of 261; and national parks 281; ‘rational’ 216, 456, 545–6; recreational crafts 261; recreational shopping 100, 480–82; regulation 215; retirement given meaning by 503; Sunday 476–7, 479; US armed forces centres for 543; as a waste of money 342 recreational crafts 261–2 recycling of waste 628–9, 631, 632, 635, 638–47, 648, 651–2, 662–4, 675; bottle banks 639; European regions of 644, 645; European Union 640, 652, 653; Freecycle network 654, 682; legislation and regulation 639; and thrift 629, 642–3; used electronics 662–4 Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) 614, 615 Reformation 1 refrigeration 208, 244, 588, 650 refrigerators see fridges Refurbished Information Technology Equipment Association (RITEA) 660 religion see also spiritual life: American teenagers following parents’ religion 613; beliefs about God 613; Buddhist see Buddhism; Christian see Christian religion and Church; commercial culture used by 607–13; Confucian philosophy/religion see Confucianism; consumer culture, affluence and 606–21; and the Englightement 606; Hindu see Hinduism; impact of urbanization 196; materialism as the new religion 606; as moral balancing rod 387; Mormons 608, 609–10; Muslim see Islam/Muslims; religious attendance 306, 475, 477, 479, 606, 607, 608; rituals 79, 616; and the shift to modernity 606; Shinto 585, 615–16; syncretism 613 remittances, marriage 592 remittances, migrant worker 334, 383, 589–96; in form of consumer goods 596; and household access to ICT in African countries 594; household use in African countries 592; outside the family 596 Renaissance 22, 28–38, 96; courtesy literature 108 rent 103, 114, 116, 242–3, 331, 408, 425, 655; in America 239, 242, 244; control 242, 243, 278; in England 243–4, 555; Krupp workers 523; maximized 249; in the Raj 145; rebates 601; strikes 243; and water rates 184 repairing 659–60, 682; repair cafés 682; tax exemption on repair services 682 reputation 94 Resident Welfare Associations 392 RESO (Folkrörelsernas Reseorganisation) 534 restaurants 107, 353, 531; in China 190, 357; and elderly people 508; and the elite 605; ethnic restaurants and migrant food cultures 597, 600–601, 603, 604; in Germany 597–8, 601, 603, 604; in Paris 181; serving ‘local’ food 580, 582–3; slow-food 470; travel in France to 685 restraint 37, 41, 114, 141, 390, 527 see also self-control; self-denial; thrift; bourgeois 117, 118, 311; clash with desire 38; collapse of self-restraint 8, 343, 405, 406, 439; moral restraints 143; sexual 365; thrown by easy credit 405 retail therapy 485 retail trade see also customer service: department stores see department stores; market halls 207–8, 209; ‘sales’ 194; shopkeepers see shopkeepers; shopping see shopping; shops see shops; supermarkets see supermarkets; turnover 194 retirement 450, 498–519 see also elderly people; communities 498–9, 514, 519; homes 504, 505, 506, 508, 510, 511 revolution 111–12, 113, 147, 190 Reynolds, Frances 108, 109 Ricardo, David 151 Ricci, Matteo 43–4 rice 27, 44, 45, 46, 128, 358, 359, 383, 585, 599, 602, 604, 635, 645; fields 666 Riesman, David 302, 436, 450 riots: food 278; youth 310, 496 rituals see also routines: coffee drinking 87; eating 14; impact of empire on taste and 78–93; and imperial identity 144; maté 80–81; religious 79, 616 Riú, Luis 512 Robbins, Lionel 152 Robertson, James 536 Robertson, Pat, ‘700 Club’ 611 Robinson, Harold 264 Robinson, John 444 Rochdale Pioneers 206 Roche, Daniel 42 Roche (pharmaceutical company) 532 rock’n’roll 311, 314, 327, 329, 351, 467; Christian rock albums 611; ‘Jailhouse rock’ 313; state-sponsored rock bands 333 Rökk, Marika 313 Rolling Stones 352 Romania 327, 645 romanticism 290, 496 Rome 156 Rooiyard, Johannesburg 252 Roosevelt, Edith 227 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 285–6, 287 Roosevelt, Theodore 9 Röpke, Wilhelm 306 Roppongi-zoku 378 Roscher, Wilhelm 3, 116 Rosenberg, Ethel 307 Rosenberg, Julius 307 Rosenfeld, Art 671 Rouen 124 Round about a Pound a Week 149 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 95, 100–101, 117, 230, 234, 279, 435, 677 routines 14, 87, 688 see also habits; rituals Rowntree, Seebohm 306, 313 Royal British Legion 512 Royal Society 97 Royal Tailors 201 Royer Law (1973), France 349 rubber 225 rum 166 running water 221 Russell, Bertrand 234 Russia 122–3, 203, 276–7, 292–6, 328, 480, 535 see also Soviet Union; 1917 revolution 276; Bolsheviks 276–7; company services 535–6; consumer politics 276–7, 294–5; tea-drinking 80, 163 Russian empire 80 Ryukyu 25 safety 226 SAGA 512 Sagan, Françoise 311 Sainsbury, Alan 350 