classic study

344 results back to index


pages: 247 words: 64,986

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own by Garett Jones

behavioural economics, centre right, classic study, clean water, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, hive mind, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, meta-analysis, prediction markets, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, social intelligence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Or instead are they more likely to come to the insight of economist Gordon Tullock, who stopped voting once he learned that he was more likely to die in an accident on the way to the voting booth than he was to change the outcome of the election? Early studies of who votes looked at years of education, which of course has a moderate to strong relationship with IQ. In a classic study from the 1970s, aptly titled Who Votes, political scientists Wolfinger and Rosenstone concluded, The core finding is the transcendent importance of education. . . . [T]he personal qualities that raise the probability of voting are the skills that make learning about politics easier and more gratifying and reduce the difficulties of voting.8 The positive link between education and voting turns up in many countries.

Pande argues that informed voters can hold politicians accountable: they remember if the politician was corrupt, effective, scandalous, whatever. Recalling the famous Dali painting with the melting clock—the one on the cover of Barro and Sala-i-Martin’s textbook—let’s call this the “persistence of memory” channel.14 As one piece of evidence she discusses a classic study by economists Ferraz and Finan of Brazilian government audits: Brazil’s central government mandated audits in some regions but not others, and so Ferraz and Finan could compare how voters treated incumbent mayors both pre- and post-audit, as well as between audited and non-audited regions.15 Yes, the audits mattered, but it also turns out that radio mattered: radio, that key source of low-cost information for so many people around the world.

The Social Construction of Opinion Exactly what is the effect of the opinions of others on our own? Solomon Asch, “Opinions and Social Pressure”17 We’ve seen evidence of conformity in the classroom and after a neighbor wins the lottery, but the most famous conformity study deserves a moment of our time. The classic study: social psychologist Solomon Asch puts a group of students in a room, and they’re all shown three lines drawn on a piece of cardboard, labeled A, B, C. The second line is clearly the longest and C is clearly the shortest. Students are asked, one by one, to say out loud which of the lines is longest.


pages: 317 words: 97,824

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, availability heuristic, Bluma Zeigarnik, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, functional fixedness, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Walter Mischel

The effect disappeared if subjects were first made explicitly aware of the rainy day: if they were asked about the weather prior to stating their happiness level, the weather no longer had an impact. In studies of the effect of the environment on emotion, if a nonemotional reason is given for a subject’s state, the prime effect is likewise eliminated. For instance, in one of the classic studies of emotion, if you’re given a shot of adrenaline and then you interact with someone who is displaying strong emotion (which could be either positive or negative), you are likely to mirror that emotion. However, if you are told the shot you received will have physically arousing effects, the mirroring will be mitigated.

What separates Holmes from Watson, the passive observer from the active one, engaged passivity from disengaged activity, is precisely the descriptor I’ve used in both cases: engagement. Flow. Motivation. Interest. Call it what you may. That thing that keeps Holmes focused exclusively on his visitor, that enraptures him and prevents his mind from wandering anywhere but to the object at hand. In a set of classic studies, a group of Harvard researchers set out to demonstrate that active perceivers categorize and characterize on a near-subconscious level, automatically and without much thought, but then fail to implement the final step of correction—even when they have all of the information to do so—and so end up with an impression of someone that does not take into account all of the variables of the interaction.

You are led into a room with a table. On the table are three items: a box of tacks, a book of matches, and a candle. You are told that you have only one assignment: attach the candle to the wall. You can take as much time as you need. How do you proceed? If you are like over 75 percent of the participants in the now-classic study by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker, you would likely try one of two routes. You might try to tack the candle onto the wall—but you’ll quickly find that method to be futile. Or you might try to light the candle and use the dripping wax to attach it to the wall, foregoing the box of tacks entirely (after all, you might think, it could be a distracter!).


pages: 262 words: 80,257

The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

Loyd, Cyclopedia of Puzzles: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Creativity_-_An_Overview/Thinking_outside_the_box#mediaviewer/File:Eggpuzzle.jpg. 3 An early classic study of the Nine-Dot Problem is described in N. R. F. Maier, “Reasoning in Humans: I. On Direction,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 10 (1930): 115–43. An example of a recent cognitive psychology study of the Nine-Dot Problem is described in T. C. Kershaw and S. Ohlsson, “Multiple Causes of Difficulty in Insight: The Case of the Nine-Dot Problem,” Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition 30 (2004): 3–13. Here is another solution to the Nine-Dot Problem. This one uses three, rather than four, lines: 4 The classic study of the Two-String Problem was conducted by N.

The diagram of the brain shown in figure 3.9 is reproduced from commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brain_headBorder.jpg. 2 The study of problem solving in patients with frontal lobe damage is described in C. Reverberi et al., “Better Without (Lateral) Frontal Cortex? Insight Problems Solved by Frontal Patients,” Brain 128 (2005): 2882–90. Think Smart, Not More 1 The classic study of the cognitive foundations of expertise in chess was written by A. D. de Groot, Thought and Choice in Chess, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1965). A recent article discusses more recent perspectives and misquotations of de Groot’s work: M. Bilalic, P. McLeod, and F. Gobet, “Expert and ‘Novice’ Problem Solving Strategies in Chess: Sixty Years of Citing de Groot (1946),” Thinking and Reasoning 14 (2008): 395–408.

Morton and Rafto’s findings of hemispheric asymmetry are discussed in B. E. Morton and S. E. Rafto, “Behavioral Laterality Advance: Neuroanatomical Evidence for the Existence of Hemisity,” Personality and Individual Differences 49 (2010): 34–42. CHAPTER 12: CARROTS AND STICKS * * * The Paradox of Motivation 1 Glucksberg’s classic study of the effects of financial incentives on performance in solving the Candle Problem is described in S. Glucksberg, “The Influence of Strength of Drive on Functional Fixedness and Perceptual Recognition,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 63 (1962): 36–41. Figure 12.1 is taken from upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Genimage.jpg.


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

The greatest challenge they faced, having arrived on the scene, was deciding what goal to aim for and what tactics to use. In European warfare the rules of the game were straightforward. When its army was beaten, the sovereign state would surrender and a new treaty was made. Against non-European foes, nothing could be taken for granted. In his classic study Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, published in 1896, Colonel Charles Callwell identified three different kinds: campaigns to suppress insurrection, campaigns of conquest and annexation and campaigns ‘to wipe out an insult, to avenge a wrong or overthrow a dangerous enemy’.45 The difficulty with small wars, as Callwell admitted, was that conditions varied so much.

Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, pp. 40–41. 34. Quoted in T. B. Macaulay, History of England (Everyman edn, London, 1906), vol. III, p. 278. 35. Speech on ‘Conciliation with America’, 22 March 1775, in Burke’s Speeches and Letters on American Affairs (Everyman edn, London, 1908), p. 105. 36. The classic study of this is P. J. Marshall, The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Oxford, 1965). 37. Macaulay in the House of Commons, 10 July 1833. A. B. Keith (ed.), Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy 1750–1921 (Oxford, 1922), vol. 2, p. 244. 38. J. S. Mill, Representative Government (1861), ch. 18. 39.

Rogers, The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia, SC, 1970), p. 10. 34. This is the main theme of Merrell, American Woods. 35. See J. O. Spady, ‘Colonialism and the Discursive Precedents of “Penn’s Treaty with the Indians”’, in W. A. Pencak and D. K. Richter (eds.), Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods (University Park, PA, 2004), p. 21. 36. The classic study is F. Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, NC, 1975). 37. I owe this point to Richter, Facing East, p. 41. 38. Ibid., p. 51. 39. P. C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (London, 1995), p. 14. 40. V. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context c. 800–1830 (Cambridge, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 277–82. 41.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Just as water buffalo will herd together in the face of a lion, football coaches, money managers, and corporate executives often find the safety of numbers alluring—as the old slogan “No one ever got fired for buying IBM” suggests. The striking thing about herding is that it takes place even among people who seem to have every incentive to think independently, like professional money managers. One classic study of herding, by David S. Scharfstein and Jeremy C. Stein, looked at the tendency of mutual-fund managers to follow the same strategies and herd into the same stocks. This is thoroughly perplexing. Money managers have jobs, after all, only because they’ve convinced investors that they can outperform the market.

In their recent comprehensive study of what makes companies, Nitin Nohria, William Joyce, and Bruce Roberson found that in the best companies, “Employees and managers were empowered to make many more independent decisions, and urged to seek out ways to improve company operations, including their own.” The virtues of decentralization are twofold. On the one hand, the more responsibility people have for their own environments, the more engaged they will be. In one classic study, two groups of people were put in rooms to work on puzzles and do proofreading while loud, random noises recurred in the background. One group was left alone, while the other was given a button they could press to turn off the sound. The second group solved five times as many puzzles and made many fewer proofreading errors.

They find losses more painful—by some accounts, twice as painful—as they find gains pleasurable, and so they hold on to losing stocks longer than they should, believing that as long as they haven’t sold the stock, then they haven’t suffered any losses. And, above all, investors are overconfident, which, among other things, means that individuals trade more than they should and end up costing themselves money as a result. One classic study by Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean looked at all the stocks that sixty-six thousand individual investors bought and sold between 1991 and 1996. The average investor turned over 75 percent of his portfolio every year, which is far more than most economists would recommend, but the most aggressive traders turned over an incredible 250 percent of their portfolios every year.


The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Intellectually curious, forever turning up new things to read and argue about, endlessly enthusiastic and enormously good fun, he is missed by many of us. This book would have been much better if I could have argued about it with him for a little longer. The text itself has been written largely in the Institute of Classical Studies in the School of Advanced Study of the University of London. Directing the ICS has been a huge privilege. At the heart of all we do there is an extraordinary library, run by the University and the Hellenic and Roman Societies in partnership, provided not just with fantastic collections but also with a marvellous specialist staff.

., Purcell (2005b). 8.Garnsey (1988a, 1999). 9.Cherry (1990), Dawson (2011). 10.See Malone (2015) for a clear account. 11.Halstead and O’Shea (1982). 12.On maritime transport see Bass (1972), Casson (1974), André and Baslez (1993), Pomey (1997), Robinson and Wilson (2011), Harris and Iara (2011). 13.Finley (1964), Grethlein (2010). 14.Knapp (2008) is the best guide to Cyprus in prehistory. 15.For discussion of the various ways to interpret this see Knapp (1990). 16.Manning et al. (2014). 17.Cline and Harris-Cline (1998). 18.Broodbank (2000). 19.Dickinson (1994), Bennet (2007). A classic study with much still of value is Renfrew (1972). For a short synoptic account see Dickinson (2014), and for collections of recent work see Shelmerdine (2008), Cline (2010). 20.Letesson and Knappett (2017). 21.Whitelaw (2017). 22.Bevan (2010), Bevan and Wilson (2013), Whitelaw (2017). 23.Whitelaw (2000). 24.Manning (2008). 25.Chadwick (1976). 26.Kelder (2006). 27.Blake (2008). 28.Sandars (1978). 29.Michel (2008). 30.Rossel et al. (2008). 31.Edens and Kohl (1993). 32.Sherratt (1993).

Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Briant, Pierre. 2017. Kings, Countries, Peoples: Selected Studies on the Achaemenid Empire. Translated by Amélie Kuhrt, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Broadhead, William. 2000. “Migration and Transformation in Northern Italy in the 3rd–1st Centuries B.C.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies (44): 145–166. Broadhead, William. 2007. “Colonization, Land Distribution and Veteran Settlement.” In Companion to the Roman Army, edited by Paul Erdkamp, 148–163. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Broodbank, Cyprian. 2000. An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


pages: 192

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

For example, in what was until recently the standard overview of US economic history, North mentions tariffs once, only to dismiss them as an insignificant factor in explaining US industrial development. He argues, without bothering to establish the case and by citing only one highly-biased secondary source (the classic study by F Taussig, 1892), 'while tariffs became increasingly protective in the years after the Civil War, it is doubtful if they were very influential in affecting seriously the spread of manufacturing'.54 However, a more careful and unbiased reading of the history reveals that the importance of infant industry protection in US development cannot be overemphasized.

The Japanese government also started building telegraph infrastructure in 1869, and by 1880 all major cities were linked in this way.179 How do we evaluate the role of state-owned enterprises in industry and infrastructure in early modern Japan? Many commentators are not very positive about them, given that they were mostly-unprofitable.180 However, other scholars see more positive aspects. For example, in his classic study, Thomas Smith sums up his verdict on the role of Japanese state-owned enterprises in the early Meiji period in the following way: What did government enterprise accomplish between 1686 and 1880? Quantitatively, not much: a score or so of modern factories, a few mines, a telegraph system, less than a hundred miles of railway.

Of course, in most cases, the manufacturers' support for free trade was a selfcentred one, rather than out of their intellectual conversion to lofty principle of free trade - while supporting the repeal of the Corn Law, the cotton manufacturers remained opposed to free export of cotton machinery right until the end of the ban (first imposed in 1774) in 1842 (Musson 1978, p. 101; see section 2.3.3.). 41. Bairoch 1993, pp. 20-1. 42. The term comes from Gallagher and Robinson 1953. 43. Kindleberger 1978, p. 196. See Semmel 1970 for a classic study of the role of economic theory in the development of British trade policy between 1750 and 1850. 44. Kindleberger 1975; Reinert 1998. In 1840, Bowring advised the member states of 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. German Zollverein to grow wheat and sell it to buy British manufactures (Landes 1998, p. 521).


pages: 281 words: 79,464

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

But the children do not typically show signs of distress themselves. The only times that they reliably seem to get upset is when they themselves cause the suffering of another person, but here the negative response is most likely due to guilt and perhaps fear, not empathic engagement. Or consider a classic study in which pairs of six-month-olds were observed as they interacted in a playroom in the presence of their mothers. Sometimes one of the babies would become distressed, and sometimes the other baby would react by touching or gesturing toward him or her. But again, there was no evidence that the distress of one baby ever bothered another baby.

But there’s something even better. Self-control can be seen as the purest embodiment of rationality in that it reflects the working of a brain system (embedded in the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that lies behind the forehead) that restrains our impulsive, irrational, or emotive desires. In a series of classic studies, Walter Mischel investigated whether children could refrain from eating one marshmallow now to get two later. He found that the children who waited for two marshmallows did better in school and on their SATs as adolescents and ended up with better mental health, relationship quality, and income as adults.

Preston and Frans de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002): 1–71. 174 Paul Harris has reviewed Paul Harris, “The Early Emergence of Concern for Others” (unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, n.d.). “The 15-month-old, Len” Example from Judy Dunn and Carol Kendrick, Siblings: Love, Envy, and Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 115. 175 consider a classic study Dale F. Hay, Alison Nash, and Jan Pedersen, “Responses of Six-Month-Olds to the Distress of Their Peers,” Child Development (1981): 1071–75. an observation about chimpanzees Frans B. M. De Waal and Filippo Aureli, “Consolation, Reconciliation, and a Possible Cognitive Difference Between Macaques and Chimpanzees,” Reaching into Thought: The Minds of the Great Apes (1996): 80–110.


pages: 291 words: 88,879

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

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

“‘The city is like that,’” he quoted her as saying, and added his own conclusion: “Such complete anonymity could be found nowhere but in the city of today, and nowhere in the city save in the rooming-house.”13 Some city dwellers relished this anonymity, however, because it liberated them to live by their own “inner laws.” In another classic study from the University of Chicago, The Ghetto, sociologist Louis Wirth explained that in the early twentieth century a number of Jewish hotels popped up in Chicago to house Jews who wanted to escape the confines of their local community. During the same era in New York City, writes one historian, “the first full-blown generation of American moderns” moved to Greenwich Village so they could enjoy “life without a father” (to use Gertrude Stein’s phrase) and forge “a community of dissidents who prided themselves on living a life apart.”

The data on aging in Europe come from Henry Aaron, “Longer Life Spans: Boon or Burden?” Daedalus, Winter 2006: 9–19. And see Robert William Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1. 3. The classic study of increased mortality among the recently widowed is C. Murray Parkes, B. Benjamin, and R. G. Fitzgerald, “Broken Heart: A Statistical Study of Increased Mortality Among Widowers,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 5646 (March 22, 1969): 740–43. 4. About 1.5 million Americans live in a nursing home on any given day, and about 3 million people reside in them over the course of a typical year.

See Laura Carstensen, “Social and Emotional Patterns in Adulthood: Support for Socioemotional Selectivity Theory,” Psychology and Aging 7 (1982) no. 3: 331–38. 12. See Martha Albertson Fineman, The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (New York: New Press, 2005). 13. For instance, in his classic study of urban social networks, Claude Fischer reports that “old men were the most isolated” of all social groups. Claude Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 253. Erin Cornwell’s analysis of recent General Social Survey data reveals the same pattern. 14.


Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

Accordingly, what’s surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be “a nation of moral ideals” and that never before Bush “have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for.”2 To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history. Occasionally, the conflict between “what we stand for” and “what we do” has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task was Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study published in 1964 in the glow of Kennedy’s Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the United States has a “transcendent purpose”: establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since “the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide.”

The resolution also has another paragraph, calling for “steps towards the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction”—obligating the United States and United Kingdom even more than others to take this initiative seriously.16 These comments naturally leave out many urgent topics, among them the horrifying descent of Syria into suicide and ominous developments in Egypt, which are sure to have a regional impact. Nonetheless, this is how some of the core issues appear, to me at least. 12 “Nothing for Other People”: Class War in the United States Norman Ware’s classic study of the industrial worker appeared ninety years ago, the first of its kind.1 It has lost none of its significance. The lessons Ware draws from his close investigation of the impact of the emerging industrial revolution on the lives of working people, and on society in general, are just as pertinent today as when he wrote, if not more so, in the light of the striking parallels between the 1920s and today.

It is important to remember the condition of working people when Ware wrote. The powerful and influential American labor movement that arose during the nineteenth century was being subjected to brutal attack, culminating in Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare after World War I. By the 1920s, the movement had largely been decimated; a classic study by the eminent labor historian David Montgomery is entitled The Fall of the House of Labor. The fall occurred in the 1920s. By the end of the decade, he writes, “corporate mastery of American life seemed secure.… Rationalization of business could then proceed with indispensable government support,” with government largely in the hands of the corporate sector.2 It was far from a peaceful process; American labor history is unusually violent.


pages: 293 words: 97,431

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

But if the flash of light suggests that you are walking in the completely wrong direction—back toward the door rather than toward the far wall where the power switch is located—you might be prone to disbelieve your eyes, wondering if the poor light has caused some kind of illusion. WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE MAY NOT BE GOOD FOR US In a classic study of animal navigation, Ursula von St. Paul took a group of domestic geese on a country ride in a small covered cart. The ride began at their home and proceeded through a series of complicated switchback turns along narrow lanes through varying types of terrain. For some segments of the ride, von St.

The study of lost-person behavior in Peter Lougheed Park was conducted by David Heth of the University of Alberta and described in the paper “Characteristics of Travel by Persons Lost in Albertan Wilderness Areas,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 18 (1998), 223-235. 3. Ronald Schmidt and Dwight McCarter, Lost! A Ranger’s Journal of Search and Rescue (Graphicom: Yellow Springs, OH, 1988). 4. Many of Wehner’s classic studies are described in his paper with Martin Muller entitled “Path Integration in Desert Ants, Cataglyphis fortis,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 85, no. 4 (1988), 5287-5290. 5. The studies showing that ants with backpacks still estimate distance accurately are described in a chapter called “Arthropods” written by Wehner for the book Animal Homing, edited by F.

The studies of the effects of physical proximity on communication in the two research laboratories are described by R. E. Kraut, C. Egido, and J. Galegher, “Patterns of Contact and Communication in Scientific Research Collaboration,” in Intellectual Teamwork, edited by Galegher, Kraut, and Egido (L. Erlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ, 1990). 14. Early classic studies of the effects of proximity are described in Thomas Allen’s paper “Communications Networks in R&D Laboratories,” R&D Management 1, no. 1 (1970), 14-21. 15. The case study of the redesign of the ThoughtForm offices is found in the paper by J. Peponis et al., “Designing Space to Support Knowledge Work,” Environment and Behavior 39 (2007), 815-841.


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

Republicans maintained that North America was sufficiently vast and underpopulated to remain agricultural for generations to come, especially if free trade allowed farmers to export crop surpluses. (Colonists believed that Native Americans lived at such an early stage of development that contact and competition with Europeans could produce only two possible outcomes: assimilation or extinction.) As historian Drew McCoy observes in his classic study of republi- foundations 19 can political economy, the essence of Jeffersonianism was the promotion of development across space rather than time; westward expansion would stall the progression through the social stages that ended in corruption and decay.16 British Americans who thought about population in geopolitical terms, though, tended to celebrate their rising numbers.