Saint-Geours, Jean 325–6 Saint-Pierre, Bernadin de 79 St Petersburg 225, 512, 558 salesmanship 69 ‘Salon of Taste’, Turin 470 salt 141 salt merchants 49, 52 Salter, James 86 Salut des copains 312 Salviati family chapel 33 San Francisco 671 Sánchez, Fernando 588–9 Sandys, George 78 Sankey, Ira 608–9, 612 Santander 77 Sant’Elia, Antonia 636 Santiago, Jalisco 591 São Paulo 176, 204, 208 Sartre, Jean-Paul 307 Saßnitz 331 satin 21, 31, 51, 60, 64, 140 Saudi Arabia 590, 618 Savanarola, Girolamo 36 Save Money and Reduce Trash (SMART) 648 savings 342, 363; in America 305, 342, 418, 420, 421, 422; in Asia 11, 362–4, 372, 417, 418, 420, 421, 426, 438, 679, 681; banks 243, 362, 417, 418, 419; bonds see bonds (savings/financial); in Britain 418–19, 420, 421, 430; campaigns as trojan horse for world of goods 419; in Canada 540; channelled by banks into sub-prime mortgages 426; compulsory 371, 418; credit, spending and 417–28; in Finland 364, 418, 419, 420, 421, 679; in Germany 414–15, 422, 426, 430, 438, 679–80; global decline in 1980s and 1990s 422–3; household savings rates 362–3, 372, 417, 420, 421; lifecycle model 420–21, 422; motivations for 420–22; and nationalism 364, 415; permanent-income model 420, 421–2; and public assistance 681; save and spend model of consumption 362–4; stamps 417; ‘target’ saving 364, 419; and tax exemptions 414–15; Volkswagen saving scheme 290–91; and war 417–18, 419 Saxony 81, 88, 148 Say, Jean-Baptiste 153, 157 Scandinavia 40–41, 225, 320, 339, 426–7, 438–9, 449, 460, 531–2, 537, 541, 547, 551, 557, 679 see also individual countries; elderly people 507, 508, 510, 557; household waste 1980–2005 643 scarcity 41, 98, 185, 284; affluence and ‘increasing scarcity of time’ 460; bolstering state power 277; and consumer activists 393; economy 332; protection against 278; shaping world view 290–91, 393 scavenging 216, 382, 651 Schaffendes Volk exhibition 291–2 Schama, Simon 57, 324 Schäuble, Wolfgang 479 Schelling, Friedrich 233 Schlink, Fred 287 Schloesser, Robert 276 Schmidt-Bleek, Friedrich 665 schnapps 166 Scholes, Abner 94 School Xhosa 347–8 schools 305, 312; American in-school advertising and branded give-aways 485; in Beijing 494; clothes 497; consumer clubs in Indian schools 390; free water in 177; hygiene in 177–8, 189; Indian 391; meals 543–4; shaping tastes and leisure 543–4; and waste 648 Schor, Juliet 443–4 Schorndorf 575 Schulze, Oskar 503 Schumpeter, Joseph 119, 141 Schütte-Lihotzky, Grete 249–50 Schweppes 639 Schwitters, Kurt 636–7 science 96, 609; home science 256 Scotland 104, 186, 475, 478, 513; Scottish Enlightenment 102 Scrivener, Christiane 552 Scuttler gangs 498 second-hand goods market 71, 145, 375, 629, 632–3, 656–7, 658–9, 660 Second World War 272, 279, 312, 504, 573; destabilizing hierarchies of class, gender and race 305; and the mutation of company services 529; and mutual dependence 573; post-war consumer boom 10, 12; post-war cultural reconstruction 351–2; production 529; and US savings bonds 418 secularism 306, 606, 607 see also materialism security 238, 272, 307, 341, 392, 579, 614, 661; guards 313; and savings 420–22 see also savings; social see welfare; and the veil 619 Seeber, Guido, Wanderkino 212 Seibu 384 Seikosha 359 Seiyu (department store) 534 self see also identity: authentic 96, 100, 235; and body see body; cult of the self 284, 285; as a fiction (Hume) 101–2; material see material self; a pure self 101; restless 231; role of things in development of 231–5; separated from things 95–7, 230–31, 235–6; socialist 294 self-control 35, 36, 419 see also restraint self-denial 117, 287, 306 see also restraint self-expression 314–15, 387, 439; and finding of identity through consumption, goods and possessions 6, 104–5, 231–5, 314–15, 320, 344, 375, 484, 677, 681, 686 self-fashioning 30, 63, 94, 108, 281, 323, 498, 681 self-fulfilment/improvement 229–30, 316, 348, 411; Asian ideas of 387, 472, 473 self-help 555, 556; manuals 107–8; and Pentecostalism 614 self-identity see identity self-realization/actualization 94, 316, 323 self-reliance 261, 680 self-respect 135, 177 self-restraint see restraint self-service 69, 348, 349, 350–51; shops 328, 329, 330, 349 see also supermarkets selfishness 105, 156, 297, 568, 613; and consumption 102, 156, 397, 403; and neo-liberalism 567; self-centred hedonism 5 see also hedonism; selfish culture of instant gratification 607 see also instant gratification; selfish individualism 549 see also individualism/individualization; selfish materialism 224, 273 Selfridge, Gordon 199, 201 Selfridges 193, 194, 199, 201 Seligman, E.


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Race realists believe, for example, that black Americans score lower on standardized tests not because the tests are skewed, or because of the long history of oppression and prejudice that blacks must overcome, but because they’re inherently less intelligent than white Americans. It’s a pseudoscientific notion, embraced by white supremacists, with roots in the centuries-old “scientific racism” that underlies, among other disasters of human history, slavery, apartheid, and the Holocaust. The alt-right, led by Bannon and Breitbart, adopted race realism as a cornerstone philosophy. If Bannon were to succeed in his quest for liberation of his “free thinkers,” he needed a way of inoculating people from political correctness.


pages: 372 words: 110,208

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

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

., “The Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man,” Nature 523 (2015): 455–58. 20. Ibid. 21. J. Lindo et al., “Ancient Individuals from the North American Northwest Coast Reveal 10,000 Years of Regional Genetic Continuity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. 114 (2017): 4093–98. 22. Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2016). 23. M. Rasmussen et al., “An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia,” Science 334 (2011): 94–98. 24. Rasmussen et al., “Genome of a Late Pleistocene Human.” 25. Rasmussen et al., “Ancestry and Affiliations of Kennewick Man.” 26.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

‘Totalitarianism’ with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a malevolent reaction to a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy – a tradition seen as an unproblematic norm. It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century. * * * This bizarre indifference to a multifaceted past, the Cold War fixation with totalitarianism, and more West-versus-the-Rest thinking since 9/11 explains why our age of anger has provoked some absurdly extreme fear and bewilderment, summed up by the anonymous contributor to The New York Review of Books, who is convinced that the West cannot ‘ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS’.


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

It sounds bizarre to us today that anyone could believe that you could tell an anarchist by his ears, or a thief by the shape of his nose. But the point is that the people who believed all this had no vested interest in locking up people with unusual faces—they simply believed in the naturalistic explanation of criminality as a product of physiological factors. Likewise, ‘scientific racism’ was widely accepted as the truth in nineteenth-century America. The inferiority of non-white peoples could be ‘proved,’ it was believed, by physical differences. And again, it was the hallmark of a liberal outlook—not a reactionary one—to believe this kind of thing. The point is that naturalistic reasoning in the social sciences—claiming to explain social phenomena as objective truths of nature—is self-reinforcing.


pages: 382 words: 105,166

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

It was a notable moment in the history of evolution: Darwin the son had balanced his faculties with those of his father.10 It should come as no surprise that Galton was a pioneer of eugenics and the even more sinister anthropometric studies that sought to improve the perceived quality of superior, literally “well-born” groups of human population through genetic and social selection. It was the basis of the nightmarish modern oxymoron of scientific racism, which would have catastrophic effects in the twentieth century. One of Galton’s most pointed questions revealed the origins of Darwin’s own method. In the line “Special Talents?” Darwin answered, “None, except for business as evinced by keeping accounts, replies to correspondence, and investing money very well.