Finally, slavery fostered efficient land use by preserving an agricultural economy, which, in classic republican terms, prevented manufacturinginduced population concentrations. A few Southerners denied that slavery put pressure on white population growth, but the majority admitted a demographic drag, and, in Malthusian terms, identified social advantages arising from it. According to a classic study of proslavery ideology, “the slaveholder concluded that slavery was the best answer to the gloomy speculation advanced under the Malthusian law.”128 In this vein, the South’s languid demographics and slow pace of life compared favorably to the rapid population growth in northern industrial cities, which pauperized workers and created a permanent class of urban wage slaves.

Progressive intellectuals such as Walter Weyl, one of the founders of the New Republic, were captivated by the metaphor of the closing of the frontier and utilized Malthusian arguments to call for new frontiers of social democracy.80 Further, postfrontier concerns with the possible exhaustion of America’s natural resources animated the turn-of-the-century conservation movement. Yet, progressive conservation was driven not by Malthusianism but by a desire to scientifically manage natural resources in the name of economic efficiency.81 Samuel Hays notes in his classic study of the progressives that although conservationists “expressed some fear that diminishing resources would create critical shortages in the future . . . they were not Malthusian prophets of despair and gloom.”82 the birth of the modern population debate 57 In addition, even though poverty had been linked to demography since Malthus, progressives did not assume that overpopulation played much of a role in the ills of the city.


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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

The effects of humanization—of seeing the other person as a fellow human being—on cooperation can be observed not only in brain scans, or by asking people what they feel, but through the laboratory as well. Experiments have been conducted to see to what extent humanization motivates people to cooperate with others even when it is actually costly to them. One such classic study was done by economists Iris Bohnet and Bruno Frey. They recruited students who had never met one another and divided them into two groups. They gave the students in Group A ten dollars and told them that they could choose to take any amount of it home for themselves, and could put any portion of it into a sealed envelope, marked with a number corresponding to one of the students in Group B.

Because it is so implausible, the question of why anyone would donate their time and energy to collaborative online projects has been the subject of much research, initially in economics, and later in other disciplines ranging from computer science and process engineering to anthropology. And the answers that show up repeatedly in surveys and other studies align perfectly with all the different intrinsic motivations we have discussed so far: community, fairness, reciprocity, adherence to norms, and so on. In one classic study, Karim Lakhani and Robert Wolf found that the most common reason (cited by 44 percent of responders) to participate in open-source development was simply the enjoyment, or the pleasure of the intellectual stimulation it provides. The second most important was building one’s skills. Another widely reported motivation was more normative—one-third of developers said that they thought “source code should be open.”


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Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, company town, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton

The prince, attired in a dark robe and a white ghutrah, reclines on a pile of sheepskins, while his colleague, Sherif Ali, leans casually against a tent pole. The various postures cinematically underline a central point: the relaxed Bedouins are at home in this place—the desert—while the stiff English colonel is an interloper. Lawrence is somewhere in between. The world is divided into people who sit on the floor and those who sit on chairs. In a classic study of human posture around the world, the anthropologist Gordon W. Hewes identified no fewer than one hundred common sitting positions. “At least a fourth of mankind habitually takes the load off its feet by crouching in a deep squat, both at rest and at work,” he observed. Deep squatting is favored by people in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but sitting cross-legged on the floor is almost as common.

Quotes from Dunnigan are based on personal conversations and are also drawn from John Dunnigan Furniture Maker (Peter Joseph Gallery, 1991), an interview with Dunnigan in Bebe Pritam Johnson and Warren Eames Johnson’s Speaking of Furniture: Conversations with 14 American Masters (Artist Book Foundation, 2013), and Dunnigan’s essay in Under Cover: Some Thoughts on Upholstered Furniture, an exhibition catalogue (Gallery NAGA, Boston, 2005). 3. Sitting Up Gordon W. Hewes’s classic study “The Anthropology of Posture” appeared in Scientific American (February 1957) and was originally published as “World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits” in American Anthropologist, vol. 2, no. 1, part 1 (April 1955). G.M.A. Richter’s authoritative The Furniture of the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans (Phaidon Press, 1966) provides much useful information.


pages: 372 words: 117,038

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

One, for example, describing what he believed to be a girl (although it was really a boy) said, “She is friendly, and female infants smile more,” while another found a supposed female (actually a male) to be “more satisfied and accepting” than a male child would have been. We shouldn’t rely on “common sense” or even our own observations of children’s behavior to determine the extent to which boys and girls are different. Fortunately, there are numerous scientific studies investigating just this issue. I’ll describe one classic study in the next chapter. But the bottom line is that Griffin’s fantasy play is representative of what boys tend to engage in: heroes battling bad guys to save the universe at great risk to themselves; the destruction of objects, homes, planets, and solar systems; and any kind of dangerous battle in which the boy can emerge as the victor (today many of these kinds of themes are played out not in fantasy but in video games).

Still, some T skeptics have found ingenious ways to avoid the inevitable conclusion. Here’s an example from Jordan-Young and Karkazis’s book Testosterone. They describe one of the cleanest, most influential studies ever conducted on testosterone and its effects on muscle in men, by the endocrinologist Shalender Bhasin and his colleagues: That classic study is the go-to citation for evidence that T builds muscle. But it’s also a great study to look at to understand some of the limitations of that claim. First, to find the effects of T on muscle, Bhasin and colleagues had to give huge doses of T, six times more than had been studied in previous research on the effect of T on muscle.

Similarly, girls who shun dresses and prefer rougher sports and horseplay with the boys are more likely to grow up to be lesbians. This association between gender-atypical interests in childhood and later homosexuality or bisexuality has been found in diverse cultures, from the United States to the Philippines, Samoa, Guatemala, the UK, and Brazil. Here’s an example of the relevant research. In a classic study, one of the largest of its kind, Richard Green (then a psychiatrist at UCLA) and his team followed a group of boys from childhood into early adulthood to determine whether early gender-atypical behavior predicted adult homosexuality. They recruited sixty-six boys between four and eleven years old, who showed “extensive cross-gender behavior.”


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Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

Tainter’s Axiom: Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse. Exception: A society can avoid collapse by finding replacement resources. Limit to the exception: In a finite world, the number of possible replacements is also finite. I have named this axiom for Joseph Tainter, author of the classic study, The Collapse of Complex Societies, which demonstrates that collapse is a frequent if not universal fate of complex societies. He argues that collapse is directly related to declining returns on efforts to support growing levels of societal complexity with energy harvested from the environment.

Random House, 1979, pp. 56-58. 7 Zerzan’s Elements of Refusal (Left Bank Books, 1988) includes chapters on time, language, number, art, agriculture, and domestication, arguing in each instance that the costs for each of these “advances” has far outweighed its benefit. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his opinion, he must be credited with consistency. 8 Robert Adler. “Entering a dark age of innovation.” NewScientist.com news service, July 2, 2005. newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7616 (Cited June 12, 2007) Chapter 2 1 Fernand Braudel, in his classic study The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (translated from French by Sian Reynolds, University of California Press, 1992), notes that, “Famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life.… France, by any standard a privileged country, is reckoned to have experienced 10 general famines during the tenth century; 26 in the eleventh; 2 in the twelfth; 4 in the fourteenth; 7 in the fifteenth; 13 in the sixteenth; 11 in the seventeenth and 16 in the eighteenth.”


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

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

But if that’s true, and people’s social life really is often rooted in the office, then it’s all the more striking that the overwhelming majority of those in bullshit occupations claim to be so miserable. on the misery of ambiguity and forced pretense Let us return to the subject of make-believe. Obviously, a lot of jobs require make-believe. Almost all service jobs do to a certain extent. In a classic study of Delta Airlines flight attendants, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the notion of “emotional labor.” Hoschschild found air hostesses typically had to spend so much effort creating and maintaining a perky, empathetic, good-natured persona as part of their conditions of employment that they often became haunted by feelings of emptiness, depression, or confusion, unsure of who or what they really were.

There is some debate over the relative weight, in medieval Christian theology, of the degree to which work was seen as an imitation of divine creation, and as a means of perfecting the self (see the discussion in Ehmer and Lis 2009:10–15), but both principles appear to have been present from the very beginning. 47. Classic studies include Kraus, Côté, and Keltner 2010, and Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, and Keltner 2011. 48. As a result underlings will also tend to care more about their superiors than their superiors will care about them, and this extends to almost any relation of structural inequality: men and women, rich and poor, black and white, and so on.

I’d say one out of a hundred really get excited about work” (1972:xxxiv); but at the same time, from the same testimony, “somebody has to do this work. If my kid ever goes to college, I just want him to have a little respect” (1972:xxxv). 52. Gini and Sullivan 1987:649, 651, 654. 53. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995) is the classic study of this phenomenon. 54. The formula was later reduced to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” but Bentham’s original theory was based on hedonistic calculation and that’s what Carlyle was responding to. 55. Carlyle 1843:134. 56. Ibid. Chapter 7: What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?


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

Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy 1831–96 (1997), pp. 424–5. 44. A classic study is M. Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1997); see also C. Jones, ‘“Business Imperialism” in Argentina: A Theoretical Note’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 12 (1980), 440ff. 45. R. Austen, African Economic History (1987), p. 275. 46. Ibid., p. 114. 47. K. O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830–1885 (Oxford, 1956), is the classic study. 48. J. D. Hargreaves, Prelude to the Partition of West Africa (1966), pp. 35–7. 49.

Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (Oxford, 1989). 16. S. Teng and J. K. Fairbank (eds.), China's Response to the West (Cambridge, MA, 1979), p. 152. 17. E. W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), pp. 20, 65, 387. 18. See A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (1962). 19. The classic study is B. H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans 1870–1880 (Oxford. 1937). 20. For this estimate, see R. W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question (1935), pp. 560–1. 21. See Swartz, The Politics of British Foreign Policy, p. 101. 22. G. Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh (1963), p. 442: Salisbury to Layard, April 1880. 23.

Stanley, The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellions [1936] (Toronto, 1961). 10. See W. L. Morton, Manitoba: A History (Toronto, 1957). 11. See M. L. Hansen and J. B. Brebner, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (1940), vol. I, pp. 183–4. 12. See G. Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics (Vancouver, 1986). The classic study of Macdonald remains D. Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician (Toronto, 1952) and D. Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftain (Toronto, 1955). 13. See R. W. Cox, ‘The Quebec General Election of 1886’ (Master's thesis, McGill University, 1948). 14. See P. Crunican, Priests and Politicians: Manitoba Schools and the Election of 1896 (Toronto, 1974), pp. 310–16. 15.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

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

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

The Schultz model added the notion that individual productivity could differ based on whether the individuals were, say, high school dropouts or engineering PhDs. He effectively started economics toward doing for labor what Solow had done for capital. (The fuller development of human capital theory came from another Nobel Laureate Gary Becker with his classic study of why individuals invest in education or experience and the consequences of these “human capital” investments for the economy.) As obvious as this all seems—machines aren’t interchangeable, nor are human beings—these new insights represented a real step forward for the discipline of economics.

(This desire to have the profession reflect more directly what we observe in reality has also contributed, no doubt, to the rise of empirical economics, which aims to use data to inform our view of the world. This empirical revolution has been powered in large part by the IT revolution and resultant computing power, which lets researchers put data to work on a scale that was unimaginable in Akerlof’s time.) Abstractions aside, what did Akerlof actually do? His classic study focused on the problems that arise in the car business as a result of a few lemons sitting on a used car lot, which he saw as an easy way into the general problem of a market with informed sellers and unwitting consumers. Akerlof’s model follows exactly the logic that Podolny was relying on when he predicted, if only to himself, the failure of eBay.


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A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Braxton Irvine

classic study, Columbine, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, Lao Tzu

Many readers would therefore do well to get a book containing a selection of these letters. Musonius Rufus is worth reading for his practical advice on daily living. The only published translation of Musonius that I know of, though, is Cora Lutz’s “Musonius Rufus: ‘The Roman Socrates,’ ” in volume 10 of Yale Classical Studies (1947), which is difficult to buy or borrow. Readers are therefore encouraged to visit my author website (williambirvine.com) for information on how to obtain a copy of Cynthia King’s translation of Musonius’s works. (This is the translation I quote from in this book.) Readers wishing to sample Epictetus are encouraged to start with his Handbook (also known as his Manual or Encheiridion).It has the advantage of being short, easily obtainable, and philosophically accessible.

Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. History of European Morals: From Augustus to Charlemagne. New York: George Braziller, 1955. Works Cited 299 Long, A. A. Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Lutz, Cora. Introduction to “Musonius Rufus: ‘The Roman Socrates.’ ” Yale Classical Studies. Vol. 10. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947. Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth. London: Penguin, 1964. Marrou, H. I. A History of Education in Antiquity. Translated by George Lamb. New York: New American Library, 1956. Musonius Rufus. “The Lectures.” In The Lectures and Sayings of Musonius Rufus.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

The growth of corporate bureaucracies and a burgeoning public sector accelerated the increase in white-collar employment, The False Promise 17 adding support to a model of technological evolution from a low-skill to high-skill economy. The growth of middle-class jobs was assumed to represent an ever-tighter relationship between human capital, jobs, and rewards, as it became more important to get the best minds working on the scientific and technological challenges of the age. In his classic study The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, published in the early 1970s, Daniel Bell highlighted the link between a rising meritocracy and economic efficiency. “The post-industrial society, in its initial logic, is a meritocracy. Differential status and differential income are based on technical skills and higher education.

The Future of Knowledge Work Economic history shows that the power to both innovate and standardize has increased over time. It also shows, at least in America and Britain, a proclivity toward managerial control over employee discretion. But it is important not to emphasize control for its own sake as in Harry Braverman’s classic study of Taylorism because it should be seen as the latest attempt to boost productivity and corporate profits.39 The economic landscape is also strewn with historical examples of how highly skilled workers have found that their skills are not as unique as they assumed or have been rendered redundant by technological innovation.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

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

Economic rationality requires that the tools of production overcome their reluctance to see their communities and families destroyed. “It is not for the commodity to decide where it should be offered for sale, to what purpose it should be used; at what price it should be allowed to change hands, and in what manner it should be consumed or destroyed,” as Karl Polanyi commented in his classic study of the laissez-faire experiment in 19th century England, quickly terminated as it came to be understood by the business classes that their interests would be harmed by the free market, which “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.”

The Department had previously described the “uncultivated waste” as a miracle of progress, with successful production by people living in considerable comfort, a level of education “equal to that furnished by an ordinary college in the States,” flourishing industry and commerce, an effective constitutional government, a high level of literacy, and a state of “civilization and enlightenment” comparable to anything known: “What required five hundred years for the Britons to accomplish in this direction they have accomplished in one hundred years,” the Department declared in wonder.15 Jackson ends her account in 1880 with a question: “Will the United States Government determine ‘to reduce the size of the reservation’?” It was soon to be answered, in just the way she anticipated. Again, the advanced civilization of the Indians stood in the way of civilization, properly conceived. What followed is described by Angie Debo in her classic study And Still the Waters Run. In the independent Indian Territory, land was held collectively and life was contented and prosperous. The Federal Indian Office opposed communal land tenure by ideological dogma, as well as for its practical effect: preventing takeover by white intruders. In 1883, a group of self-styled philanthropists and humanitarians began to meet to consider problems of the Indians.

., on the role of banks in German industrial development. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, Landes, Unbound, for extensive discussion. 6. Bils, cited by DuBoff, Accumulation, 56. Bartel, editor, Challenge, July/August 1992. See Du Boff on the general topic. Brady, Business, on 1920s and ‘30s. A classical study of the abandonment of the free market is Polanyi, Great Transformation. For further references, see DD, ch. 1, n. 19. 7. Lazonick, Business Organization. 8. Taylor, Dollars & Sense, Nov. 1991. 9. Steven Elliott-Gower, Assistant Director, Center for East-West Trade Policy, U.of Georgia, NYT News Service, Dec., 23, 1991.


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A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book by John Barton

classic study, complexity theory, feminist movement, invention of the printing press, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Republic of Letters, source of truth, the market place, trade route

Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (London: SCM Press and Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1989). This discusses selected passages and provides a structured study course. The classic study in English is B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, Treating of the Manuscript Tradition, Sources, Authorship & Dates (London: Macmillan, 1924), which still provides all the standard arguments in favour of the ‘two-source’ hypothesis. The (equally classic) study questioning the existence of Q is A. M. Farrer, ‘On Dispensing with Q’, in D. E. Nineham (ed.), Studies in the Gospels in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955), pp. 55–88; the argument is developed further in M.

The Gospels themselves may already show this process at work; for example, details of the passion story may have been adjusted to match Psalm 22, such as the text, ‘they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots’ (verse 18); compare Matthew 27:35 and especially John 19:23–5. On this phenomenon see the classic study by Barnabas Lindars, New Testament Apologetic: The Doctrinal Significance of the Old Testament Quotations (London: SCM Press, 1961). 29. Justin also harmonized the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, or else drew on an already existing harmony, and there may be links between his work and the Diatessaron; see Watson, Gospel Writing, pp. 474–5. 30.

On the definition of ‘canonicity’ as well as reflections on the formation of both canons see J. Barton, The Spirit and the Letter: Studies in the Biblical Canon (London: SPCK, 1997); the American edition (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, also 1997) is called Holy Writings, Sacred Text, but has the misleadingly restrictive subtitle The Canon in Early Christianity. A classic study, which dethroned the old idea that Jews in Palestine and the diaspora had different canons of the Hebrew Bible, is A. C. Sundberg Jr, The Old Testament of the Early Church (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964). For a discussion of the status of various books in the community at Qumran see T.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

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

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

“Of course mixed groups are no panacea….But mixed groups have been shown to have two desirable effects. First, exposure to competing positions generally increases political tolerance….Second, mixing increases the likelihood that people will be aware of competing rationales and see that their own arguments might be met with plausible counterarguments.” Sunstein draws on classic studies and experimental research to show that, as in South Chicago during its industrial heyday, in-group attachments and prejudices against others diminish when people interact across the usual social boundaries. Democratic politics, Sunstein argues, works better when we are regularly exposed to different people and competing positions.

“nothing but sit her black ass down”: Barbershop, story written by Mark Brown; screenplay written by Mark Brown, Don D. Scott, and Marshall Todd, directed by Tim Story, 2002. prepared to engage the world outside: Urban ethnographers have also observed the social processes visible in black barbershops in other protected spaces, including the tavern. The classic study is Elijah Anderson’s A Place on the Corner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Anderson writes: “Urban taverns and bars, like barbershops, carryouts, and other such establishments, with their adjacent street corners and alleys, serve as important gathering places for people of the ‘urban villages’ and ghetto areas of the city.


Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton

All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Bayesian statistics, biofilm, bioinformatics, classic study, David Attenborough, Ernest Rutherford, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, ocean acidification

When I was seven, I was given a classic little book, Fossils, a Guide to Prehistoric Life, by Frank Rhodes, Herbert Zim, and Paul Shaffer. What excited me was that the illustrations were all in colour – unusual still in the 1960s – and that there were not only pictures of fossils, but reconstructions too. The text reflected the knowledge of the time – this is what Tyrannosaurus looked like, based on the classic studies by Professor Henry Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, and this is how the dinosaurs died out, rather slowly, and perhaps as a result of long-term cooling climates (or maybe simply because they were too stupid to adapt to a changing world), according to the ideas of Professor Leigh Van Valen of the University of Chicago.

These, as in modern reptiles, and indeed in trees, are light and spacious when growth is rapid (usually summer), and tight and dark when growth is slow (usually winter), when life conditions are poor. In a series of papers, Greg Erickson has explored the growth rates of many dinosaurs using observations of their growth rings. In a classic study of T. rex and its relatives, Erickson counted growth rings in bones from animals of all sizes. In one example, he counted to nineteen growth rings, and he was confident he had reached the endpoint because the outside of the bone was finished with some tightly packed bone layers, called the external fundamental system (EFS).


pages: 312 words: 83,998

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

"World Economic Forum" Davos, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, confounding variable, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental economics, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeremy Corbyn, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, publication bias, risk tolerance, seminal paper

A reappraisal of Bateman’s classic study of intrasexual selection. Evolution, 61(11), 2457–2468. Quoted on pp. 2458 and 2457, respectively. 10. In fact, a later attempt to replicate Bateman’s study (by Patricia Gowaty and her colleagues) challenged Bateman’s assumption that there would be a quarter-share each of offspring with a maternal mutation only, paternal mutation only, a double mutation, and no mutation. Double-mutation flies, in particular, were particularly unlikely to survive. Gowaty, P. A., Kim, Y.-K., & Anderson, W. W. (2012). No evidence of sexual selection in a repetition of Bateman’s classic study of Drosophila melanogaster.


pages: 285 words: 83,682

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Here is a young man talking to his college-educated interviewer: “Um, let me try to explain to you why I was so nervous at the beginning of the interview,” said a house painter. “It’s not you, you’re all right—but you see . . . um . . . whenever I’m with educated people, you now, or people who aren’t my own kind . . . um . . . I feel like I’m making a fool of myself if I just act natural, you know?”36 Sennett and Cobb’s classic study was memorably titled The Hidden Injuries of Class. Such injuries have persisted. In a best-selling 2016 account of growing up as what he himself calls a “hillbilly,” J. D. Vance reports many moments of just such anxiety as a rare white working-class student at Yale Law School.37 We’ve repeatedly seen that the significance of identities is always being contested.