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

Cartwright, a well-known physician in the 1850s, promulgated a false theory that African Americans were biologically inferior to whites, claiming that they had smaller blood vessels and brains, and a “tendency towards indolence and barbarism,” and therefore had to be kept in an enslaved state for their own well-being. Scientific racism—a concept that went unnamed then but is clear to us now—gave southerners reasons, albeit untrue, to justify their biases against their enslaved workers. Now, it’s important to note that the majority of southern families were not slaveholders. But the fabric of the South’s economy and lifestyle rested upon a superiority over African Americans held first in bondage and then at a segregated disadvantage.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

To refuse to acknowledge the carnage at the Somme and Stalingrad, or the gas chambers of Auschwitz, or the subjugation of entire continents for the sake of enlarging colonial empires as intrinsic to enlightened modernity rather than an anomaly is also to deny that we could be capable of repeating the experience. British philosopher John Gray, another “progressophobe” that Pinker despises, summarizes this problem as follows: You would never know, from reading Pinker, that Nazi “scientific racism” was based in theories whose intellectual pedigree goes back to Enlightenment thinkers such as the prominent Victorian psychologist and eugenicist Francis Galton. Such links between Enlightenment thinking and 20th-century barbarism are, for Pinker, merely aberrations, distortions of a pristine teaching that is innocent of any crime: the atrocities that have been carried out in its name come from misinterpreting the true gospel, or its corruption by alien influences.


pages: 422 words: 119,123

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

“Everyone will agree with me,” he wrote on the eve of his 1898 expedition, “that there are no human beings on the face of the globe better adapted to form the rank and file of an Arctic party than that little tribe, the most northerly people of the world, whose fathers and grandfathers lived in that very region.” Yet note the stress on “rank and file.” In line with the so-called scientific racism of the day, which envisioned a progressive evolution of peoples and cultures with Western Europeans on top, Peary depicted Inuits as “children” and their ways as “primitive.” They lived near the coasts, he noted, fearing the interior and the sea ice. But due to his regular visits, Peary believed, they had come to trust him like a generous father and would follow him across the sea ice to the pole.


The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel by David Gange

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, British Empire, garden city movement, global village, rewilding, Scientific racism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Feminist historians such as Joan Kelly-Gadol, for instance, showed the ‘Renaissance’ to be a narrative that fits the experience of a cadre of wealthy upwardly mobile men, but not their contemporaries whose opportunities narrowed and wealth decreased.2 To sum up an era with the term Renaissance is thus to engage in an identity politics that values the rich alone. The case of the Enlightenment is little different. Social distinctions of race, class, gender and sexuality were not undermined but consolidated: this was the era of scientific racism or ‘the century of the colour line’ as it was labelled by the philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois. Yet the case against the label ‘Enlightenment’ is also a geographic one: to deploy it is to be dazzled by cities and blind to rural sea coasts. As scholarship informed by environmental challenges increasingly encourages focus on place and geographical distinctiveness, the Enlightenment must surely fail as an explanatory narrative.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Subsequently, a branch of anthropology became invested in the elaboration of “racial types,” whereby certain physical attributes were linked to certain mental and behavioral characteristics—for instance, skull size and other arbitrary measures were used in an attempt to establish the superiority of white men over people of color and also over white women. This “scientific” racism and sexism would become essential in colonial governance. Well-meaning white people believed (and continue to believe) that Western science and technology were the only means of improving the condition of the destitute “savages” in the colonized territories. Other less well-meaning individuals saw the absence of “advanced” knowledge in the colonized as a good reason for their annihilation.


The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah

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

“I don’t believe in this doctrine of racial equality” Liam Stack, “Holocaust Denier Is Likely GOP Nominee in Illinois,” New York Times, February 8, 2018. They implied that mixing biologically distinct peoples Gavin Evans, “The Unwelcome Revival of ‘Race Science,’ ” Guardian, March 2, 2018; Nicole Hemmer, “ ‘Scientific Racism’ Is on the Rise on the Right. But It’s Been Lurking There for Years,” Vox, March 28, 2017; D’Antonio, “Trump’s Move.” allegedly claimed that “if we can get rid of enough people …” Alexander C. Kaufman, “El Paso Terrorism Suspect’s Alleged Manifesto Highlights Eco-Fascism’s Revival,” HuffPost, August 4, 2019.


pages: 436 words: 140,256

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Columbian Exchange, correlation coefficient, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, out of africa, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route

Today, environmentalists view people who exterminate species and destroy habitats as morally bad. Industrial societies have jumped at any excuse to denigrate pre-industrial peoples, in order to justify killing them and appropriating their land. Are the purported new finds about moas and Chaco Canyon vegetation just pseudo-scientific racism that in effect is saying, Maoris and Indians dp not deserve fair treatment because they were bad? What has to be remembered is that it has always been hard for humans to know the rate at which they can safely harvest biological resources indefinitely, without depleting them. A significant decline in resources may not be easy to distinguish from a normal year-to-year fluctuation.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

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

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

Communism didn’t just draw on Marx’s ideas. It also drew on Russian nationalism (“socialism in one country”) and on the cults of science and culture. Stalin was keen on using science to solve man’s problems and on exploiting culture to burnish Russian nationalism. Likewise, Nazism didn’t just draw on “scientific” racism. It also drew on German nationalism and German cultural chauvinism, worshipping German gods such as Thor and German artists such as Goethe and (particularly) Richard Wagner. Both Hitler and Stalin owed a debt to Hegel’s idea that freedom lies in the “realm of necessity”—submerging the individual’s will into the will of the collective—and that history’s purposes justify the crushing of individual rights.


Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

Huxley, ‘The Darwin Memorial’ (1885) Samuel Morton, the noted American physician and scientist, published a series of lavishly illustrated books in the 1830s and 1840s that described his measurements of hundreds of human skulls from all over the world.1 His method involved filling up the skull cavities with mustard seeds (and later, lead shot), then inferring how large the brain inside the skull must have been from the number of seeds or pellets he could cram inside.2 He concluded from his collection that the skulls of Europeans were more capacious than those of Asian, Native American and African people and argued that these differences showed the varying ‘mental and moral faculties’ of the different groups.3 Morton’s books, in which he also discussed his far-fetched theories about the entirely separate origins of different human races, were an international sensation and played a key role in the rise of scientific racism, the movement that attempted to split humans into a hierarchy of superior and inferior groups and helped fuel some of the worst horrors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Along with the average differences by group, Morton provided copious data on his measurements of most of the skulls.


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

It began in the lead-up to the Inquisition, with the burnings, torture, and then expulsion of Muslims and Jews; continued with the bloody conquest of the Americas and the ransacking of Africa for riches and human fuel to power the new colonies; wreaked colonial havoc in Asia; and then returned to Europe for Hitler to distill all of the methods forged in these earlier chapters—scientific racism, concentration camps, frontier genocide—into his Final Solution. But the story didn’t end there. Because the Allies, who finally saw fit to stop Hitler, decided that they did not want to open their borders to his surviving victims, and instead offloaded their Jewish problem, along with their collective shame and guilt about the Holocaust, onto the Arab world and said: “You take it.”


pages: 530 words: 147,851

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

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

Academic dominance by the Left, and the inevitable intolerance that accelerated in the twenty-first century, was already a reality. Britain’s great conservative philosopher Roger Scruton recalled going to speak at Glasgow University in the mid-1980s where he discovered on his arrival that the philosophy department had staged an official boycott on the charges of ‘scientific racism’. Forced to wander aimlessly around campus until the organisers could find a room for him to use, he watched a ‘desultory procession of apparatchiks’ conferring an honorary degree on Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, already at this stage responsible for mass murder, although he hadn’t quite become the wild-eyed geriatric madman of later years.1 Scruton’s crime was to have founded the Salisbury Review, a tiny conservative magazine that caused huge controversy in 1984 by publishing a Bradford headmaster called Ray Honeyford, who argued that multicultural policies were causing segregation to worsen.