The question of when “European,” as a group identity, gained broader traction is taken up, if not entirely resolved, in Peter Burke, “Did Europe Exist Before 1700?” History of European Ideas 1 no. 1 (1980): 21–29. He notes, “If the first context in which people became aware of themselves as Europeans was that of being invaded by other cultures, the second was that of invading other cultures.” 10.G. W. F. Hegel, “On Classical Studies,” On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 324. The lecture was given in 1809. “The perfection and glory of those masterpieces,” he continued, “must be the spiritual bath, the secular baptism that first and indelibly attunes and tinctures the soul in respect of taste and knowledge.” 11.Mark R.


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

Parkes, “Influences of the Application of Punctuation,” in Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 65–96. 10.E.G. Turner and P.J. Parsons, “Introduction,” in Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World (London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, bulletin supplement, 1987), 1–23. 11.Brown et al, “Punctuation.” 12.M.B. Parkes, “Antiquity: Aids for Inexperienced Readers and the Prehistory of Punctuation,” in Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 12. 13.Parkes, “Introduction,” 1–8; G.

From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1968), 252–79. 4.E.Dickey, “Dionysius Thrax,” in Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period, Classical Resources Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 77–80; J.Alan Kemp, “The Tekhne Grammatike of Dionysius Thrax: Translated into English,” Historiographia Linguistica 13, no. 2 (1986): 343–63. 5.Dickey, “Dionysius Thrax,” 215. 6.D.J. Murphy, “Hyphens in Greek Manuscripts,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 36, no. 3 (1995): 296–99; E.G. Turner and P.J. Parsons, “Introduction,” in Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient World, Bulletin Supplement, University of London Institute of Classical Studies (University of London, 1987), 1–23. 7.Paul Saenger, “The Hyphen,” in Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 69–70. 8.Paul Saenger, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1982): 367–414. 9.Bernhard Bischoff and University of Cambridge, “Palimpsests,” in Latin Paleography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–12; Bernhard Bischoff and University of Cambridge, “Writing Instruments,” in Ibid., 18–29; Saenger, “The Hyphen,” 69–70. 10.D.Christian, S.Jacobsen, Associated Press, and D.Minthorn, “Editing Marks,” in Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 407. 11.Paul Saenger, “The Circle of Sedulius Scottus,” in Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 109–15. 12.Murphy, “Hyphens in Greek Manuscripts,” 296–99. 13.Ibid. 14.Saenger, “Silent Reading,” 367–414. 15.N.R.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

As for office automation, it has gone through three different phases, largely determined by available technology.55 In the first phase, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, mainframe computers were used for batch processing of data; centralized computing by specialists in data-processing centers formed the basis of a system characterized by the rigidity and hierarchical control of information flows; data entry operations required substantial efforts since the goal of the system was the accumulation of large amounts of information in a central memory; work was standardized, routinized, and, in essence, deskilled for the majority of clerical workers, in a process analyzed, and denounced, by Braverman in his classic study.56 The following stages of automation, however, were substantially different. The second phase, in the early 1980s, was characterized by the emphasis on the use of microcomputers by the employees in charge of the actual work process; although they were supported by centralized databases, they interacted directly in the process of generating information, although often requiring the support of computer experts.

The social context, and particularly the relationship between capital and labor according to specific decisions by the management of firms, drastically affects the actual shape of the work process and the consequences of the change for workers. This was particularly true during the 1980s when the acceleration of technological change went hand in hand with the process of capitalist restructuring, as I have argued above. Thus, the classic study by Watanabe 62 on the impact of the introduction of robots into the automobile industry in Japan, the United States, France, and Italy, showed substantially different impacts of a similar technology in the same industry: in the United States and Italy, workers were displaced, because the main goal of introducing new technology was to reduce labor costs; in France, job loss was lower than in the two other countries because of government policies to cushion the social impacts of modernization; and in Japan, where companies were committed to life-tenured employment, employment actually increased, and productivity shot up, as a result of retraining and higher teamwork effort which increased the competitiveness of firms and took market share away from their American counterparts.

On the other hand, there has been a spatial concentration of the upper tier of such activities in a few nodal centers of a few countries.9 This concentration follows a hierarchy between tiers of urban centers, with the higher-level functions, in terms of both power and skill, being concentrated in some major metropolitan areas.10 Saskia Sassen’s classic study of the global city has shown the joint dominance of New York, Tokyo, and London in international finance, and in most consulting and business services of international scope.11 These three centers together cover the spectrum of time zones for the purpose of financial trading, and work largely as a unit in the same system of endless transactions.


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

Brunner, “Abnormal Behavior Associated with a Point Mutation in the Structural Gene for Monoamine Oxidase A,” Science 262 (1993): 578–580. 44 Lois Wingerson, Unnatural Selection: The Promise and the Power of Human Gene Research (New York: Bantam Books, 1998), pp. 291–294. 45 The theory that crime is the result of a failure to learn impulse control at a certain key developmental stage is sometimes referred to as the “life course” theory of crime; it offers an explanation as to why so large a percentage of crimes are committed by recidivists. The classic study establishing the existence of criminal “life courses” is Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Delinquency and Nondelinquency in Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). See also the reanalysis of the Gluecks’ data in Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 46 For an account of the rise and fall of crime rates in the United States and other Western countries after 1965, see Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Free Press, 1999), pp. 77–87. 47 Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988). 48 For an entertaining account of this incident, see Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 92–94. 49 Wingerson (1998), pp. 294–297. 50 David Wasserman, “Science and Social Harm: Genetic Research into Crime and Violence,” Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy 15 (1995): 14–19. 51 Wade Roush, “Conflict Marks Crime Conference; Charges of Racism and Eugenics Exploded at a Controversial Meeting,” Science 269 (1995): 1808–1809. 52 Alice H.

See also her article “Eugenic Anxieties, Social Realities, and Political Choices,” Social Research 59 (1992): 663–683. See also Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963). 4 See Henry P. David and Jochen Fleischhacker, “Abortion and Eugenics in Nazi Germany,” Population and Development Review 14 (1988): 81–112. 5 The classic study of this is Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 6 Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1996).


pages: 307 words: 94,069

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

Let’s remember something: This “inventor” identity, which has fueled business success and employee satisfaction, was made up. None of Brasilata’s employees were born “inventors.” The identity was introduced to them, and they liked the sound of it. It seemed to be a mantle worth wearing. Being an inventor has become a source of pride and strength. 5. If cultivating an identity sounds daunting, take heart. A classic study in psychology shows that you can start with small steps. In the 1960s, two psychologists from Stanford University, Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser, asked a researcher to go door-to-door in an upscale neighborhood in Palo Alto, California. When home owners answered the door, the researcher announced himself as a volunteer for “Citizens for Safe Driving” and asked whether they would allow a billboard reading “Drive Carefully” to be installed on their lawns.

But it would be inadvisable to recall the other 20 percent after the close of a $100 million acquisition. (Whoops! Those hotshot engineers refuse to leave the snow in Boulder.) Checklists provide insurance against overconfidence. And overconfidence is worth insuring against because we all have a knack for it. In one classic study, people were asked to come up with solutions for their university’s chronic parking problem. Ideas ranged from raising parking fees to creating more “Compact Only” parking spaces. After the ideas were collected, a panel of experts assessed them—eliminating wacky or impractical options—and identified a set of “best solutions.”


pages: 297 words: 89,176

Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization by Paul Kindstedt

agricultural Revolution, classic study, cotton gin, Kickstarter, mass immigration, New Urbanism, trade route

The image of the sacred healing snake coiled around Asklepios’s staff has become a universal symbol of medicine and healing that is often included in medical-related logos, such as that of the American Medical Association. What does all this have to do with milk coagulation and cheese making? Well, during the 1930s an archaeological team from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens led by Ferdinand Joseph de Waele systematically excavated the site of the Asklepieion at Corinth (de Waele 1933). The original sanctuary was built in the sixth century BC and then rebuilt in fourth century BC. Among the many artifacts found at the site were large flat terra-cotta basins that contained heavy spouts.

Gomi, T. 1980. On Dairy Productivity at Ur in the Late Ur III Period. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 23(1/2):1–42. Grandjouan, C., E. Markson, and S. I. Rotroff. 1989. Hellenistic Relief Molds from the Athenian Agora. Hesperia Supplements, Vol. 23. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton. Grant, A. J. 1966. Early Lives of Charlemagne: Eginhard & the Monk of St Gall. Translated and edited by Professor A. J. Grant. Cooper Square Publishers, New York. Pp. 79–80 Grant, M. 2000. Galen on Food and Diet. Routledge, London. Granto, J., R. Inglehart, and D.


pages: 342 words: 90,734

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", additive manufacturing, airport security, Buckminster Fuller, City Beautiful movement, classic study, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Jane Jacobs, kremlinology, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Eisenman, rent control, Silicon Valley, the High Line, urban renewal, young professional

When Marco Velardi, the editor of Apartamento, a self-styled “everyday life interiors magazine” based in Milan and Barcelona, invited me to contribute something “to celebrate the fact we were inspired by your words five years ago when we started doing our magazine,” I couldn’t resist. PART TWO Our Urban Condition Tocqueville, Urban Critic Alexis de Tocqueville is celebrated for Democracy in America, his classic study of American civilization at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The author was only twenty-five when he visited the United States, but he had a wide-ranging intellect, a keen sense of observation, and a journalist’s knack for eliciting the opinion of others. Consequently, one can pick almost any subject—slavery, religion, education—and find that he had something interesting to say about it.

Most musicians, critics, and concertgoers would probably include not only Vienna’s Musikvereinssaal and Boston’s Symphony Hall but also Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and New York’s Carnegie Hall. A systematic study of these and other halls is contained in Concert and Opera Halls: How They Sound, a vastly revised and enlarged edition of the now-classic study Music, Acoustics, and Architecture (which was originally published in 1962). The author is Leo L. Beranek, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based acoustician who is co-founder of one of the world’s leading firms of acoustical consultants—Bolt, Beranek & Newman. Beranek’s top rating is “Superior,” and it is accorded only to the Musikvereinssaal, Symphony Hall, and the Concertgebouw.


pages: 1,197 words: 304,245

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

I am here arguing against a powerful tradition in recent historiography of science which insists that replication is always problematic, and that in the end what counts as successful replication is always decided by the intervention of authority.78 According to these historians, replication is a social artefact, not a natural fact. The classic study is Leviathan and the Air-pump, by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer.79 That book, which has been described as the most influential work in the history of science after Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, presents a number of arguments which have become famous.80 It argues that Boyle, through his air-pump experiments, was a pioneer in making facts: from the previous chapter we can see that this view is mistaken, unless one focusses narrowly on the use of the word ‘fact’.

In order to develop its industry, the bourgeoisie required a science that would investigate the properties of material bodies and the manifestations of the forces of nature.’ But Marxists were not alone in assuming that the new science was motivated by its possible practical applications: Robert K. Merton in his classic study of 1938, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-century England, in which he emphasized the role of Puritanism in encouraging useful knowledge, followed Hessen in arguing that seventeenth-century science was indeed intended, through and through, to have practical applications, despite his own rejection of Hessen’s Marxist assumptions.6 A series of studies, however (those of Alfred Rupert Hall being particularly influential), have claimed to show that, whatever the intentions of scientists may have been, in practice, the new science had virtually no influence on technological progress.

Berkel, Isaac Beeckman (2013), 83 and n. 42. 7. See above, p. 24. 8. More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), preface (b7r). More had earlier welcomed Cartesianism as a ‘Fortification about Theology’ to defend it from the assaults of the atheists: McGuire & Rattansi, ‘Newton and the “Pipes of Pan”’ (1966), 131. The classic study of More and Descartes is Webster, ‘Henry More and Descartes, Some New Sources’ (1969). 9. Parker, Disputationes de Deo et providentia divina (1678), 64; and Bayle (ed.), Nouvelles (1684), Vol. 2, 753 10. Boyle, A Defence (1662), preface (*1v) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 3, 9; Boyle, Experiments and Considerations Touching Col-ours (1664), preface (A4r) = Boyle, The Works (1999), Vol. 4, 7: ‘corpuscular philosophy’.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

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

Good outcomes, like quality public education, are a complex mixture of inputs provided by governments (teachers, curriculum, classrooms, etc.) as well as characteristics of the population being served, including their income, social habits, and culture (that is, the degree to which learning is valued in the home). A classic study of educational outcomes in the United States was the 1966 Coleman Report, whose statistical analysis showed that quality education was much more a reflection of a student’s friends and family than of the inputs being supplied by the government.11 In any event, measuring outcomes is often difficult for the kinds of complex services offered by modern governments.

Therefore, one cannot afford the luxury of charity, which is giving others more than their due, or even of justice, which is giving them their due … Toward those who are not of the family the reasonable attitude is suspicion.”4 According to political scientist Joseph LaPalombara, “Primary associations are still dominant; family, kinship, neighborhood, village are still the associational forms that have the greatest call on individual loyalties.”5 Another political scientist, Sidney Tarrow, in his study of peasant communism in southern Italy, writes of a culture built around “the prevalence of violence and the consciousness of death, the modest place of woman in society, and the almost occult role of corruption in economics and politics.” Building on Banfield, he asserts that “in the Mezzogiorno, individuals participate in and directly perceive modern secondary organizations, but for some reason reject them as illegitimate or corrupt.”6 His insights were given broader empirical validation in Robert Putnam’s classic study Making Democracy Work, in which he devises various empirical measures of civic engagement like newspaper readership or membership in sports clubs, and finds a striking divergence between the strong associational bonds in northern Italy and the weak or nonexistent ones in the South.7 Very similar observations have been made about the traditional Greek rural society that existed in the nineteenth century, in which, according to sociologist Apostolis Papakostas, “The only available way to organize people was through the family—a social organization which, in spite of local variations in its structure, has always played an important role in the social life of modern Greece.”8 As in southern Italy, loyalty to the family has a counterpart in distrust of strangers.

A classic segmentary lineage—a tribe, speaking anthropologically—is a group that traces common ancestry to a progenitor who may be two, three, or more generations distant. The system is held together by a very specific set of beliefs about the power of dead ancestors and unborn descendants to affect the fortunes of the living. As described in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of the Nuer in South Sudan, these lineages are scalable depending on how many generations back one chooses an ancestor. For most day-to-day purposes, the relevant ancestor is very proximate and the kin group correspondingly very small. Modern ethnic groups, by contrast, encompass hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.


pages: 887 words: 242,125

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe by Mark Mazower

classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Monroe Doctrine, éminence grise

Khurshid Pasha, illustration by Adam de Friedel, from The Greeks: Twenty-four Portraits of the Principal Leaders and Personages, 1832. (The Gennadius Library, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens) 12. Ali Pasha at Bucinto, 1819, illustration by Justin Cartwright, from Selections of the Costume of Albania and Greece, 1822. 13. The piazza of St Mark, Zakynthos, illustration by Joseph Cartwright, from The Ionian Islands, 1821. (The Gennadius Library, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens) 14. Philhellenes’ camp during the Greek War of Independence, 1835, painting by Carl von Heideck. (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe (photograph: akg-images)) 15.

(Stephen Vagliano Collection) 29. The slave market in Cairo, illustration from Robert Hay, Illustrations of Cairo, 1840. (The Gennadius Library, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens) 30. Women from the Peloponnese in a makeshift tent, c. 1828, illustration by Théodore Leblanc, from Sketches from Life Made during a Three-year Journey in Greece and the Levant, 1833–4. (The Gennadius Library, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens) 31. Greek Soldiers during the Insurrections of 1829, watercolour by Théodore Leblanc, c. 1829. (Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown Digital Repository, Brown University Library) 32.


pages: 510 words: 163,449

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

For the Foulis brothers themselves, I relied on David Murray’s Robert and Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press (Glasgow, 1913), and Some Letters of Robert Foulis (Glasgow, 1917), and Richard Sher’s “Commerce, Religion, and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Glasgow,” in Glasgow, Volume I: Beginnings to 1830, edited by T. M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (Manchester, 1995). The book I found most helpful for understanding the physical evolution of Glasgow was Andrew Gibb’s Glasgow: The Making of the City (London, 1983). For Edinburgh, A. J. Youngson’s classic study, The Making of Classical Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1966), is still indispensable; Charles MacKean’s Edinburgh: An Illustrated Architectural Guide (Edinburgh, 1992) is a handy street-by-street, almost house-by-house guide to the evolution of this fascinating city. On James Craig, see Kitty Croft and Andrew Fraser’s James Craig, 1744–1795 (Edinburgh, 1995).

Todd offers another good summary of Reid’s philosophy in his introduction to The Philosophical Orators of Thomas Reid (Carbondale, 1989). I also found quite useful Peter J. Diamond’s Common Sense and Improvement: Thomas Reid as Social Theorist, which is now available in paperback, and George Davie’s classic study, The Social Significance of the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Dundee, 1973). Finally, my discussion of James Wilson relies on Mark David Hall, The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson 1742-1798 (Columia MO, 1997), and Shannon Stimson’s brilliant piece, “A Jury of the Country,” in the Sher and Smitten volume on Scotland and America cited above.

The quotation about Stewart’s appeal to the English mind comes from James McCosh in his essay on Stewart in Scottish Philosophy (1875), which can be found in various reprint editions and even online (www.utm.edu/research/iep/text/mccosh/mccosh). Dugald Stewart languishes in a scholarly limbo. No such fate has befallen his gifted students who founded the Edinburgh Review. The classic study is by John Clive: Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (London, 1957). It can be supplemented with Joanne Shattock’s Politics and Reviews: The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly (Leicester, 1989) and Biancamaria Fontana’s Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinbugh Review (Cambridge, 1985).


pages: 632 words: 163,143

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

Among the Inuit of Canada, an aggrieved man has the right to challenge his opponent to a contest in which they sing taunts and gibes at each other.51 Song contests go back to the duelling shepherds in Virgil’s pastoral Eclogues.52 And the film 8-Mile, in which the rapper Eminem battles rival MCs in the clubs of Detroit, vividly shows how song contests are also the basis of hip-hop. In a classic study, the great anthropologist Alan Merriam lists a plethora of songs used by the Tutsi of Rwanda: Songs for boasting purposes, for war and greeting, songs sung when young married women meet together and reminisce about absent friends, children’s songs, songs to flatter a girl, and many more [including] boasting songs called ibirirmbo, in which two men sing in competition with each other, alternating musical phrases; they may vie either in praising one cow or in singing of the merits of one cow against another.53 Clearly, what is sauce for the cow is sauce for the gander, and the many other musics of social life: hunting, healing, war, lament, love, worship and so on.

.), The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 201–13 (p. 202). 68McKinnon, ‘On the Question of Psalmody’, p. 163. 69Joachim Braun, Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), pp. 301–20. 70John Garr, Living Emblems: Ancient Symbols of Faith (Atlanta, Georgia: Golden Key Press, 2007), p. 39. 71Jacob Neusner, The Idea of History in Rabbinic Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 72McKinnon, ‘On the Question of Psalmody’, p. 191. 73Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson (eds), Music and the Muses: The Culture of “mousikē” in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 74West, East Face of Helicon, pp. 16–17. 75Ibid., pp. 105–6. 76Naomi Weiss, The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater (Oakland: The University of California Press, 2018), p. 175. 77West, East Face of Helicon, p. 344. 78Peter Wilson, ‘Euripides’ Tragic Muse’, Illinois Classical Studies 24–5 (1999–2000), pp. 427–49. 79Ibid., pp. 436–7. 80Aristotle, Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 81Armand D’Angour, ‘The Musical Setting of Ancient Greek Texts’, in Tom Phillips and Armand D’Angour (eds), Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 47–72. 82Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 83Georg Danek and Stefan Hagel, ‘Homer-Singen’, Wiener humanistische Blätter 37 (1995), pp. 5–20. 84West, East Face of Helicon, p. 198. 85D’Angour, ‘Musical Setting’. 86Thomas Schmitz, ‘Reading Greek Literature’, in Enmarch and Lepper (eds), Ancient Egyptian Literature, pp. 25–44 (pp. 42–3). 87Charles Rose, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 90. 88West, East Face of Helicon, p. 163. 89Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and other Writings, trans.