pages: 772 words: 150,109

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

As Benjamin Hurlbut has put it: ‘Far from “going rogue” and rejecting the norms and expectations of his professional community, JK [He] was guided by them.’5 In a series of discussions with Hurlbut after the scandal broke, He Jiankui – then under house arrest – explained that he had the impression that US colleagues saw Chinese science as second class. He said he felt ‘disgust’ in 2015 when US scientists criticised Huang’s report of the first gene editing of human embryos and it was rejected by leading journals; this then turned to a feeling that there was ‘scientific racism against the Chinese’ when in 2017 Mitalipov’s experiment was not only published in Nature but was widely praised.6 What occurred in 2018 was almost inevitable. In 2015 the New York Times reported the words of Dr Yi Raoi of Beijing University regarding the lack of ethical oversight in China: ‘The more technology we have, the more dangerous we are to ourselves and entire humankind.… Right now, human gene editing is the main thing’ Mr Yi said.


pages: 670 words: 169,815

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

So young officers who came ‘fresh to the province’ saw what their seniors were doing and were ‘apt to fall into the same habits’.11 The threat of no promotion was actually carried out by Charles Bernard, who passed over three senior district superintendents for the job of inspector general of police, one of them – a Major Litchfield – because had ‘formed and maintained immoral connections with a native of the country’. The British tended to be pragmatic about such things, however. There is no hint, in the official papers at least, of any of the ‘scientific racism’ or fears of ‘miscegenation’ which were common elsewhere in the later part of the nineteenth century. Sir Charles Crosthwaite, the arch-Conservative, who thought that Lloyd George and Churchill were cads and loathed the 1909 ‘People’s Budget’, was typically practical on the issue. Writing at the end of 1888 to Herbert Thirkell White, Crosthwaite was frank: ‘There is no doubt that many men in Burma keep Burman women.’


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

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

Law, language, institutions and beliefs, not physical attributes, were what held peoples back or encouraged them forward. The most influential Social Darwinist of the 1890s and after, Benjamin Kidd (1858–1916), rejected biological arguments for the ‘social efficiency’ that explained European primacy.13 ‘Scientific racism’ was a convenient addition, not the nub of the argument. As a result, social evolution left room for quite different responses to the British encounter with non-Western peoples. Disillusionment with the results of ending black slavery, the great Indian rebellion and the tepid if not hostile response to British missionary efforts persuaded many observers that order and progress in non-Western societies required the forceful assertion of British authority.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Two years earlier, American scientists had rushed to condemn China’s initial exploration of human embryo editing, which had used nonviable embryos, but here they were basking in the media spotlight with an article in Nature, no less, using viable embryos, without anything like the same criticism. JK charged this was a double standard, nothing less than “scientific racism against the Chinese.”27 Feeling a sense of patriotic duty, JK was emboldened to push on. * * * In mid-2017, JK started talking to Lombardi about the idea of launching a gene-editing company. He wanted to hire a CEO for Direct Genomics so he could free up time to focus on the science of gene editing.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

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

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

Nott, “The Mulatto a Hybrid—Probable Extermination of the Two Races If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, August 16, 1843; also see Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 12. See “Literary Notices,” Northern Light, September 2, 1844; Horsman, “Scientific Racism and the American Indian at Mid-Century,” American Quarterly 27, no. 2 (May 1975): 152–68. 13. “Inaugural Address 1836,” in First Congress—First Session. An Accurate and Authentic Report of the Proceedings of the House of Representatives. From the 3d of October to the 23d of December, by M.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

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

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

With science replacing Christianity as a framework for making sense of the world, leading European thinkers showed great dexterity in appropriating the new way of thinking as further justification for world domination. The early-nineteenth-century French naturalist George Leopold Cuvier contributed to a newly emerging field of scientific racism by declaring that “the Caucasian race has given rise to the most civilized nations, to those which have generally held the rest in subjection.”59 Early affirmations of Caucasian racial superiority were given a more robust platform with the publication in 1859 of Darwin's theory of evolution.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

He distinguished between Nutzgeld, or useful objects used in exchange, and Zeichengeld, or objects of conventional form, practically useless, mere tokens of value (Thilenius 1921; Quiggin 1949: 3). Quiggin notes further relevant distinctions, such as those drawn by Albert Terrien de Lacouperie (1845–1894) between Naturgeld, Handelsgeld, und Industriegeld, and by George Montandon (1879–1944)—an advocate, incidentally, of scientific racism—between natural money and money of civilization (or “cultural money”). Tellingly in light of our discussion of origin myths in Chapter 1, each distinction seems to be grappling with the idea that some forms of money are closer to nature, or to what is essentially useful, whereas others tend to be closer to civilization, and are abstract.


pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

There has therefore been too little time for the accumulation of substantial divergence.” That extraordinary last statement was written to address the past: it is a measured scientific retort to Agassiz and Galton, to the American eugenicists of the nineteenth century, and to the Nazi geneticists of the twentieth. Genetics unleashed the specter of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. Genomics, thankfully, has stuffed it back into its bottle. Or, as Aibee, the African-American maid, tells Mae Mobley plainly in The Help, “So, we’s the same. Just a different color.” In 1994, the very year that Luigi Cavalli-Sforza published his comprehensive review of race and genetics, Americans were convulsing with anxiety around a very different kind of book about race and genes.


pages: 850 words: 224,533

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

On his demented worldview, the German people were entitled to Eastern lands because they were superior to Slavs. Just as humans used animals for their own purposes, Aryans have conquered inferior races to achieve their cultural greatness. Though clearly an anti-Semite, Schmitt did not subscribe to the Nazi version of “scientific racism.” He did not think that Jews belong to a lower life form that must be enslaved, exiled, or eradicated. When Hitler began to execute his plan—annexing Austria and conquering Czechoslovakia—Schmitt scrambled to justify, or at least describe, Hitler’s new aggressive foreign policy in his own terms.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

The bottom line is sex. If modern humans replaced Neanderthals in the Western Old World and Homo erectus in the Eastern regions without interbreeding, racist theories tracing contemporary Western rule back to prehistoric biological differences must be wrong. But was that what happened? In the heyday of so-called scientific racism in the 1930s, some physical anthropologists insisted that modern Chinese people were more primitive than Europeans because their skulls had similarities (small ridges on top, relatively flat upper faces, nonprotruding jaws, shovel-shaped incisors) to those of Peking Man. So, too, these anthropologists pointed out, the skulls of Australia’s indigenous peoples had similarities—ridges around the back for attaching neck muscles, shelflike brows, receding foreheads, large teeth—with those of Indonesian Homo erectus a million years ago.


The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

But they were wholly committed to the moral obsessions of Victorian society, and its strictures on gender, the place of the family and the treatment of women.132 Few mid-Victorians would have resisted the claim – however romantic their views – that ‘commercial’ societies like their own were richer and stronger because their institutions and mores favoured the advancement of knowledge and technology. The common ingredient of most of these attitudes was a vulgar conception of ‘race’ – not a scientific racism but a catch-all presumption that variations in skin-shade, religion and climate were an accurate predictor of civilisational capacity. Some Victorians discovered by personal experience the limitations of this theory, but not very many. These trends in British society were part of the story.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Taken to fresh extremes by the composer Richard Wagner’s son-in-law, the Germanophile Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), in his 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, these ideas became the vehicle for a racialized antisemitism, in which the Jew was portrayed as the eternal enemy of the pure-bred Aryan, and Jesus Christ was portrayed as an Aryan and not a Jew. Scientific racism arranged racial types on an evolutionary scale and implied that mixing them together would pull what were now increasingly known as the ‘higher races’ down to the level of the ‘lower’ ones. Contemplating the British Empire and its history, Pearson declared: History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.


The Rough Guide to Brazil by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, bike sharing, car-free, clean water, Day of the Dead, digital nomad, haute cuisine, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, land tenure, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Scientific racism, sexual politics, spice trade, Stephen Fry, sustainable-tourism, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, éminence grise

Although over-long – judicious skipping is in order – it is very accessible to the general reader, interesting and often moving. RACE Thomas E. Skidmore Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Duke UP). First published in 1974, this revised edition has a preface that updates the book to the 1990s. A landmark in the intellectual history of Brazilian racial ideology, examining scientific racism and the Brazilian intellectual elite’s supposed belief in assimilation and the ideal of whitening. France W. Twine Racism in a Racial Democracy (Rutgers UP). Fascinating ethnography of racism in a small Brazilian town, by a black American sociologist interested in the differences between Brazilian and American racial politics.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Nevertheless, some remnants of the eugenics movement remained alive, and by the millennial era, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive science had raised complicated questions about the idea. 52. The historic linkage between “population control,” the eugenics movement, and racism is detailed by Allan Chase in The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). While a full treatment of these issues is beyond the scope of this book, what seems clear, from his change in terminology, steering of the Buffett Foundation, and gradual distancing from the Hardin camp, was Buffett’s disenchantment with the Malthusian views of Hardin because of their eugenics implications.