.: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 35–8. 92Barbara Castiglioni, ‘Music, Ritual, and Self-Referentiality in the Second Stasimon of Euripides’ Helen’, Greek and Roman Studies 6 (2018), pp. 247–64 (p. 256). 93Hagel, Ancient Greek Music, p. 6. 94Eric Csapo, ‘Euripides and Tragic Theatre in the Late Fifth Century’, Illinois Classical Studies 24–5 (1999–2000), pp. 399–426. 95Ibid., p. 417. 96Timothy Moore, ‘Stinging Auloi, Aristophanes, Acharnians 860–71’, Greek and Roman Musical Studies 5 (2017), pp. 178–90 (p. 186). 97Csapo, ‘Euripides and Tragic Theatre’. 98West, East Face of Helicon, p. 192. 99Ibid., p. 284. 100Egert Pöhlmann and Martin West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 12–13. 101See the clip on https://www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 358 words: 104,664

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Immersion—while not a common strategy in contemporary social science because of the high costs in time, effort, and money—is nonetheless a classic approach for studying groups that are otherwise too secretive, defensive, or marginalized to grant access to outsiders. In taking this approach, I was inspired by classic studies, such as those by William Whyte and John van Maanen.82 Van Maanen set a particularly good example, because—like me—he wanted to conduct research on an occupational group that was particularly suspicious of “left-leaning” academics. For him, the subject was police departments, and his timing made the work particularly difficult.

Historically, the professions have been thought of as beholden to states: dependent upon government licensing to legitimate professional credentials and authority, as well as to create the markets for professional practice.1 This relationship is so strong that some social scientists define the state itself in terms of its power to shape employer-employee relations, as well as the institutions of work training and education. As a classic study explained, “The prime contingency of professionalism is the state and its policies.”2 This remains the case for many professions, such as law and medicine, which one cannot practice without a state-issued license, and then only within certain state-defined boundaries. But while other professions have traditionally depended on the state to ratify and legitimate their power, wealth management stands in a different position.


pages: 338 words: 100,477

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds by Kevin Dutton

availability heuristic, Bernie Madoff, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, credit crunch, different worldview, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, equity premium, fundamental attribution error, haute couture, job satisfaction, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Milgram experiment, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile

It’s difficult in the face of such buffoonery to countenance the possibility that there may be a serious side to all of this. Yet there is. In the law courts, for instance, the hypnotic potential of language is recognised only too well as an impish impediment to justice. This is precisely the reason why, in cross-examination, ‘leading’ questions are so vehemently overruled. 16A classic study conducted in 1974 by Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington and her colleague John Palmer provides clear evidence as to why this should continue to be the case. The centrepiece of the study comprised a video clip of a minor road traffic accident – a moving car making contact with a stationary one – which Loftus and Palmer played to two groups of participants.

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41 (1946): 258–290. 15 In 2005, the Global Language Monitor … For a light-hearted tour of the latest politically (in)correct words and phrases see http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/top-politically-incorrect-words-of-2009; for the original ‘misguided criminals’ article see John Simpson, ‘London Bombs Need Calm Response.’ BBC Home (31st August 2005). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4671577.stm (accessed November 17th, 2005). 16 A classic study conducted in 1974 … Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Palmer, John C., ‘Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory.’ Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 13 (1974): 585–589. 17 ‘As soon as the race label is added …’ David Von Drehle, ‘Five Faces of Obama.’


The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

classic study, Eratosthenes, Index librorum prohibitorum, Socratic dialogue, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

., Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 179–96 ———, ‘Bandits in the Roman Empire’, Past & Present, no. 105 (Nov. 1984), pp. 3–52 ———, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Shear, T. L., ‘The Athenian Agora: Excavations of 1971’, Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, vol. 42, no. 2 (Apr–Jun 1973), pp. 121–79 Sherwin-White, A. N., ‘Why Were the Early Christians Persecuted? – An Amendment’, Past & Present 27 (1964), pp. 23–7 Sienkiewicz, H., Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (1895), tr. S. F. Conrad (New York: Hippocrene, 1992) Sizgorich, T., Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) Smith, W., A Smaller Latin–English Dictionary, revised J.

.; London: Yale University Press, 1984, second, revised edition, 2003) ———, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and reality in the late 4th century (Berkeley, Ca.; London: University of California Press, 1983) Wilson, M. R., Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, Mich.; Dayton, Oh.: William B. Eerdmans, 1989) Wilson, N. G., ‘The Church and Classical Studies in Byzantium’, in Antike und Abendland 16 (1970) ———, Saint Basil on the Value of Greek Literature (London: Duckworth, 1975) Wood, I. and J. Harries, eds, The Theodosian Code, Studies in the Imperial Law of Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1993) Yegül, F. K., Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) Footnotes * In Palmyra the goddess became associated with the local goddess Allat, to become ‘Athena-Allat’


pages: 417 words: 103,458

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

[He] was able to use his smartness to outsmart himself.’30 The use of system 2 ‘slow thinking’ to rationalise our beliefs even when they are wrong leads us to uncover the most important and pervasive form of the intelligence trap, with many disastrous consequences; it can explain not only the foolish ideas of people such as Conan Doyle, but also the huge divides in political opinion about issues such as gun crime and climate change. So what’s the scientific evidence? The first clues came from a series of classic studies from the 1970s and 1980s, when David Perkins of Harvard University asked students to consider a series of topical questions, such as: ‘Would a nuclear disarmament treaty reduce the likelihood of world war?’ A truly rational thinker should consider both sides of the argument, but Perkins found that more intelligent students were no more likely to consider any alternative points of view.

Perhaps experts over-reach themselves, believing their powers are infallible? The idea would seem to fit with the descriptions of the bias blind spot that we explored in the last chapter. Until recently, however, the bulk of the scientific research suggested the opposite was true: it’s the incompetents who have an inflated view of their abilities. Consider a classic study by David Dunning at the University of Michigan and Justin Kruger at New York University. Dunning and Kruger were apparently inspired by the unfortunate case of McArthur Wheeler, who attempted to rob two banks in Pittsburgh in 1995. He committed the crimes in broad daylight, and the police arrested him just hours later.


pages: 370 words: 99,312

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

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

The power of the demos was absolute, and it often changed its mind: it was for just this reason that critics considered democracy a uniquely unstable form of government. The citizens in assembly were perfectly free to reject previously approved laws, even to establish completely new institutions (as witness their adoption of the sweeping reforms of Cleisthenes). As M. I. Finley reminded readers in his classic study Democracy Ancient and Modern, “There were no theoretical limits to the power of the state, no activity, no sphere of human behaviour”—public or private, sacred or secular—“in which the state could not legitimately intervene provided the decision was properly taken for any reason that was held to be valid by the Assembly.

At the same time, a new kind of political institution, unknown to the ancient Greeks, took shape, producing what Hans Kelsen called “one of real democracy’s most important elements: the political party, which brings like-minded individuals together in order to secure them actual influence in shaping public affairs.” * * * THIS WAS AN AREA where the United States led the way, with Andrew Jackson and his successors turning the Democratic Party into a machine for the mass mobilization of voters. As the British scholar James Bryce put it (in the final, 1910 edition of his classic study, The American Commonwealth): “The victories of the ballot box, no less than of the sword, must be won by the cohesion and disciplined docility of troops, and … these merits can only be secured by skillful organization and long-continued training.” Around the world, a variety of political groups of various persuasions began to emulate the American Democratic Party.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

In popular debates over the issuing of state grants and immunities, corporate charters were denounced as “mercantile monopolies” that had no place in a republic. “Such franchises and privileged grants may have made sense in monarchies as devices serving ‘to circumscribe and limit absolute power,’” observes Gordon Wood in his classic study, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. “But now that only the people ruled, these grants of corporate privileges seemed pernicious.” Early Americans may have hated all traces of the old regime, but they never followed Franklin and Jefferson’s lead when it came to patent monopolies. They used the Patent Office in such numbers that Jefferson was forced to concede the system’s role in, if not unleashing, at least bringing order to “a spring to invention beyond my comprehension.”

In Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (2012), Lewis Hyde revisits Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution through the skeptical contemporary eyes of Jefferson and Franklin, products of a transatlantic Enlightenment that held views of ancient lineage about knowledge as the common store of humanity, and that saw each discovery as an addition to a cumulative, multigenerational project that had no place for the idea of the “sole inventor.” These ideas dovetailed with the democratic ethos of an early American republic that rejected private claims smacking of royal privilege. The historically unique fierceness of this rejection and its origins are the subject of Gordon S. Wood’s classic study, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991). For a critical look at how Congress and the courts have used the Progress Clause as constitutional cover for constitutionally questionable acts, from trade to foreign policy, see Jeanne C. Fromer, “The Intellectual Property Clause’s External Limitations” (2012).


pages: 100 words: 31,338

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

affirmative action, bank run, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, job automation, mass immigration, meritocracy, moral panic, open borders, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Brussels Effect, too big to fail, Wolfgang Streeck, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Raymond Aron was right when he observed five decades ago that “with humanity on the way to unification, inequality between peoples takes on the significance that inequality between classes once had.”16 The Crisis and the Left In his reflections on the impact of the refugee crisis on Europe, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek comments on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s classic study On Death and Dying.17 In her book, Kübler-Ross offers the well-known scheme of the five stages of how we react upon learning that we have a terminal illness: 1. denial (“This can’t be happening, not to me.”) 2. anger (“How can this happen to me?”) 3. bargaining (“Just let me live to see my children graduate.”) 4. depression (“I’m going to die, so why bother with anything?”)


pages: 151 words: 30,411

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski

Charles Babbage, classic study, Ford Model T, invention of movable type, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman

GLOSSARY OF TOOLS London pattern screwdriver Scotch pattern screwdriver Undertaker’s screwdriver Gent’ fancy screwdriver Carpenter’s brace Breast auger Spiral bit auger Cooper’s adze Wooden carpenter’s brace with brass plates Try square Bevel A-level Spirit level Maul Combination case opener Plane Backsaw Skew-back handsaw Frame saw ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks, first, to David Shipley for asking the question. For help with the Greek quote, my appreciation to Prof. Ralph Rosen, chair of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Robert A. Ruhloff was kind enough to send me information on wrought-iron spikes, including several interesting samples. Jamie Kendrick, Adam Barzilay, Maria Gonzalez, and Yi-Ting Liu provided capable research assistance. The Milton Historical Society supplied information on the redoubtable P.


pages: 113 words: 36,039

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Berlin Wall, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, coherent worldview, creative destruction, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, urban planning, women in the workforce

Ever since Marcion, the second-century theologian who appealed to Paul’s authority for his doctrine that the Christian God was a deity wholly distinct from and superior to the Hebrews’ Yahweh, the Pauline corpus has been creatively misread. It is hard to find much in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount to inspire such flights of fancy, but Paul’s epistles, with their powerful intimations about sin, grace, and imminent redemption, are another matter. As Monsignor Ronald Knox put it in his classic study Enthusiasm, “the mind of Paul has been misunderstood all down the centuries; there is no aberration of Christianity which does not point to him as the source of its inspiration, found as a rule, in his Epistle to the Romans.” And one can understand why. Consider these extraordinarily pregnant formulations from the Epistle: “We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (3:28).


pages: 1,758 words: 342,766

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

System testing (in the strict sense of independent testing) is done after construction to verify that construction has been done correctly. Construction is at the center of the software-development process. With a focus on construction, the individual programmer's productivity can improve enormously. A classic study by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant showed that the productivity of individual programmers varied by a factor of 10 to 20 during construction (1968). Since their study, their results have been confirmed by numerous other studies (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Valett and McGarry 1989, DeMarco and Lister 1999, Boehm et al. 2000).

The typical organization uses a test-heavy defect-removal approach and achieves only about 85 percent defectremoval efficiency. Leading organizations use a wider variety of techniques and achieve defect-removal efficiencies of 95 percent or higher (Jones 2000). The strong implication is that if project developers are striving for a higher defectdetection rate, they need to use a combination of techniques. A classic study by Glenford Myers confirmed this implication (1978b). Myers studied a group of programmers with a minimum of 7 and an average of 11 years of professional experience. Using a program with 15 known errors, he had each programmer look for errors by using one of these techniques: Execution testing against the specification Execution testing against the specification with the source code Walk-through/inspection using the specification and the source code Myers found a huge variation in the number of defects detected in the program, ranging from 1.0 to 9.0 defects found.

First, 20% of a project's routines contribute 80% of the cost of development (Boehm 1987b). That doesn't necessarily mean that the 20% that cost the most are the same as the 20% with the most defects, but it's pretty suggestive. Second, regardless of the exact proportion of the cost contributed by highly defective routines, highly defective routines are extremely expensive. In a classic study in the 1960s, IBM performed an analysis of its OS/360 operating system and found that errors were not distributed evenly across all routines but were concentrated into a few. Those error-prone routines were found to be "the most expensive entities in programming" (Jones 1986a). They contained as many as 50 defects per 1000 lines of code, and fixing them often cost 10 times what it took to develop the whole system.


pages: 399 words: 116,828

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson

affirmative action, business cycle, citizen journalism, classic study, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, declining real wages, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, desegregation, Donald Trump, edge city, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, jobless men, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, school choice, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, work culture , working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Since the early twentieth century, Chicago has been a laboratory for the scientific investigation of the social, economic, and historical forces that create and perpetuate economically depressed and isolated urban communities. The most distinctive phase of this research, referred to as the Chicago School of urban sociology, was completed before 1950 and was conducted by social scientists at the University of Chicago. Immediately following World War I, the Chicago School produced several classic studies, many of which were conducted under the guidance of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess over the next three decades. These studies often combined statistical and observational analyses in making distinctive empirical and theoretical contributions to our understanding of urban processes, social problems and urban growth, and, commencing in the late 1930s, the nature of race and class subjugation in urban areas.

But Frazier, an African-American sociologist trained at the University of Chicago, also recognized and emphasized a problem ignored in the earlier work of Park and Burgess—the important link between the black family structure and the industrial economy Frazier believed that the availability of employment opportunities in the industrial sector would largely determine the upward mobility of African-Americans and their eventual assimilation into American life. In 1945, a fundamental revision in the Chicago framework came with the publication of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s classic study, Black Metropolis. Drake and Cayton first examined black progress in employment, housing, and social integration using census, survey, and archival data. Their analysis clearly revealed the existence of a color line that effectively blocked black occupational, residential, and social mobility.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Mughal officials typically negotiated for delivery of the revenue demand with lineage heads and chieftains, homogenized in Mughal usage as zamindars (land-holders). At the bottom of this hierarchy were the peasant cultivators. Their condition under the Mughals has been a subject of controversy. In his classic study of the Mughal agrarian system, Irfan Habib concluded that the cultivating peasantry, though not owners of the land, hence unable to sell it, still possessed a hereditary right of occupancy so long as they paid the state’s revenue demand. For Habib, the result was an unceasing oppression, as their superiors sought to strip the cultivators of all surplus.

For the Sikhs see Richard Fox, Lions of the Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). For the debates between and within communities see Kenneth W. Jones, ed., Religious Controversy in British India (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1992). For the politics of ‘swadeshi’ the classic study is Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973). For issues of gender relations see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Barbara Daly Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s ‘Bhishti Zewar’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Rokeya Sahkhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dreams and Selections from the Secluded Ones, ed. and trans.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 8. McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The World at Work: Jobs, Pay and Skills for 3.5 Billion People’, Report of the McKinsey Global Institute, 2012. 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Kalamazoo, Black & Red, 2000. 10. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow, New York, Bantam, 1980. 11. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009. 12. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, London, NLR Books, 1971. 13. Gordon, ‘Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds’. 14.

., Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984 —, ‘Nature as Accumulation Strategy’, Socialist Register, 2007, pp. 19–41 Stiglitz, J., The Price of Inequality, New York, Norton, 2013 Storrs, C. (ed.), The Fiscal Military State in Eighteenth Century Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009 Thomas, P., The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2010 Toffler, A., The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow, New York, Bantam, 1980 Veblen, T., The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009 edition Wallerstein, I., Collins, R., Mann, M., Derluguian, G., and Calhoun, C., Does Capitalism Have a Future?, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013 Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, New York, Free Press, 1969 Wolff, R., Moore, B., and Marcuse, H., A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Beyond Tolerance, Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook, Repressive Tolerance, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969 Wright, M., Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism, New York, Routledge, 2006 Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures. 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 271 A Abu Ghraib, Iraq 202 acid deposition 255, 256 advertising 50, 121, 140, 141, 187, 197, 236, 237, 275, 276 Aeschylus 291 Afghanistan 202, 290 Africa and global financial crisis 170 growth 232 indigenous population and property rights 39 labour 107, 108, 174 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 population growth 230 Agamben, Giorgio 283–4 agglomeration 149, 150 economies 149 aggregate demand 20, 80, 81, 104, 173 aggregate effective demand 235 agribusiness 95, 133, 136, 206, 247, 258 agriculture ix, 39, 61, 104, 113, 117, 148, 229, 239, 257–8, 261 Alabama 148 Algerian War (1954–62) 288, 290 alienation 57, 69, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 198, 213, 214, 215, 263, 266–70, 272, 275–6, 279–80, 281, 286, 287 Allende, Salvador 201 Althusser, Louis 286 Amazon 131, 132 Americas colonisation of 229 indigenous populations 283 Amnesty International 202 anti-capitalist movements 11, 14, 65, 110, 111, 162 anti-capitalist struggle 14, 110, 145, 193, 269, 294 anti-globalisation 125 anti-terrorism xiii apartheid 169, 202, 203 Apple 84, 123, 131 apprenticeships 117 Arab Spring movement 280 Arbenz, Jacobo 201 Argentina 59, 107, 152, 160, 232 Aristotelianism 283, 289 Aristotle 1, 4, 200, 215 arms races 93 arms traffickers 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 136 Adam Smith in Beijing 142 Arthur, Brian: The Nature of Technology 89, 95–9, 101–4, 110 artificial intelligence xii, 104, 108, 120, 139, 188, 208, 295 Asia ‘land grabs’ 58 urbanisation 254 assembly lines 119 asset values and the credit system 83 defined 240 devalued 257 housing market 19, 20, 21, 58, 133 and predatory lending 133 property 76 recovery of 234 speculation 83, 101, 179 associationism 281 AT&T 131 austerity xi, 84, 177, 191, 223 Australia 152 autodidacts 183 automation xii, 103, 105, 106, 108, 138, 208, 215, 295 B Babbage, Charles 119 Bangkok riots, Thailand (1968) x Bangladesh dismantlement of old ships 250 factories 129, 174, 292 industrialisation 123 labour 108, 123, 129 protests against unsafe labour conditions 280 textile mill tragedies 249 Bank of England 45, 46 banking bonuses 164 electronic 92, 100, 277 excessive charges 84 interbank lending 233 and monopoly power 143 national banks supplant local banking in Britain and France 158 net transfers between banks 28 power of bankers 75 private banks 233 profits 54 regional banks 158 shell games 54–5 systematic banking malfeasance 54, 61 Baran, Paul and Sweezy, Paul: Monopoly Capitalism 136 Barcelona 141, 160 barrios pobres ix barter 24, 25, 29 Battersea Power Station, London 255 Battle of Algiers, The (film) 288 Bavaria, Germany 143, 150 Becker, Gary 186 Bernanke, Ben 47 Bhutan 171 billionaires xi, 165, 169, 170 biodiversity 246, 254, 255, 260 biofuels 3 biomedical engineering xii Birmingham 149 Bitcoin 36, 109 Black Panthers 291 Blade Runner (film) 271 Blankfein, Lloyd 239–40 Bohr, Niels 70 Bolivia 257, 260, 284 bondholders xii, 32, 51, 152, 158, 223, 240, 244, 245 bonuses 54, 77, 164, 178 Bourdieu, Pierre 186, 187 bourgeois morality 195 bourgeois reformism 167, 211 ‘Brady Bonds’ 240 Braudel, Fernand 193 Braverman, Harry: Labor and Monopoly Capital 119 Brazil a BRIC country 170, 228 coffee growers 257 poverty grants 107 unrest in (2013) 171, 243, 293 Brecht, Bertolt 265, 293 Bretton Woods (1944) 46 brewing trade 138 BRIC countries 10, 170, 174, 228 Britain alliance between state and London merchant capitalists 44–5 banking 158 enclosure movement 58 lends to United States (nineteenth century) 153 suppression of Mau Mau 291 surpluses of capital and labour sent to colonies 152–3 welfare state 165 see also United Kingdom British Empire 115, 174 British Museum Library, London 4 British Petroleum (BP) 61, 128 Buffett, Peter 211–12, 245, 283, 285 Buffett, Warren 211 bureaucracy 121–2, 165, 203, 251 Bush, George, Jr 201, 202 C Cabet, Étienne 183 Cabral, Amilcar 291 cadastral mapping 41 Cadbury 18 Cairo uprising (2011) 99 Calhoun, Craig 178 California 29, 196, 254 Canada 152 Cape Canaveral, Florida 196 capital abolition of monopolisable skills 119–20 aim of 92, 96–7, 232 alternatives to 36, 69, 89, 162 annihilation of space through time 138, 147, 178 capital-labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9 and capitalism 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 centralisation of 135, 142 circulation of 5, 7, 8, 53, 63, 67, 73, 74, 75, 79, 88, 99, 147, 168, 172, 177, 234, 247, 251, 276 commodity 74, 81 control over labour 102–3, 116–17, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 creation of 57 cultural 186 destruction of 154, 196, 233–4 and division of labour 112 economic engine of 8, 10, 97, 168, 172, 200, 253, 265, 268 evolution of 54, 151, 171, 270 exploitation by 156, 195 fictitious 32–3, 34, 76, 101, 110–11, 239–42 fixed 75–8, 155, 234 importance of uneven geographical development to 161 inequality foundational for 171–2 investment in fixed capital 75 innovations 4 legal-illegal duality 72 limitless growth of 37 new form of 4, 14 parasitic forms of 245 power of xii, 36, 47 private capital accumulation 23 privatisation of 61 process-thing duality 70–78 profitability of 184, 191–2 purpose of 92 realisation of 88, 173, 192, 212, 231, 235, 242, 268, 273 relation to nature 246–63 reproduction of 4, 47, 55, 63, 64, 88, 97, 108, 130, 146, 161, 168, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 189, 194, 219, 233, 252 spatiality of 99 and surplus value 63 surpluses of 151, 152, 153 temporality of 99 tension between fixed and circulating capital 75–8, 88, 89 turnover time of 73, 99, 147 and wage rates 173 capital accumulation, exponential growth of 229 capital gains 85, 179 capital accumulation 7, 8, 75, 76, 78, 102, 149, 151–5, 159, 172, 173, 179, 192, 209, 223, 228–32, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 273, 274, 276 basic architecture for 88 and capital’s aim 92, 96 collapse of 106 compound rate of 228–9 and the credit system 83 and democratisation 43 and demographic growth 231 and household consumerism 192 and lack of aggregate effective demand in the market 81 and the land market 59 and Marx 5 maximising 98 models of 53 in a new territories 152–3 perpetual 92, 110, 146, 162, 233, 265 private 23 promotion of 34 and the property market 50 recent problems of 10 and the state 48 capitalism ailing 58 an alternative to 36 and capital 7, 57, 68, 115, 166, 218 city landscape of 160 consumerist 197 contagious predatory lawlessness within 109 crises essential to its reproduction ix; defined 7 and demand-side management 85 and democracy 43 disaster 254–5, 255 economic engine of xiii, 7–8, 11, 110, 220, 221, 252, 279 evolution of 218 geographical landscape of 146, 159 global xi–xii, 108, 124 history of 7 ‘knowledge-based’ xii, 238 and money power 33 and a moneyless economy 36 neoliberal 266 political economy of xiv; and private property rights 41 and racialisation 8 reproduction of ix; revivified xi; vulture 162 capitalist markets 33, 53 capitalo-centric studies 10 car industry 121, 138, 148, 158, 188 carbon trading 235, 250 Caribbean migrants 115 Cartesian thinking 247 Cato Institute 143 Central America 136 central banks/bankers xi–xii, 37, 45, 46, 48, 51, 109, 142, 156, 161, 173, 233, 245 centralisation 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 219 Césaire, Aimé 291 CFCs (chloro-fluorocarbons) 248, 254, 256, 259 chambers of commerce 168 Chandler, Alfred 141 Chaplin, Charlie 103 Charles I, King 199 Chartism 184 Chávez, Hugo 123, 201 cheating 57, 61, 63 Cheney, Dick 289 Chicago riots (1968) x chicanery 60, 72 children 174 exploitation of 195 raising 188, 190 trading of 26 violence and abuse of 193 Chile 136, 194, 280 coup of 1973 165, 201 China air quality 250, 258 becomes dynamic centre of a global capitalism 124 a BRIC country 170, 228 capital in (after 2000) 154 class struggles 233 and competition 150, 161 consumerism 194–5, 236 decentralisation 49 dirigiste governmentality 48 dismantlement of old ships 250 dispossessions in 58 education 184, 187 factories 123, 129, 174, 182 famine in 124–5 ‘great leap forward’ 125 growth of 170, 227, 232 income inequalities 169 industrialisation 232 Keynesian demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi; labour 80, 82, 107, 108, 123, 174, 230 life expectancy 259 personal debt 194 remittances 175 special economic zones 41, 144 speculative booms and bubbles in housing markets 21 suburbanisation 253 and technology 101 toxic batteries 249–50 unstable lurches forward 10 urban and infrastructural projects 151 urbanisation 232 Chinese Communist Party 108, 142 Church, the 185, 189, 199 circular cumulative causation 150 CitiBank 61 citizenship rights 168 civil rights 202, 205 class affluent classes 205 alliances 143, 149 class analysis xiii; conflict 85, 159 domination 91, 110 plutocratic capitalist xiii; power 55, 61, 88, 89, 92, 97, 99, 110, 134, 135, 221, 279 and race 166, 291 rule 91 structure 91 class struggle 34, 54, 67, 68, 85, 99, 103, 110, 116, 120, 135, 159, 172, 175, 183, 214, 233 climate change 4, 253–6, 259 Clinton, President Bill 176 Cloud Atlas (film) 271 CNN 285 coal 3, 255 coercion x, 41–4, 53, 60–63, 79, 95, 201, 286 Cold War 153, 165 collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) 78 Collins, Suzanne: The Hunger Games 264 Colombia 280 colonialism 257 the colonised 289–90 indigenous populations 39, 40 liberation from colonial rule 202 philanthropic 208, 285 colonisation 229, 262 ‘combinatorial evolution’ 96, 102, 104, 146, 147, 248 commercialisation 262, 263, 266 commodification 24, 55, 57, 59–63, 88, 115, 140, 141, 192, 193, 235, 243, 251, 253, 260, 262, 263, 273 commodities advertising 275 asking price 31 and barter 24 commodity exchange 39, 64 compared with products 25–6 defective or dangerous 72 definition 39 devaluation of 234 exchange value 15, 25 falling costs of 117 importance of workers as buyers 80–81 international trade in 256 labour power as a commodity 62 low-value 29 mobility of 147–8 obsolescence 236 single metric of value 24 unique 140–41 use value 15, 26, 35 commodity markets 49 ‘common capital of the class’ 142, 143 common wealth created by social labour 53 private appropriation of 53, 54, 55, 61, 88, 89 reproduction of 61 use values 53 commons collective management of 50 crucial 295 enclosure of 41, 235 natural 250 privatised 250 communications 99, 147, 148, 177 communism 196 collapse of (1989) xii, 165 communist parties 136 during Cold War 165 scientific 269 socialism/communism 91, 269 comparative advantage 122 competition and alienated workers 125 avoiding 31 between capitals 172 between energy and food production 3 decentralised 145 and deflationary crisis (1930s) 136 foreign 148, 155 geopolitical 219 inter-capitalist 110 international 154, 175 interstate 110 interterritorial 219 in labour market 116 and monopoly 131–45, 146, 218 and technology 92–3 and turnover time of capital 73, 99 and wages 135 competitive advantage 73, 93, 96, 112, 161 competitive market 131, 132 competitiveness 184 complementarity principle of 70 compounding growth 37, 49, 222, 227, 228, 233, 234, 235, 243, 244 perpetual 222–45, 296 computerisation 100, 120, 222 computers 92, 100, 105, 119 hardware 92, 101 organisational forms 92, 93, 99, 101 programming 120 software 92, 99, 101, 115, 116 conscience laundering 211, 245, 284, 286 Conscious Capitalism 284 constitutional rights 58 constitutionality 60, 61 constitutions progressive 284 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 US Constitution 284 and usurpation of power 45 consumerism 89, 106, 160, 192–5, 197, 198, 236, 274–7 containerisation 138, 148, 158 contracts 71, 72, 93, 207 contradictions Aristotelian conception of 4 between money and the social labour money represents 83 between reality and appearance 4–6 between use and exchange value 83 of capital and capitalism 68 contagious intensification of 14 creative use of 3 dialectical conception of 4 differing reactions to 2–3 and general crises 14 and innovation 3 moved around rather than resolved 3–4 multiple 33, 42 resolution of 3, 4 two modes of usage 1–2 unstable 89 Controller of the Currency 120 corporations and common wealth 54 corporate management 98–9 power of 57–8, 136 and private property 39–40 ‘visible hand’ 141–2 corruption 53, 197, 266 cosmopolitanism 285 cost of living 164, 175 credit cards 67, 133, 277 credit card companies 54, 84, 278 credit financing 152 credit system 83, 92, 101, 111, 239 crises changes in mental conceptions of the world ix-x; crisis of capital 4 defined 4 essential to the reproduction of capitalism ix; general crisis ensuing from contagions 14 housing markets crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22 reconfiguration of physical landscapes ix; slow resolution of x; sovereign debt crisis (after 2012) 37 currency markets, turbulence of (late 1960s) x customary rights 41, 59, 198 D Davos conferences 169 DDT 259 Debord, Guy: The Society of the Spectacle 236 debt creation 236 debt encumbrancy 212 debt peonage 62, 212 decentralisation 49, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 219, 281, 295 Declaration of Independence (US) 284 decolonisation 282, 288, 290 decommodification 85 deindustrialisation xii, 77–8, 98, 110, 148, 153, 159, 234 DeLong, Bradford 228 demand management 81, 82, 106, 176 demand-side management 85 democracy 47, 215 bourgeois 43, 49 governance within capitalism 43 social 190 totalitarian 220, 292 democratic governance 220, 266 democratisation 43 Deng Xiaoping x depressions 49, 227 1930s x, 108, 136, 169, 227, 232, 234 Descartes, René 247 Detroit 77, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 160 devaluation 153, 155, 162 of capital 233 of commodities 234 crises 150–51, 152, 154 localised 154 regional 154 developing countries 16, 240 Dhaka, Bangladesh 77 dialectics 70 Dickens, Charles 126, 169 Bleak House 226 Dombey and Son 184 digital revolution 144 disabled, the 202 see also handicapped discrimination 7, 8, 68, 116, 297 diseases 10, 211, 246, 254, 260 disempowerment 81, 103, 116, 119, 198, 270 disinvestment 78 Disneyfication 276 dispossession accumulation by 60, 67, 68, 84, 101, 111, 133, 141, 212 and capital 54, 55, 57 economies of 162 of indigenous populations 40, 59, 207 ‘land grabs’ 58 of land rights of the Irish 40 of the marginalised 198 political economy of 58 distributional equality 172 distributional shares 164–5, 166 division of labour 24, 71, 112–30, 154, 184, 268, 270 and Adam Smith 98, 118 defined 112 ‘the detail division of labour’ 118, 121 distinctions and oppositions 113–14 evolution of 112, 120, 121, 126 and gender 114–15 increasing complexity of 124, 125, 126 industrial proletariat 114 and innovation 96 ‘new international division of labour’ 122–3 organisation of 98 proliferating 121 relation between the parts and the whole 112 social 113, 118, 121, 125 technical 113, 295 uneven geographical developments in 130 dot-com bubble (1990s) 222–3, 241 ‘double coincidence of wants and needs’ 24 drugs 32, 193, 248 cartels 54 Durkheim, Emile 122, 125 Dust Bowl (United States, 1930s) 257 dynamism 92, 104, 146, 219 dystopia 229, 232, 264 E Eagleton , Terry: Why Marx Was Right 1, 21, 200, 214–15 East Asia crisis of 1997–98 154 dirigiste governmentality 48 education 184 rise of 170 Eastern Europe 115, 230 ecological offsets 250 economic rationality 211, 250, 252, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279 economies 48 advanced capitalist 228, 236 agglomeration 149 of dispossession 162 domination of industrial cartels and finance capital 135 household 192 informal 175 knowledge-based 188 mature 227–8 regional 149 reoriented to demand-side management 85 of scale 75 solidarity 66, 180 stagnant xii ecosystems 207, 247, 248, 251–6, 258, 261, 263, 296 Ecuador 46, 152, 284 education 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 127–8, 129, 134, 150, 156, 168, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 223, 235, 296 efficiency 71, 92, 93, 98, 103, 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 272, 273, 284 efficient market hypothesis 118 Egypt 107, 280, 293 Ehrlich, Paul 246 electronics 120, 121, 129, 236, 292 emerging markets 170–71, 242 employment 37 capital in command of job creation 172, 174 conditions of 128 full-time 274 opportunities for xii, 108, 168 regional crises of 151 of women 108, 114, 115, 127 see also labour enclosure movement 58 Engels, Friedrich 70 The Condition of the English Working Class in England 292 English Civil War (1642–9) 199 Enlightenment 247 Enron 133, 241 environmental damage 49, 61, 110, 111, 113, 232, 249–50, 255, 257, 258, 259, 265, 286, 293 environmental movement 249, 252 environmentalism 249, 252–3 Epicurus 283 equal rights 64 Erasmus, Desiderius 283 ethnic hatreds and discriminations 8, 165 ethnic minorities 168 ethnicisation 62 ethnicity 7, 68, 116 euro, the 15, 37, 46 Europe deindustrialisation in 234 economic development in 10 fascist parties 280 low population growth rate 230 social democratic era 18 unemployment 108 women in labour force 230 European Central Bank 37, 46, 51 European Commission 51 European Union (EU) 95, 159 exchange values commodities 15, 25, 64 dominance of 266 and housing 14–23, 43 and money 28, 35, 38 uniform and qualitatively identical 15 and use values 15, 35, 42, 44, 50, 60, 65, 88 exclusionary permanent ownership rights 39 experts 122 exploitation 49, 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 124, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 159, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 193, 195, 208, 246, 257 exponential growth 224, 240, 254 capacity for 230 of capital 246 of capital accumulation 223, 229 of capitalist activity 253 and capital’s ecosystem 255 in computer power 105 and environmental resources 260 in human affairs 229 and innovations in finance and banking 100 potential dangers of 222, 223 of sophisticated technologies 100 expropriation 207 externality effects 43–4 Exxon 128 F Facebook 236, 278, 279 factories ix, 123, 129, 160, 174, 182, 247, 292 Factory Act (1864) 127, 183 famine 124–5, 229, 246 Fannie Mae 50 Fanon, Frantz 287 The Wretched of the Earth 288–90, 293 fascist parties 280 favelas ix, 16, 84, 175 feminisation 115 feminists 189, 192, 283 fertilisers 255 fetishes, fetishism 4–7, 31, 36–7, 61, 103, 111, 179, 198, 243, 245, 269, 278 feudalism 41 financial markets 60, 133 financialisation 238 FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sections 113 fishing 59, 113, 148, 249, 250 fixity and motion 75–8, 88, 89, 146, 155 Food and Drug Administration 120 food production/supply 3, 229, 246, 248, 252 security 253, 294, 296 stamp aid 206, 292 Ford, Martin 104–8, 111, 273 foreclosure 21, 22, 24, 54, 58, 241, 268 forestry 113, 148, 257 fossil fuels 3–4 Foucault, Michel xiii, 204, 209, 280–81 Fourier, François Marie Charles 183 Fourierists 18 Fourteen Points 201 France banking 158 dirigiste governmentality under de Gaulle 48 and European Central Bank 46 fascist parties 280 Francis, Pope 293 Apostolic Exhortation 275–6 Frankfurt School 261 Freddie Mac 50 free trade 138, 157 freedom 47, 48, 142, 143, 218, 219, 220, 265, 267–270, 276, 279–82, 285, 288, 296 and centralised power 142 cultural 168 freedom and domination 199–215, 219, 268, 285 and the good life 215 and money creation 51 popular desire for 43 religious 168 and state finances 48 under the rule of capital 64 see also liberty and freedom freedom of movement 47, 296 freedom of thought 200 freedom of the press 213 French Revolution 203, 213, 284 G G7 159 G20 159 Gallup survey of work 271–2 Gandhi, Mahatma 284, 291 Gaulle, Charles de 48 gay rights 166 GDP 194, 195, 223 Gehry, Frank 141 gender discriminations 7, 8, 68, 165 gene sequences 60 General Motors xii genetic engineering xii, 101, 247 genetic materials 235, 241, 251, 261 genetically modified foods 101 genocide 8 gentrification 19, 84, 141, 276 geocentric model 5 geographical landscape building a new 151, 155 of capitalism 159 evolution of 146–7 instability of 146 soulless, rationalised 157 geopolitical struggles 8, 154 Germany and austerity 223 autobahns built 151 and European Central Bank 46 inflation during 1920s 30 wage repression 158–9 Gesell, Silvio 35 Ghana 291 global economic crisis (2007–9) 22, 23, 47, 118, 124, 132, 151, 170, 228, 232, 234, 235, 241 global financialisation x, 177–8 global warming 260 globalisation 136, 174, 176, 179, 223, 293 gold 27–31, 33, 37, 57, 227, 233, 238, 240 Golden Dawn 280 Goldman Sachs 75, 239 Google 131, 136, 195, 279 Gordon, Robert 222, 223, 230, 239, 304n2 Gore, Al 249 Gorz, André 104–5, 107, 242, 270–77, 279 government 60 democratic 48 planning 48 and social bond between human rights and private property 40 spending power 48 governmentality 43, 48, 157, 209, 280–81, 285 Gramsci, Antonio 286, 293 Greco, Thomas 48–9 Greece 160, 161, 162, 171, 235 austerity 223 degradation of the well-being of the masses xi; fascist parties 280 the power of the bondholders 51, 152 greenwashing 249 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba 202, 284 Guatemala 201 Guevara, Che 291 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 141 guild system 117 Guinea-Bissau 291 Gulf Oil Spill (2010) 61 H Habermas, Jürgen 192 habitat 246, 249, 252, 253, 255 handicapped, the 218 see also disabled Harvey, David The Enigma of Capital 265 Rebel Cities 282 Hayek, Friedrich 42 Road to Serfdom 206 health care 23, 58, 60, 67–8, 84, 110, 134, 156, 167, 189, 190, 235, 296 hedge funds 101, 162, 239, 241, 249 managers 164, 178 Heidegger, Martin 59, 250 Heritage Foundation 143 heterotopic spaces 219 Hill, Christopher 199 Ho Chi Minh 291 holocausts 8 homelessness 58 Hong Kong 150, 160 housing 156, 296 asset values 19, 20, 21, 58 ‘built to order’ 17 construction 67 controlling externalities 19–20 exchange values 14–23, 43 gated communities ix, 160, 208, 264 high costs 84 home ownership 49–50 investing in improvements 20, 43 mortgages 19, 21, 28, 50, 67, 82 predatory practices 67, 133 production costs 17 rental markets 22 renting or leasing 18–19, 67 self-built 84 self-help 16, 160 slum ix, 16, 175 social 18, 235 speculating in exchange value 20–22 speculative builds 17, 28, 78, 82 tenement 17, 160 terraced 17 tract ix, 17, 82 use values 14–19, 21–2, 23, 67 housing markets 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 32, 49, 58, 60, 67, 68, 77, 83, 133, 192 crisis (2007–9) 18, 20, 22, 82–3 HSBC 61 Hudson, Michael 222 human capital theory 185, 186 human evolution 229–30 human nature 97, 198, 213, 261, 262, 263 revolt of 263, 264–81 human rights 40, 200, 202 humanism 269 capitalist 212 defined 283 education 128 excesses and dark side 283 and freedom 200, 208, 210 liberal 210, 287, 289 Marxist 284, 286 religious 283 Renaissance 283 revolutionary 212, 221, 282–93 secular 283, 285–6 types of 284 Hungary: fascist parties 280 Husserl, Edmund 192 Huygens, Christiaan 70 I IBM 128 Iceland: banking 55 identity politics xiii illegal aliens (‘sans-papiers’) 156 illegality 61, 72 immigrants, housing 160 imperialism 135, 136, 143, 201, 257, 258 income bourgeois disposable 235 disparities of 164–81 levelling up of 171 redistribution to the lower classes xi; see also wages indebtedness 152, 194, 222 India billionaires in 170 a BRIC country 170, 228 call centres 139 consumerism 236 dismantlement of old ships 250 labour 107, 230 ‘land grabs’ 77 moneylenders 210 social reproduction in 194 software engineers 196 special economic zones 144 unstable lurches forward 10 indigenous populations 193, 202, 257, 283 dispossession of 40, 59, 207 and exclusionary ownership rights 39 individualism 42, 197, 214, 281 Indonesia 129, 160 industrial cartels 135 Industrial Revolution 127 industrialisation 123, 189, 229, 232 inflation 30, 36, 37, 40, 49, 136, 228, 233 inheritance 40 Inner Asia, labour in 108 innovation 132 centres of 96 and the class struggle 103 competitive 219 as a double-edged sword xii; improving the qualities of daily life 4 labour-saving 104, 106, 107, 108 logistical 147 organisational 147 political 219 product 93 technological 94–5, 105, 147, 219 as a way out of a contradiction 3 insurance companies 278 intellectual property rights xii, 41, 123, 133, 139, 187, 207, 235, 241–2, 251 interest compound 5, 222, 224, 225, 226–7 interest-rate manipulations 54 interest rates 54, 186 living off 179, 186 on loans 17 money capital 28, 32 and mortgages 19, 67 on repayment of loans to the state 32 simple 225, 227 usury 49 Internal Revenue Service income tax returns 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 49, 51, 100, 143, 161, 169, 186, 234, 240 internet 158, 220, 278 investment: in fixed capital 75 investment pension funds 35–6 IOUs 30 Iran 232, 289 Iranian Revolution 289 Iraq war 201, 290 Ireland dispossession of land rights 40 housing market crash (2007–9) 82–3 Istanbul 141 uprising (2013) 99, 129, 171, 243 Italy 51,161, 223, 235 ITT 136 J Jacobs, Jane 96 James, C.L.R. 291 Japan 1980s economic boom 18 capital in (1980s) 154 economic development in 10 factories 123 growth rate 227 land market crash (1990) 18 low population growth rate 230 and Marshall Plan 153 post-war recovery 161 Jewish Question 213 JPMorgan 61 Judaeo-Christian tradition 283 K Kant, Immanuel 285 Katz, Cindi 189, 195, 197 Kenya 291 Kerala, India 171 Keynes, John Maynard xi, 46, 76, 244, 266 ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ 33–4 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 35 Keynesianism demand management 82, 105, 176 demand-side and debt-financed expansion xi King, Martin Luther 284, 291 knowledge xii, 26, 41, 95, 96, 100, 105, 113, 122, 123, 127, 144, 184, 188, 196, 238, 242, 295 Koch brothers 292 Kohl, Helmut x L labour agitating and fighting for more 64 alienated workers 125, 126, 128, 129, 130 artisan 117, 182–3 and automation 105 capital/labour contradiction 65, 66, 68–9, 146 collective 117 commodification of 57 contracts 71, 72 control over 74, 102–11, 119, 166, 171–2, 274, 291–2 deskilling 111, 119 discipline 65, 79 disempowering workers 81, 103, 116, 119, 270 division of see division of labour; domestic 196 education 127–8, 129, 183, 187 exploitation of 54, 57, 62, 68, 75, 83, 107, 108, 126, 128, 129, 150, 156, 166, 175, 176, 182, 185, 195 factory 122, 123, 237 fair market value 63, 64 Gallup survey 271–2 house building 17 housework 114–15, 192 huge increase in the global wage labour force 107–8 importance of workers as buyers of commodities 80–81 ‘industrial reserve army’ 79–80, 173–4 migrations of 118 non-unionised xii; power of 61–4, 71, 73, 74, 79, 81, 88, 99, 108, 118–19, 127, 173, 175, 183, 189, 207, 233, 267 privatisation of 61 in service 117 skills 116, 118–19, 123, 149, 182–3, 185, 231 social see social labour; surplus 151, 152, 173–4, 175, 195, 233 symbolic 123 and trade unions 116 trading in labour services 62–3 unalienated 66, 89 unionised xii; unpaid 189 unskilled 114, 185 women in workforce see under women; worked to exhaustion or death 61, 182 see also employment labour markets 47, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 102, 114, 116, 118, 166 labour-saving devices 104, 106, 107, 173, 174, 277 labour power commodification of 61, 88 exploitation of 62, 175 generation of surplus value 63 mobility of 99 monetisation of 61 private property character of 64 privatisation of 61 reserves of 108 Lagos, Nigeria, social reproduction in 195 laissez-faire 118, 205, 207, 281 land commodification 260–61 concept of 76–7 division of 59 and enclosure movement 58 establishing as private property 41 exhausting its fertility 61 privatisation 59, 61 scarcity 77 urban 251 ‘land grabs’ 39, 58, 77, 252 land market 18, 59 land price 17 land registry 41 land rents 78, 85 land rights 40, 93 land-use zoning 43 landlords 54, 67, 83, 140, 179, 251, 261 Latin America ’1and grabs’ 58, 77 labour 107 reductions in social inequality 171 two ‘lost decades’ of development 234 lawyers 22, 26, 67, 82, 245 leasing 16, 17, 18 Lebed, Jonathan 195 Lee Kuan-Yew 48 Leeds 149 Lefebvre, Henri 157, 192 Critique of Everyday Life 197–8 left, the defence of jobs and skills under threat 110 and the factory worker 68 incapable of mounting opposition to the power of capital xii; remains of the radical left xii–xiii Lehman Brothers investment bank, fall of (2008) x–xi, 47, 241 ‘leisure’ industries 115 Lenin, Vladimir 135 Leninism 91 Lewis, Michael: The Big Short 20–21 LGBT groups 168, 202, 218 liberation struggle 288, 290 liberty, liberties 44, 48–51, 142, 143, 212, 276, 284, 289 and bourgeois democracy 49 and centralised power 142 and money creation 51 non-coercive individual liberty 42 popular desire for 43 and state finances 48 liberty and freedom 199–215 coercion and violence in pursuit of 201 government surveillance and cracking of encrypted codes 201–2 human rights abuses 202 popular desire for 203 rhetoric on 200–201, 202 life expectancy 250, 258, 259 light, corpuscular theory of 70 living standards xii, 63, 64, 84, 89, 134, 175, 230 loans fictitious capital 32 housing 19 interest on 17 Locke, John 40, 201, 204 logos 31 London smog of 1952 255 unrest in (2011) 243 Los Angeles 150, 292 Louis XIV, King of France 245 Lovelace, Richard 199, 200, 203 Luddites 101 M McCarthyite scourge 56 MacKinnon, Catherine: Are Women Human?


pages: 401 words: 112,784

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Putnam's underlying analysis of the individual organisations confirms that ‘the membership records of virtually every adult organization in this sample bears the scars’ of this period.8 Other, more qualitative, analyses carried out during the Depression era underline the same conclusion. Mirra Komarovsky's classic study of 59 unemployed men and their families near New York documented how economic misfortune warped relations within the home, and then spilled over into the community and ‘reduced the social life’. People who ‘used to visit and entertain friends’ suddenly did so ‘hardly at all’. One former electrician put it particularly bluntly: ‘You don't have any friends unless you have got the dollar.’9 Few aspects of community life were untouched.

The family provides the oldest form of economic shelter: long before anyone talked of ‘cradle to grave’ welfare states, families pooled resources and risks to nurture the young, care for the old and rescue the destitute. If hard times weaken family life, therefore, they do not merely take a direct psychological toll, but also increase economic exposure. Should we expect broke homes to become broken homes? ‘Not necessarily’ is the message from most of the research and reports from the 1930s. In her classic study of unemployed men in the American Depression, Mirra Komarovsky uncovered much desperation; but she nonetheless found that a majority of families continued to hang together, and on traditional lines, with 44 of her 59 cases reporting no change in the standing of the man within his home.44 Touring the depressed North of England in the same years, George Orwell wrote that things were ‘more normal than one really has the right to expect.


Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison by The Class Ceiling Why it Pays to be Privileged (2019, Policy Press)

affirmative action, Ascot racecourse, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, classic study, critical race theory, discrete time, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Hyperloop, if you build it, they will come, imposter syndrome, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Martin Parr, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge theory, nudge unit, old-boy network, performance metric, psychological pricing, school choice, Skype, starchitect, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

We begin our remarks here by explaining how our approach forges a critical link between contemporary mainstream mobility analysis and what is often called ‘the sociology of elite recruitment’ – a long and rich research tradition that has largely 188 Class ceilings: A new approach to social mobility been forgotten in recent decades.12 Studies of elite recruitment were central to sociological inquiry through much of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, in particular, a number of classic studies – particularly in the UK and US – investigated social mobility in a range of elite domains such as the senior civil service, the clergy, corporate management and politics.13 The key issue at stake in this work was the degree to which processes of elite recruitment enact forms of social closure,14 or how social collectives restrict access to resources and opportunities to a limited circle of the eligible.15 This issue of closure was also seen as having particular significance in terms of elite formation.

He eschewed the contemporary language of social mobility embraced more readily by professional service firms, feeling that architecture was now an established level-playing field. See Thaler and Sunstein (2009). The Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the Nudge Unit, is an organisation that was set up inside the Cabinet Office to apply nudge theory to UK government policy in many areas, including social mobility. Erickson’s (1996) classic study finds a similar effect in terms of the use of popular culture as a bridging tool that aids cross-class interaction and coordination in workplaces. Chapter Nine 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 APPG on Social Mobility (2012). Sandberg (2015). Bourdieu (1977, p 495, 1990a). Bourdieu (1990b, p 65).


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Santiago-Caballero 2011 documents fairly stable inequality in the province of Guadalajara in the eighteenth-century, except for a modest dip late in this period associated with land reform (see herein, chapter 12, p. 355). For falling European real wages, see herein, chapter 10, pp. 301–302. 19 France: The classic study is Le Roy Ladurie 1966, esp. 239–259, and also 263–276 for falling real wages. Portugal: Reis, Santos Pereira, and Andrade Martins n.d., esp. 27 fig. 2, 30–32, 36–37 figs. 5–6. In 1770, inequality was lower in Porto than it had been in 1700 and also lower than in 1565 Lisbon, lower in small towns and rural areas than in 1565 but higher in large towns than it had been in both 1565 and 1700 (27 fig. 2).

The most comprehensive data set, based on samples comprising 1.75 million households in sixteen provinces from the 1920s and 1930s, suggests that the top decile owned approximately half of all farmland. In some areas, the most affluent 10 percent or 15 percent owned not more than between a third and half of the land, a far cry from intense concentration. Indeed, in the northern village of Zhangzhuangcun, made famous by William Hinton’s classic study of land reform in the late 1940s, middling and poor peasants had already owned 70 percent of the land prior to the communist takeover.18 Yet just as in the Soviet Union, where middling farmers had been branded and exterminated as kulaks, the Chinese communist leadership was loath to let inconvenient facts get in the way of its mission.

., Miller-Antonio, Sari, and Murphy, Joanne M. A. 2009. “Differential health among the Mycenaeans of Messenia: status, sex, and dental health at Pylos.” In Schepartz, Lynne A., Fox, Sherry C., and Bourbou, Chryssi, eds., New directions in the skeletal biology of Greece. Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 155–174. Scheve, Kenneth, and Stasavage, David. 2009. “Institutions, partisanship, and inequality in the long run.” World Politics 61: 215–253. Scheve, Kenneth, and Stasavage, David. 2010. “The conscription of wealth: mass warfare and the demand for progressive taxation.” International Organization 64: 529–561.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Giovanni Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism, London: NLB, 1978, p. 17. 15 Our argument in this respect is thus quite different from that of Niall Ferguson, who at various points adopts something close to a historical-materialist definition of the US as a liberal empire—“one that not only underwrites the free international exchange of commodities, labor and capital but also creates and upholds the conditions without which markets cannot function”—but insists, despite much of the evidence in his own book, that in practice the US “has been a surprisingly inept empire builder.” Colossus, p. 2. 16 The classic study in this vein is William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History, Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966. Andrew J. Bacevich embraced this interpretation in his American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, even though it fails to register the small contribution that exports made to capital accumulation relative to the domestic economy at the time, and gives vastly disproportionate weight to the significance of US capitalist expansion in Central America at a time when California was barely yet a site of US capital accumulation.

Hogan, “Revival and Reform: America’s Twentieth-Century Search for a New Economic Order Abroad,” Diplomatic History 8:4 (Fall 1984), p. 299. 34 For two interesting recent National Bureau of Economic Research studies that draw parallels and contrasts between the real-estate bubbles of the 1920s and early 2000s, see Eugene N. White, “Lessons from the Great American Real Estate Boom and Bust of the 1920s,” NBER Working Paper No. 15573, December 2009; and William N. Gotzmann and Frank Newman, “Securitization in the 1920s,” NBER Working Paper No. 15650, January 2010. On the stock-market bubble, the classic study remains John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), especially the 1988 edition with a new introduction, “1929 and the Crash of ’87.” 35 David Gordon, “The Global Economy,” New Left Review I/168 (March–April 1988), Table 1, p. 32. 36 See Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939, Cambridge: CUP, 1987; and Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, esp.

The NAC consisted of the secretaries of the Treasury, State and Commerce Departments and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve and Export-Import Bank. 12 On the overwhelming US influence in the constitution of the IMF, and the establishment of its loan conditionalities, see Sarah Babb, “The IMF in Sociological Perspective: A Tale of Organizational Slippage,” Studies in Comparative International Development 38: 2 (2003); Mark D. Harmon, The British Labour Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, esp. Chapter 1; and Fred Block’s classic study, The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. 13 William Y. Elliott, National Planning Association, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation, The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy: Its Concepts, Strategy, and Limits, Report of a Study Group sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Planning Association, New York: Holt & Co., 1955, p. 213. 14 A report presented to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors at the beginning of 1950 clearly outlined the phases through which American international economic policy passed in the early postwar years.


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

Russell-Wood, A World on the Move (New York, 1992). 125. See B. Lewis, Cultures in Conflict (Oxford, 1995) for Ottoman indifference to the Americas. CHAPTER 3: THE EARLY MODERN EQUILIBRIUM 1. J.B. Brebner, The Explorers of North America (pbk edn, New York, 1955), p. 255. 2. Ibid., p. 255. 3. Ibid., p. 299. 4. The classic study is J. Baker, History of Geographical Exploration (London, 1931). 5. See J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (London, 1974). 6. See R. Law, ‘ ‘‘Here is no resisting the country’’: The Realities of Power in Afro-European Relations on the West African Slave Coast’, Itinerario 17, 2 (1994), pp. 56–64. 7.

Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1994). 2. P. C. Perdue, China Marches West (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). 3. For the politics of the upper Nile in the mid eighteenth century, J. J. Ewald, Soldiers, Traders and Slaves: State Formation and Economic Transformation in the Greater Nile Valley 1700–1885 (Madison, 1990). 4. The classic study is P. J. van der Merwe, The Migrant Farmer in the History of the Cape Colony, 1657–1842 (1938; Eng. trans. Athens, O., 1995). 5. W. P. Cumming, S. Hillier, D. B. Quinn and G. Williams, The Exploration of North America 1630–1776 (London, 1974), pp. 233–4. 6. Quoted in R. J. Bonney, ‘The Eighteenth Century II: The Struggle for Great Power Status and the End of the Old Fiscal Regime’, in R.

Wills, ‘Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination’, American Historical Review98, 1 (1993), pp. 83–105, is a useful survey of more recent writing. S. F. Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1994) is a reminder of the continuing importance of overland trade. The classic study of change in the Ottoman Empire is H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilisation on Moslem Culture in the Near East, vol. 1: Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century (2pts, London, 1950, 1957). The disorder that followed the fall of the Safavids in Iran is described in J.


Confronting Gun Violence in America by Thomas Gabor

classic study, Columbine, demand response, Ferguson, Missouri, income inequality, mandatory minimum, More Guns, Less Crime, RFID, Silicon Valley, traumatic brain injury, urban sprawl, work culture

He argued that: The relatively high death rate in gun robbery is the direct consequence of the fact that a loaded gun provides the assailant with the means to kill quickly at a distance and without much skill, strength, or danger of a counterattack. A passing whim or even the accidental twitch of a trigger finger is sufficient. Thus, a gun is intrinsically more dangerous than other types of weapons.12 In a classic study conducted in the late 1960s, Franklin Zimring, then a University of Chicago law professor, used an innovative methodology to isolate the impact of the weapon on the outcome of assaults. Reviewing Chicago Police data for 1967, he found that assaults with firearms were 56 Confronting Gun Violence in America five times as likely to result in the victim’s death as knife attacks.13 He anticipated that critics would attribute this finding to a greater intent to kill on the part of those attacking with guns, rather than the greater lethality of guns versus knives.

First, there is much evidence that such a clear division has no factual basis as a large body of research shows that many citizens break a wide range of laws, from cheating on taxes to committing violent acts.13 For example, a study by the Internal Revenue Service found that, in 2001, Americans shortchanged the government by $345 billion. In that year, ten million people who were required to file tax returns did not do so.14 Surveys of the general public have shown that most people violate the law at some point. One classic study of 1700 New York City adults without a criminal record revealed that 99 %admitted to at least some lawbreaking.15 Numerous surveys of high school students show widespread lawbreaking and support the notion that humanity cannot be neatly divided into “good guys” and “bad guys.”16 Even violence is not limited to a small subpopulation of “bad guys.”


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

(OECD; Frankfurt, 1998) Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired, expands at length on the networking metaphor in his book The New Rules of the New Economy (New York: Viking, 1998). "Education and the Wealth of Nations," The Economist (March 29, 1997), 15, 21-23. The Third Wave; AMn Toffler, The Third Wave, The Classic Study of Tomorrow (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 306 83 83 84 87 NOTES . like the best schools: This concept is based on a conversation Leyden had with Roberto Unger, a Harvard professor, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the summer of 1998. Unger lays it out in his book The Future of American Pmgressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform, by Roberto Unger and Cornell West (Boston: Beacon press, 1998).

Things That Make Us Smart, Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine, by Donald A. Norman (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993). Norman has crusaded for designing our technologies to more seamlessly integrate into our world and, in doing so, has helped envision a future of ubiquitous computing. 320 Selected BiblioejRApky The Third Wave, the Classic Study of Tomorrow, by Alvin Toffler (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). So far ahead of its time in describing elements of the shift to the global networked society that it's still relevant. The Unbound Prometheus, by David S. Landes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Shows the power of technology as a key driving force in long-term economic change, with a particular focus on the industrial revolution.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

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

These stories of the NAM and the House of Mirth come to us from an era when American businessmen knew where their class interests lay and acted accordingly, a conservative might sigh. But in the years after World War II, he would continue, corporations started to get soft; they started to get comfortable with big government. There was more than a little truth to this complaint. The classic study of the American corporation in the sixties, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State, described an organization in which shareholders had virtually no role at all and managers answered instead to government and to one another. For average citizens this arrangement made for the greatest period of mass prosperity in the nation’s history.

: Prizewinning Washington Post Journalists Reveal How Reality Gagged the Gingrich Revolution (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 89. 23. Others have made the same point. For example, the reason business failed to get its way in the 1986 corporate tax rewrite, according to Showdown at Gucci Gulch, a classic study of the industry, was the fragmented approach of the corporate lobbyists. “The total firepower of these special interests was potentially fatal to any piece of legislation, yet they never managed to form an efficient ‘killer’ coalition.” Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Alan S. Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 287. 24.


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The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

They were as much civic statements as aesthetic monuments, and they came to define the cities that built them: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1870), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1870), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1876) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1879). Scholarly institutions followed suit: the Archaeological Institute of America (1879) and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (1891). The ruthlessly neoclassical American School of Architecture was founded in 1894. Meanwhile, on the American stage, Shakespeare was everywhere, his characters speaking easily in the local accent. Shakespeare’s plays taught European history to those Americans for whom a college education was inaccessible.

Eisenhower himself studied Latin in school and had a childhood fascination with Hannibal, whose invasion of Europe Eisenhower would replicate, with amphibious landing craft instead of elephants. In his Abilene High School yearbook, Eisenhower predicted that he would become a professor of history at Yale. A graduate of West Point, Eisenhower read Clausewitz’s classic study of war three times. From 1928 to 1929, he lived in Paris, where he helped to compile a guidebook on World War I monuments. This background led to a particular interpretation of the Second World War. Fascism was a betrayal of European civilization and European liberty in Eisenhower’s view—a take on European civilization with an American tinge.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children 1997 (Oxford University Press, 1997); UNICEF, The Progress of Nations 1996 (UNICEF House, 1996). 2. Thomas Friedman, NYT, June 2, 1992; National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, NYT, September 26, 1993; historian David Fromkin, NYT Book Review, May 4, 1997, summarizing recent work. 3. On the general picture and its historical origins, see, inter alia, Frederic Clairmont’s classic study, The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism (Asia Publishing House, 1960), reprinted and updated (Penang and Goa: Third World Network, 1996); and Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty (Penang: Third World Network, 1997). Clairmont was an UNCTAD economist for many years; Chossudovsky is professor of economics at the University of Ottawa. 4.


pages: 402 words: 129,876

Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It by Ben Goldacre

behavioural economics, classic study, data acquisition, framing effect, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income per capita, meta-analysis, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, sugar pill, systematic bias, WikiLeaks

From the most current systematic review, there have been twenty-nine studies looking at the impact of drug rep visits.58 Seventeen of those twenty-nine studies found that doctors who see drug reps are more likely to prescribe the promoted drug (six had mixed results, the rest show no difference, and none show a drop in prescribing). Doctors who see drug reps also tend to have higher prescribing costs, and are less likely to follow best-practice prescribing guidelines. To give a flavour of this research, one classic study took forty doctors who had requested that a drug should be added to their hospital formulary – the list of locally approved drugs – in the preceding two years.59 Eighty doctors from the same places who hadn’t applied to put a drug onto the formulary were then randomly selected, and the contact these two groups had had with the industry was compared.

The cases which reach the public domain are only the tip of the iceberg, since there is little or no investigative work, so their exposure relies on competitors discovering and reporting a transgression, or doctors who are personally engaged in unethical behaviour reporting themselves to the authorities, which doesn’t happen often. Trips like the one described in the previous paragraph are used to influence the prescribing behaviour of doctors seeing patients like you, and spending NHS money: some with the booze, and some without, but in any case, the evidence shows that they are effective at changing behaviour. One classic study followed a group of doctors before and after an all-expenses-paid trip to a symposium in ‘a popular sunbelt vacation site’.70 Before they left, as you’d expect, the majority said they didn’t think this kind of thing would change their prescribing behaviour. After they got back, their prescription of the company’s products increased threefold.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

For the past 30 years the conventional wisdom has been that once a person achieves a minimal standard of living, more money does not bring more happiness. If you live below a certain income threshold, increased money makes a difference, but after that, it doesn’t buy happiness. That was the conclusion of a now-classic study by Richard Easterlin in 1974. However, recent research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania shows that worldwide, affluence brings increased satisfaction. Higher income earners are happier. Citizens in higher-earning countries tend to be more satisfied on average. My interpretation of this newest research—which also matches our intuitive impressions—is that what money brings is increased choices, rather than merely increased stuff (although more stuff comes with the territory).

San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. 78 objects in the entire estate: Edward Waterhouse and Henry Briggs. (1970) “A declaration of the state of the colony in Virginia.” The English experience, its record in early printed books published in facsimile, no. 276. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. 78 now-classic study by Richard Easterlin in 1974: Richard A. Easterlin. (1996) Growth Triumphant. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 78 affluence brings increased satisfaction: David Leonhardt. (2008, April 16) “Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All.” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16leonhardt.html. 80 only a small percentage of humans lived in cities: United States Census Bureau. (2008) “Historical Estimates of World Population.” http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html; George Modelski. (2003) World Cities.


pages: 385 words: 133,839

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

Its standards are slightly lower on some contaminants, and it requires only weekly testing and voluntary recalls in the case of problems. And sure enough, the benzene scare over Perrier and the bromate con­ troversy in Britain are just the beginning of the problems with bottled water quality over the years. A classic study by the Natural Resources Defense Council of more than one thousand bottles of water in 1999 found that while most samples were safe, nearly a quarter tested above state 1 26 THE COKE MACHINE standards for bacterial or chemical contamination (only 4 percent violated weaker federal standards).

Page 125 set a “low priority”: Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, “Bottled Water Regulations and the FDA,” August–September 2002. Page 125 standards are slightly lower . . . voluntary recalls: International Bottled Water As­ sociation, “Regulation of Bottled Water: An Overview.” Page 125 A classic study: Natural Resources Defense Council, “Bottled Water: Pure Drink or Pure Hype?” March 1999. Page 126 the American Medical Association found: Case Western Reserve University, “Study Finds Some Bottled Water Has More Bacteria and Less Fluoride Than Tap Water,” Science Daily, March 22, 2000. Page 126 a 2002 study by the University of Tuskegee: Abua Ikem et al., “Chemical Quality of Bottled Waters from Three Cities in Alabama,” Science of the Total Environment 285, nos. 1–3 (February 21, 2002), 165–175.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Remarkable though the Sumerian civilisation undoubtedly was, cities – with or without the help of the gods – did not rise out of the Mesopotamian landscape in a single generation. In Sumer, cities developed over two millennia, from c. 5500–3500 bc.4 But the city’s roots go deeper still. Archaeology is now revealing tantalising glimpses of the Neolithic origins of modern urbanism. Lewis Mumford, whose monumental work The City in History remains a classic study of urbanism, notes that ‘the embryonic structure of the city already existed in the village. House, shrine, cistern, public way, agora – not yet a specialised market – all first took form in the village.’5 As Neolithic people increasingly gained control over food production, creating surpluses that could support specialist craftsmen, their villages gradually grew into a new kind of community.

After all, to spend some time as a flâneur, sitting in a city centre café, watching people pass by, is to experience theatre in its purest form. Studying faces you do not know and are never likely to see again, faces from every continent, is endlessly fascinating. There is something intrinsically theatrical about urban life, one of the themes explored by Jonathan Raban in his classic study Soft City. A city can be defined as a community in which you are likely to meet strangers. You are repeatedly thrown together with unfamiliar people and you have to make snap judgements based on superficial evidence, such as how they dress or speak, or whether their smile is trustworthy or suspicious.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

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

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

This mixture of employers may not provide insurance against the global collapse of a great depression, but it sure smooths out the ordinary ups and downs of the marketplace. A one-company town like Hershey, Pennsylvania, depends on a single employer, and workers’ lives depend on whether that employer rises or falls. Not so in New York City or Rio de Janeiro, where there’s a plethora of factories in different industries. A classic study by two economists found that unemployment rates were almost 3 percent higher in the downturns of the 1970s and 1980s in places that lacked a diverse range of employers. The sheer variety of urban jobs also allows people to figure out what they can and can’t do well. For millennia, most humans toiled on farms regardless of whether or not they had any aptitude for tilling the soil.

There is extensive research examining the impact of incarceration on crime levels, and typically when sentence lengths double, crime rates decline by somewhere between 10 and 40 percent. Steven Levitt argues that the incapacitation effect of jails is usually more important than deterrence. One classic study of his used ACLU lawsuits against overcrowding that pushed prisons to let criminals out. After the releases, crime rates rose nearby, and he estimates that as prison populations drop by 10 percent, violent crime increases by 4 percent. Using this estimate, the increase in prison population can explain almost 40 percent of the drop in violent crime during the 1990s.


pages: 303 words: 67,891

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

The Novamente system has been integrated with AGI-SIM, a 3D simulation world powered by the CrystalSpace game engine used in the Crystal Cassie embodiment of the SNePs AGI system [9]. Table 1 above shows each of our proposed developmental stages, with examples drawn from our ongoing research with the Novamente system. 1.Piaget’s Approach to Cognitive Development Jean Piaget, in his classic studies of human developmental psychology [10-15], conceived of child development in four stages, each roughly identified with an age group: infantile, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal. --Infantile: In this stage a mind develops basic world-exploration driven by instinctive actions. Reward-driven reinforcement of actions learned by imitation, simple associations between words and objects, actions and images, and the basic notions of time, space, and causality are developed.

To save space, some of the discussion in this paper will assume a basic familiarity with NAIE structures such as Atoms, Nodes, Links, ImplicationLinks and so forth, all of which are described in previous references and in other papers in this volume. 1.2. Cognitive Development in Simulated Androids Jean Piaget, in his classic studies of developmental psychology [8] conceived of child development as falling into four stages, each roughly identified with an age group: infantile, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal. While Piaget’s approach is out-of-date in some ways, recent researchers have still found it useful for structuring work in computational developmental psychology [9]; we have modified the Piagetan approach somewhat for usage in our own work (see [10]).


pages: 464 words: 139,088

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn King

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Doha Development Round, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, large denomination, lateral thinking, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Satoshi Nakamoto, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It is a little-known, though not uninteresting, fact that the Wimbledon Championships are viewed in more countries than belong to the International Monetary Fund, and they are certainly more entertaining than the Annual Meetings of the IMF. Just a stone’s throw from Centre Court is the house in which Walter Bagehot wrote his classic study of central banking, Lombard Street. Setting out the doctrine of the LOLR – lend freely against good collateral at a penalty rate to banks facing a run – it became the bible for central bankers wondering how to respond to financial crises. Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, and other central bank governors, often referred to Bagehot when explaining the measures they had taken to support banks during the recent crisis.35 Although the policy is widely attributed to Bagehot, it can be traced back to Henry Thornton in An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain published in 1802, in which he writes: ‘if any one bank fails, a general run upon the neighbouring ones is apt to take place, which, if not checked in the beginning by pouring into the circulation a large quantity of gold, leads to very extensive mischief’.36 And even before that, in response to the first financial crisis in the United States – the panic of 1792 – Alexander Hamilton, then US Treasury Secretary, intervened to stem the crisis and in so doing was arguably the first person to discover the benefits of a LOLR.37 He certainly was the first in a long line of US Treasury Secretaries who believed in bailouts.

In 2008, the shock to confidence following the banking collapse led to a Keynesian downturn around the world on top of which was superimposed the adjustment to businesses and households’ earlier ‘mistake’ in assessing the sustainable level of spending. As explained above, that complicated the required policy response and led to the paradox of policy. The Great Depression in the 1930s saw violent swings of output and employment. In their classic study of the monetary history of the United States, Friedman and Schwartz argued that this was the fault of the Federal Reserve for remaining passive in the face of a sharp decline in the amount of money as banks failed and reduced lending. Out of this experience was born the view that an activist monetary and fiscal policy was essential.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

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

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

“It was hush hush, everything,” recalled daughter Linda. “Why?”64 This silence appeared in many parts of family life but shrouded sex most of all. “Working-class wives express considerably more discomfort about what they do in the marriage bed than their middle-class sisters,” wrote Lillian Rubin in her classic study, Worlds of Pain. Sex had been almost completely forbidden as a subject of discussion for many women in adolescence and, in their telling, often remained mysterious all the way up to marriage. “I never knew about that, really, even when I was married … after I was married, because a son didn’t come until two years.

On the 1970s and labor history, see Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Lane Windham, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of the New Economic Divide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). For the classic study of industrial job loss, see William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996). 3. Thomas K. Glennan Jr. et al., Education, Employment, and the Economy: An Examination of Work-Related Education in Greater Pittsburgh (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1989). 4.


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

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

Perhaps, he thought, there might be “a most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies,” which will somehow yield a physical account of attraction and cohesion and offer some hope of rescuing an intelligible picture of the world.8 We should not lightly ignore the concerns of “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species,” or of Galileo and Descartes, or Locke and Hume. Or of Newton’s most respected scientific contemporaries, who “unequivocally blamed [Newton] for leading science back into erroneous ways which it seemed to have definitely abandoned,” E. J. Dijksterhuis writes in the classic study of the mechanistic world picture and its collapse as a substantive doctrine. Christiaan Huygens described Newton’s principle of attraction as an “absurdity.” Gottfried Leibniz argued that Newton was reintroducing occult ideas similar to the sympathies and antipathies of the much-ridiculed scholastic science and was offering no physical explanations for phenomena of the material world.9 Newton largely agreed with his scientific contemporaries.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

The modern system of campaign funding is an equal-opportunity offender. The peer-progressive response to this travesty is simple enough in theory. Don’t eliminate campaign financing altogether; diversify and decentralize it. A hundred years ago, during the last great crisis of political accountability, the political scientist Robert Brooks observed in his classic study of political corruption: “It is highly improbable that the question of campaign funds would ever have been raised in American politics if party contributions were habitually made by a large number of persons each giving a relatively small amount.” “A large number of persons each giving a relatively small amount.”


pages: 201 words: 21,180

Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

barriers to entry, classic study, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fail fast, Howard Rheingold, late fees, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommendation engine, social bookmarking, social software, social web, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

They tend to have impressive numbers that show successful behavior to others. Endowment Effect The Endowment Effect is the idea that people value something more when they feel a sense of ownership. We all know what this is like. From the moment we first compare our bicycles with our friends’ bikes, there’s something special about ours simply because it is ours. The classic study of the endowment effect involves economics. To test for the presence of the effect, researchers usually test whether or not people will insist upon selling an item for more than they can buy it for. This would show that they value it more because they own it. This quickly gets murky, however, because there are many shades of “ownership.”


pages: 197 words: 53,476

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis by Elaine Morgan

classic study, David Attenborough, lateral thinking, sexual politics

Traces of ‘cutaneous moisture’ were detected on the skin of the baboon.24 Also, the rhesus monkey.25 And the macaque.26 And the chimpanzee.27 I received a (doubtless subjective) impression that a large number of primate species which had remained cool and dry throughout the first half of the twentieth century had suddenly begun sweating like stevedores. There was, understandably, a tendency to concentrate on savannah-dwelling species (with the curious exception of vervet monkeys. The last we heard of them was that they do not sweat,28 but no doubt somebody will catch up with them and make them do it). In 1980 a classic study of the patas monkey was published by Sheila A. Mahoney,29 establishing that the patas monkey sweats more profusely than any primate except man and that this is very effective in controlling its temperature. For some time I clung to a last-ditch belief that it might have been apocrine sweating; all non-human primates have apocrine glands all over their bodies.


pages: 487 words: 151,810

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

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

Harold’s parents kept up a constant patter when he was around. In Erica’s home, the TV was more likely to be on all the time. Erica’s mom was simply too exhausted to spend much energy on childlike conversation. Scientists have done elaborate calculations to measure the difference in word flows between middle-class and lower-class households. A classic study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that by the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children raised in professional families. On an hourly basis, professional children heard about 487 “utterances.” Children growing up in welfare homes heard about 178.

People in more trusting cultures have wider stock market–participation rates. People in trusting cultures find it easier to organize and operate large corporations. Trust creates wealth. Erica noticed that there are different levels and types of trust in different communities, different schools, different dorms, and different universities. In his classic study The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Edward Banfield noticed that peasants in southern Italy shared a great deal of trust with members of their own family, but were very suspicious of people outside their kinship boundaries. This made it hard for them to form community groups or to build companies that were bigger than the family unit.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

suburb.”172 Cyclists, if one follows the logic in the 1890s, create this experience with each and every turn of their cranks, thereby preserving the authenticity of the natural experience itself. in doing so, they transform the bicycle from a mere transportation device into a landscaping machine. Tourism Cyclists praised the scenic landscapes of the countryside and the “tonic influences” of fresh air and sunshine, but there was a palatable tension between their longing for nature and the grounding of the city.173 Tobin’s classic study of recreational cycling posits that bicyclists of the period were not actually anti-urban, but markedly pro-urban: they never wanted to be without the conveniences of the modern city. The areas just outside the city/suburb became an extension of the urban paradigm by way of the cyclists’ roads, road maps, travel guides, and their collective desire for personal leisure and recreation.

One can map this disparate technical culture in the United States, at least in hindsight, by the articles and photo essays published in popular magazines like Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated, and Modern Mechanix in the 1930s and 1940s.65 in the 1960s and 1970s, bike tinkerers played a more pronounced and pivotal role in the development of modern cycling trends and designs that one can see at work, for example, in the invention of Schwinn’s Sting-ray bicycle and its subsequent appropriation into two rather distinct techno-cultural formations: lowriding, which is a highly stylized set of practices and traditions rooted in the Chicano communities of los angeles, and BMX, which is a sport/activity pioneered by anglo youth in the beach towns and suburban sprawl of Southern California.66 Much farther north, in the woods of Marin Country, California, a slightly older group of “pot smoking peacenik misfits in flannel and denim” were similarly modifying and repurposing old Schwinn bicycles, though their designs were geared toward racing down mountains as opposed to slowly cruising city streets or jumping dirt mounds on outdoor tracks.67 With each of these innovations, bike tinkerers were engaged in a participatory technological process that effectively blurs the lines between production and consumption—a scenario not unlike the one Gene Balsley documented in his classic study of the “Hot-rod [Car] Culture.”68 Mutant bike builders toy with a similar set of technological binaries, but their interventions are actually far more radical inasmuch as they do not blur the lines between production and consumption as much as they actively erase consumption altogether: bikes are cobbled together from found, salvaged, gifted, traded, and/or scrounged (dumpstered) parts, and they are not sold when completed.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Rather it is like Alfred Marshall’s comment about cotton spinning and weaving, that “a large factory is only several parallel smaller factories under one roof.” At Foxconn City, that was almost literally the case, with separate buildings used to assemble similar products for different companies. Beyond some point, economies of scale in production diminish or disappear. In his classic study Scale and Scope Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., after noting that at one point close to a quarter of the world’s production of kerosene came from just three Standard Oil refineries, wrote: “Imagine the diseconomies of scale that would result from placing close to one-fourth of the world’s production of shoes, textiles or lumber into three factories or mills!

Chaloner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 205. 44.Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 240–44; Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 178. 45.Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 150, 283–84, 312; Fitton, The Arkwrights, 146, 151; John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, An Orphan Boy (1832), reprinted in James R. Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2007), 169; Cohen, “Managers and Machinery,” 25; Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 174, 199; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 422. The classic study of the change from task-oriented to time-oriented work is E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (Dec. 1967), pp. 56–97. 46.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 43; Ellen Johnston, Autobiography (1869), reprinted in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 308; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 92; “knocker, n.”


The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Snoek (eds), Handbook of Freemasonry, Leiden, 2014. M.K. Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture, Leiden, 2002. On Hermeticism and the Scottish court, pp. 200–206. D. Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710, Cambridge, 1988. I have drawn heavily on this classic study throughout this chapter. For the figure of 80 per cent of Schaw Lodges still being around today, see p. 216. For that of there being thirty Schaw Lodges across Scotland by 1730, see p. 213. ‘Som secret signe delivered from hand to hand’, quoted p. 143. D. Stevenson, ‘Schaw, William (1549/50–1602)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24799, consulted 21 February 2017.

Miller (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. III. Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, 1963. E.M. Veale, ‘Craftsmen and the economy of London in the 14th century’, in R. Holt and G. Rosser (eds), The Medieval Town, 1200–1540, London, 1990. F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory, London, 1966. The classic study of the art of memory and its Renaissance adaptations. The text and translation of the Regius Poem are available at http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/regius.html, consulted 3 April 2017. Chapter 4: London: At the Sign of the Goose and Gridiron J. Anderson, The constitutions of the Freemasons: Containing the history, charges, regulations, etc. of that… fraternity, London, 1723.


pages: 678 words: 148,827

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

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

Lack of a reliable source of food gives rise to food insecurity, which tends to produce a specific cluster of negative behaviors: increased impulsivity and hyperactivity, increased irritability and aggression, increased anxiety, and a propensity to use rewarding narcotics.22 The evidence that food uncertainty begets this cluster of behaviors is striking and vast; it includes studies of induced food deprivation among insects, birds, and mammals (including humans); studies of people who are crash dieting and forced to undergo “therapeutic” starvation; and studies of people with clinical eating disorders. The cluster of behaviors results specifically from extreme hunger, not from preexisting personality differences. In one classic study, researchers noted that patients began the experiment compliant, pleasant, and optimistic but became increasingly impulsive and angry—to the point of engaging in physical abuse—during therapeutic starvation.23 In one instance, a “man asked for help after discharge because he was so angry when in traffic that he feared he would kill any aggravator by smashing his car into them.”24 Hunger increases the motivation to work or pay for food, while it decreases motivation to work or pay for any kind of non-food reward.25 The suite of behaviors associated with hunger is best viewed not as a system failure but as an adaptation, a response consisting of alternate strategies to improve the location, capture, and defense of food resources, even at the expense of achieving other goals.26 If the alternate strategies keep failing to achieve their aim, anxiety and hyperactivity may eventually give way to depression and lethargy.

As child development psychologists Nathan Fox and Jack Shonkoff explain, “Fears are not just passively forgotten over time; they must be actively unlearned.”63 While fear can be learned relatively early in life, and is influenced by both the frequency and emotional intensity of the event, unlearning can occur only after particular areas of the prefrontal cortex have properly matured, when they have enough power to regulate the amygdala and other subcortical brain areas associated with the anticipation of reward.64 The concept of learned helplessness addresses a related phenomenon. In their classic studies beginning in the late 1960s, psychologists Steven Maier and Martin Seligman found that, given enough repeated shocks, dogs eventually stop trying to escape from their situation even when they eventually are given the opportunity to do so.65 They just gave up, apparently believing that nothing they could do would matter.


pages: 196 words: 57,974

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Antiglobalization protesters rioted in Seattle, Washington, and London to protest against the awesome power of multinationals, raging against companies like McDonald’s, which by the mid-1990s was serving 3 million burgers a day in one hundred countries. Raymond Vernon, the author of one of the classic studies of multinationals, Sovereignty at Bay, used his last book, In the Hurricane’s Eye (1998), to predict a gloomy future for multinationals, as people turned against them. Had they really become so powerful? Businesspeople were partly to blame for the notion. They had long dreamed, as the chairman of Dow Chemical once put it, “of buying an island owned by no nation and of establishing the world headquarters of the Dow company on the truly neutral ground of such an island, beholden to no nation or society.”


pages: 232 words: 60,093

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, ed. John L. Thomas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 115. 26. Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 70. 27. Unwin was greatly influenced by the Viennese city planner Camillo Sitte, author of the classic study The Art of Building Cites: City building according to artistic fundamentals, trans. Charles T. Stewart (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1991; orig. pub. in English 1945; orig. pub. 1889). See also Walter L. Creese, “An Extended Planning Progression,” introduction to Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994; orig. pub. 1909), xii-xiii. 28.


pages: 204 words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

If we may take advertising to be the voice of commerce, then its history tells very clearly that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries those with products to sell took their customers to be not unlike Daniel Webster: they assumed that potential buyers were literate, rational, analytical. Indeed, the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment. In Frank Presbrey’s classic study The History and Development of Advertising, he discusses the decline of typography, dating its demise in the late 1860’s and early 1870’s. He refers to the period before then as the “dark ages” of typographical display.19 The dark ages to which he refers began in 1704 when the first paid advertisements appeared in an American newspaper, The Boston News-Letter.


Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business by Ernie Chan

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, Brownian motion, business continuity plan, buy and hold, classic study, compound rate of return, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, endowment effect, financial engineering, fixed income, general-purpose programming language, index fund, Jim Simons, John Markoff, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, p-value, paper trading, price discovery process, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, transaction costs

Even Renaissance Technologies Corporation, arguably the most successful quantitative hedge fund of all time, lost 8.7 percent in the first half of August, though it later recovered most of it. Not only is the magnitude of the loss astounding, but the widespread nature of it was causing great concern in the financial community. Strangest of all, few of these funds hold any mortgage-backed securities at all, ostensibly the root cause of the panic. It therefore became a classic study of financial contagion as propagated by hedge funds. This kind of contagion occurs because a large loss by one hedge fund causes it to sell off some large positions that it holds (whether or not these are the positions that cause the loss in the first place). This selling causes the prices of the securities to drop (or rise in the case of short positions).


pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The imposition of the liberal order is accompanied by the legitimizing myth that its form was freely chosen by unencumbered individuals; that it was the consequence of extensive state intervention is ignored by all but a few scholars. Few works have made this intervention clearer than the historian and sociologist Karl Polanyi’s classic study The Great Transformation.6 Polanyi describes how economic arrangements were separated from particular cultural and religious contexts in which those arrangements were understood to serve moral ends—and posits that these contexts limited not only actions but even prevented the understanding that economic actions could be properly undertaken to advance individual interests and priorities.


pages: 225 words: 61,814

The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton

classic study, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Socratic dialogue, the market place, urban planning

Picture Acknowledgments The photographs in the book are used by permission and courtesy of the following: Aarhus Kunstmuseum: 20.2; The Advertising Archives: 10.2 (DC Comics): 22.4; AKG London: (Musée du Louvre, Paris/Erich Lessing) 12.4, 19.4 (National Research and Memorial Centre for Classical German Literature, Weimar) 22.1, 22.2 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) 22.5, 22.7 (University Library, Jena) 22.8; Albertina, Vienna: 22.17; Archivi Alinari, Florence: 22.24; American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations: 4.4; The Ancient Art & Architecture Collection/© Ronald Sheridan: 13.10; The Art Archive: 12.1 (detail) 14.3, 16.1, 17.9; Associated Press: 13.7; G. Bell and Sons Ltd, from A History of French Architecture by Sir Reginald Blomfield (from the French Cours d’Architecture, 1921, J.


pages: 532 words: 162,509

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez

Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, Columbian Exchange, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Jones Act, planetary scale, Right to Buy, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty

Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); and William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972). 5. For a broad comparative discussion, see Gross and de la Fuente, “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race.” Frank Tannenbaum’s classic study Slave and Citizen was among the first to draw attention to the significant differences between the legal regimes that emerged in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies—which he believed were relatively benign and conducive to freedom—and the harsher regimes prevalent in British America. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1946).

Altman, The War for Mexico’s West, chap. 5; Carlos Sempat Assadourian, Zacatecas: Conquista y transformación de la frontera en el siglo XVI: Minas de plata, guerra, y evangelización (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2008), passim. 36. Sempat Assadourian, Zacatecas, 39–49; Zavala, Los esclavos indios en Nueva España, 110. 37. The classic study of Zacatecas is Peter J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), chap. 1. See also Sempat Assadourian, Zacatecas, chap. 2. 38. “Borrador de la instrucción del Príncipe don Felipe a don Luis de Velasco, virrey de Nueva España, acerca de la libertad y buen tratamiento de los naturales que trabajaban en las minas, estancias, e ingenios, 1552,” in Mariano Cuevas, ed., Documentos inéditos del siglo XVI para la historia de México (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1975), 170–175.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

., The Boole–De Morgan Correspondence 1842–1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 25. ♦ “NOW SOME ZS ARE NOT XS”: De Morgan to Boole, draft, not sent, ibid., 27. ♦ “IT IS SIMPLY A FACT”: quoted by Samuel Neil, “The Late George Boole, LL.D., D.C.L.” (1865), in James Gasser, ed., A Boole Anthology: Recent and Classical Studies in the Logic of George Boole (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 16. ♦ “THE RESPECTIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE SYMBOLS 0 AND 1”: George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Walton & Maberly, 1854), 34

Scientific American 193, no. 10 (October 1955): 70. Gardner, Martin. Hexaflexagons and Other Mathematical Diversions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. ———. Martin Gardner’s Sixth Book of Mathematical Games from Scientific American. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1963. Gasser, James, ed. A Boole Anthology: Recent and Classical Studies in the Logic of George Boole. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2000. Gell-Mann, Murray, and Seth Lloyd. “Information Measures, Effective Complexity, and Total Information.” Complexity 2, no. 1 (1996): 44–52. Genosko, Gary. Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2005.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

It would be a mistake for transparency enthusiasts, of which there are quite a few in geek circles, to disregard the subtle differences and indeterminacies that politics introduces into their magnificent and abstract schemes to improve the world. But it’s not just politics that suffers once transparency is recast from an instrumental value into an intrinsic one; many other institutions have experienced similar pressures. Michael Power, in his classic study on the rise of “the audit society,” points to two troubling consequences of auditing—in the context not just of corporations but of public institutions also—both of which are likely to accompany the quest for more transparency. The first, which Power dubs “decoupling,” can be filed under the “perversity” part of Albert Hirschman’s “perversity-futility-jeopardy” triad.

Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs about How Government Should Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 83 “we should not look to new ways”: ibid., 213. 84 “the difference between a 100 percent attendance record”: ibid., 212–213. 84 “members would be doing something much more beneficial”: ibid., 213. 84 Michael Power, in his classic study: Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 85 “books and auditing of accounts”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 71. 86 “the information-processing imperative”: Julie E. Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 117. 86 “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”: Google, “Company Overview,” http://www.google.com/about/company. 86 “discursive shift. . . towards economics”: Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century (London: William Heinemann, 2012), 361. 86 “Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong”: ibid., 361. 87 “The reason they do this is not necessarily”: ibid., 361. 87 for assuming that “a set of indices”: Haridimos Tsoukas, “The Tyranny of Light: The Temptations and the Paradoxes of the Information Society,” Futures 29, no. 9 (November 1997): 827–843. 87 “at its core. . . transparency theory”: Mark Fenster, “The Opacity of Transparency,” Iowa Law Review 91 (2005): 885–949. 88 “the modern government’s sprawling, often incoherent bureaucracy”: ibid., 915. 88 “any ‘message’ that government information comprises”: ibid., 922. 88 As linguist George Lakoff argued: quoted in Tsoukas, “The Tyranny of Light,” 830. 88 “To reduce something to allegedly objective information”: ibid., 830. 89 “open tends toward obfuscation”: Christopher M.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

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

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

A meta-analysis of prison sentencing studies (funded by Open Philanthropy, a foundation dedicated to prison reform) “calls even those mild estimates into question.” The deterrence impact of longer sentences seems only moderately beneficial at best. The case is stronger for the connection between incapacitation and crime. A classic study by economist Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago looked at the timing of American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuits about prison overcrowding. These lawsuits led to the release of prisoners, and those releases were followed by increases in crime nearby. Analysts who have followed up Levitt’s methodology estimate that a 10 percent increase in the number of prisoners released led to a 4.5 percent increase in the amount of violent crime and a 2.5 percent increase in the amount of property crime.

Between 2016 and 2019: Derived from New York City Police Department, “Historical New York City Crime Data.” One recent study: Helland and Tabarrok, “Does Three Strikes Deter?: A Nonparametric Estimation.” Their estimate is: Helland and Tabarrok. “calls even those mild”: Roodman, “The Impacts of Incarceration on Crime,” 5. A classic study: Levitt, “The Effect of Prison Population Size on Crime Rates: Evidence from Prison Overcrowding Litigation.” 4.5 percent increase: Roodman, 5. COVID-19-related prison releases: Rector, “Surge in South L.A. Bloodshed Tied to Gunfire from High-Capacity Firearms, Gang Feuds.” raise the odds of rearrest: Roodman.


The Economic Weapon by Nicholas Mulder

anti-communist, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, deglobalization, European colonialism, falling living standards, false flag, foreign exchange controls, global pandemic, guns versus butter model, Monroe Doctrine, power law, reserve currency, rising living standards, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

The continuation of the blockade against Germany and Austria-Hungary has not escaped the attention of historians.3 Humanitarian efforts to feed Europeans in this period have also been well documented.4 Less appreciated are the distinct class politics of blockade. The economic campaign against Bolshevism was a form of counterrevolution on the cheap and at a distance. Classic studies by historians Arno Mayer and Charles Maier show how European elites regained their grip on power after the upheaval of the wartime years and the radical groundswell of the Russian Revolution.5 Material pressure against civilian populations deserves to be seen as an essential tool in this stabilization of the bourgeois social order in Europe.

., The Organization of American Relief in Europe, 1918–1919 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 189–247; Elisabeth Piller, “German Child Distress, American Humanitarian Aid and Revisionist Politics, 1918–1924,” Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 3 (2016): 453–486. 5. The best study of the 1919 settlement as a conservative project of stabilization remains Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967); the classic study of the domestic politics and political economy of restoration is Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). 6. Georges-Henri Soutou, “1918: La fin de la première guerre mondiale?”


pages: 211 words: 69,380

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

classic study, Day of the Dead, experimental subject, fear of failure, hedonic treadmill, Kibera, Lao Tzu, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, security theater, selection bias, Steve Jobs, summit fever, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, traveling salesman, World Values Survey

‘doing the presumably sensible thing is counterproductive’: Steven Hayes, ‘Hello Darkness: Discovering Our Values by Confronting Our Fears’, Psychotherapy Networker 31 (2007): 46-52. 2: What Would Seneca Do? a speech he gave to executives of the investment bank Merrill Lynch: See Jeanne Pugh, ‘The Eternal Optimist’, St Petersburg Times, 8 June 1985. Healthy and happy people … generally have a less accurate, overly optimistic grasp: The classic study on ‘depressive realism’ is Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, ‘Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 108 (1979): 441-85. a particularly high-achieving week at work: Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen, ‘Positive Fantasies about Idealized Futures Sap Energies’, Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology 47 (2011): 719-29.


pages: 238 words: 68,384

The Charming Quirks of Others: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel by Alexander McCall Smith

classic study, cuban missile crisis, Nelson Mandela, retail therapy

“She created a marvellous garden, which I’m afraid I’ve rather let run to seed. But one can’t do everything—or anything, sometimes.” He invited her in, leading her down a book-lined corridor into a large drawing room that faced, unusually, the rear garden. There were paintings on the walls, all of them conventional: landscapes, a study of birds in flight, a small classical study, an old framed map of the county of Midlothian. And there, above the white marble fireplace, was her Raeburn, the one that she had examined with Guy Peploe and that she thought he would be bidding for on her behalf next month. She stood still for a moment, wondering whether she was mistaken. Was it a copy?


pages: 261 words: 64,977

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Despite the smug banker quoted in the Guardian Weekly story, ideology hasn’t ended in the Great Recession; ideology has triumphed. Intransigent Idealism “I don’t read books,” a Tea Party activist once told the historian Jill Lepore. “I read blogs.”3 The line struck a chord with me. It brought to mind a book that I had been reading of late, Part of Our Time, Murray Kempton’s classic study of “the committed and the dedicated” during the thirties—Communists and fellow travelers, mainly—whose mind-set seemed identical to the one I saw among the blog-reading rebels of the contemporary Right.4 Kempton brought the matter into sharpest focus in a biographical sketch of J. B. Matthews, a onetime radical who turned red hunter in the fifties, performing both roles with the same evangelical zeal, the same intolerance for ambiguity, the same “singular quality always to know in a flash without ever having learned.”5 “Matthews saw what he wished to see, and he had no need of books for knowledge,” Kempton writes.


pages: 234 words: 69,808

Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

classic study, fail fast, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Magellanic Cloud

asked the Hermian Ambassador quickly. 'What's that?’ 'It's a crackpot movement,' explained Sir Robert, with as much embarrassment as a diplomat was ever likely to show, 'which is convinced that Rama is a grave potential danger. A box that shouldn't be opened, you know.' He doubted if the Hermian did know: classical studies were not encouraged on Mercury. 'Pandora - paranoia,' snorted Conrad Taylor. 'Oh, of course, such things are conceivable, but why should any intelligent race want to play childish tricks?’ 'Well, even ruling out such unpleasantness,' Sir Robert continued, 'we still have the much more ominous possibility of an active, inhabited Rama.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

There will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.22 Cicero’s elegant defense of what he termed a mixed system—a system of shared governmental responsibility, in which citizens have a share in control of their government, checked by a monarch, checked in turn by an aristocracy—was treasured by the American Founding Fathers.23 This system, Cicero thought, would ensure the prevention of tyranny and the violation of virtue. WHAT ATHENS TELLS US . . . AND WHAT IT DOESN’T Yes, classical studies are still necessary. The college students who fulminate against them are undercutting the very foundations upon which they stand—they’re ignoring reason, science, and democracy. We’ll see later in this book just how that abandonment undercuts the strength of the West. But there is no question that without Athens, the West simply would not exist as it is—and that the world would suffer greatly for that fact.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Many have argued against the Lipset hypothesis by pointing to examples of poor democracies, like India, and rich authoritarian states, like Singapore. But even though there are outliers, tonnes of studies and cross-sectional and time-series data from many countries and years reveal a very strong correlation between wealth and democracy. One classic study found that ‘the level of economic development, as measured by per capita income, is by far the best predictor of political regimes’.15 The most important factor is not that economic development directly results in democratization, but that when a regime changes for whatever reason – it can be the death of the dictator, popular protests or anything else – democracy is far more likely to survive in a fairly wealthy country.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Brynjolfsson, a technology optimist, has two answers for the skeptics. First, he argues, the official statistics do not fully capture the benefits of digital innovation. And second, he says that in technology, revolutions take time. To explain, Brynjolfsson points to his own work on technology and work practices, and to the research of others including a classic study by Paul David, an economic historian at Stanford. In his 1990 paper, “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” David observed that the electric motor was introduced in the early 1880s but did not generate discernible productivity gains until the 1920s.


The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

FINTAN O’TOOLE THE POLITICS OF PAIN POSTWAR ENGLAND AND THE RISE OF NATIONALISM Contents Preface: The Importance of Not Being Earnest Introduction 1.The Pleasures of Self-Pity 2.SS-GB: Life in Occupied England 3.The Triumph of the Light Brigade 4.A Pint of Beer, a Packet of Prawn Cocktail Flavour Crisps and Two Ounces of Dog Shit, Please 5.Sadopopulism 6.The Twilight of the Gods: English Dreamtime 7.The Sore Tooth and the Broken Umbrella 8.Postscript: A Special Place in Hell Notes To Bjørn Oisín and all the new Europeans The fact is that, in spite of the way we behave, we cannot any longer feel that the infliction of pain is merely funny GEORGE ORWELL, 1944 PREFACE THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING EARNEST In her classic study, Watching the English, published in 2004 and updated a decade later, the social anthropologist Kate Fox wrote of her compatriots that ‘the kind of hand-on-heart, gushing earnestness and pompous, Bible-thumping solemnity favoured by almost all American politicians would never win a single vote in this country’.1 The English, she claimed, watched such American demagogues on the TV news ‘with a kind of smugly detached amusement, wondering how the cheering crowds can possibly be so credulous as to fall for this sort of nonsense . . . such shamefully earnest platitudes, in such ludicrously solemn tones?’


The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living by Brock Bastian

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cognitive dissonance, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, helicopter parent, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, placebo effect, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, sugar pill, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce

Pain, fear, stress and even humiliation are central components of group initiation rites (think of the many hazing ceremonies conducted in American college fraternities over the years), and such negative experiences have long been incorporated into many rituals around the world, throughout history. This raises the question, what are these painful experiences achieving, and why have these kinds of rituals and group practices persisted over time? A classic study by Harold Gerard and Grover Mathewson from the University of California in 1966 demonstrated how pain may enhance the value of group membership.14 As part of the study, they invited college women to listen to a group discussion on sex. The catch was that to gain permission to hear the group discussion, the women were told either (a) they had to undergo a mild electric shock, or (b) they had to undergo a strong electric shock – and this time the experimenters really did electrocute their volunteers.


pages: 232 words: 70,361

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

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

The maximum tax rate was 25% from 1942 to 1964, the era of quasi-confiscatory top marginal income tax rates. 8. Oblivious to this social norm, economists could not understand why firms were paying dividends and dubbed this the “dividend puzzle” (see e.g., Black, 1976). 9. Hall (1951), p. 54. Lewellen (1968), the classic study on executive compensation from the 1960s, entirely ignores company perks, perceived as negligible. 10. A long article in Fortune in 1955 described how top executives live (Ducan-Norton, 1955). The only mention of company perks is the following statement: “A common practice is for a company president, on his way to New York in the company plane, to fill the empty seats with family and friends.


Misogynies by Joan Smith

classic study, Etonian, Norman Mailer, Robert Bork

., p. 62. 10 Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, translated into modern English by Clifton Wolters, Penguin, 1972, p. 136. 11 The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, OUP, 1979. p. 275, No. 10. 12 Sunday Telegraph, 22 February 1987. 13 Daily Telegraph, 27 February 1987. 14 Ibid. 15 Sunday Times, 22 December 1985. 16 Ibid. 17 Independent, 12 April 1988. 18 1 Corinthians 7:10-11. 19 Genesis 2:25. 20 Genesis 3:7. 21 Genesis 3:16. 22 Genesis 3:17-19. 23 All quotations from On Female Dress (De cultu feminarum), Tertullian, Writings, Vol. 1 (from the Ante-Nicene Christian Library Series), T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1869, pp. 304-5. 24 William P. Le Saint, op. cit., p. 57. 25 Jerome, Letters, quoted in Armstrong, op. cit., p. 60. 26 Richard Rolle, op. cit., p. 175. 27 All quotations from Malleus Maleficarum: The Classic Study of Witchcraft, translated by Montague Summers, Arrow Books, 1971 (Dover, 1971). 28 Ibid., pp. 120-1. 29 Ibid., p. 121. 30 Ibid., pp. 116-7. 31 Ibid., p. 122. 32 Ibid., p. 262. 33 Ibid., pp. 263-4. 34 Ibid., pp. 267-8. 35 Ibid., p. 268. WOMEN IN TOGAS 1 R. H. Barrow, The Romans, Pelican, 1949, p. 9. 2 Ibid., pp. 130-1. 3 Ibid., p. 117. 4 Thomas Godwyn, Romance historiae anthologia recognita et aucta (‘An English Exposition of the Romane Antiquities’), printed by John Lichfield and James Short for Henry Crypps, Oxford, 1623, p. 150. 5 Quoted in Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, Johns Hopkins, 1987, p. 133. 6 Ibid., p. 130. 7 The Poems of Catullus, translated by James Michie, Panther, 1972, pp. 10-11. 8 Gilbert Highet, Poets in a Landscape, Pelican, 1959, p. 17. 9 Ibid., p. 25. 10 Ibid., p. 45. 11 Catullus, Poem, 11. 12 Highet, op. cit., p. 37. 13 Ibid., p. 46. 14 Ibid., p. 45. 15 Recorded by Quintilian; quoted in T.


Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

Some evolved around the mid-nineteenth century, when industry first located in the outskirts of large cities (Lewis 2004). At this time, heavy industry located in fringe areas of such cities as Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Cleveland, and others. In his classic study of streetcar suburbs, Samuel Warner (1962) notes that by Different Types of Inner-Ring Suburbs / 123 1900, the Boston metropolitan area was split between the central city and a suburban ring of industrial subcenters as well as residential homes. Old textile suburbs of Philadelphia emerged around the same time, as did the steel-manufacturing suburbs of Chicago.


The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

It is hardly surprising, given what we know about confirmation bias, that the 14.2 million Donald Trump supporters who signed up to receive his unfiltered message via Twitter were completely disinterested in attempts by his opponents to discredit him. Such criticism would only appeal to those who already supported Hillary Clinton. Given this awareness, I hope it is starting to become obvious why “birds of a feather flock together”. Think about it: how often do you buy a newspaper or book that you disagree with? The classic study on how confirmation bias affects our interpretation of new information was done in 1979 by researchers from Stanford University.9 They exposed two groups of volunteers, one that supported capital punishment and one that opposed it, to two different studies (both were fictional, though participants didn't know this), one confirming and one disconfirming their existing beliefs about whether the death penalty deters violent crime.


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

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

It wouldn’t make sense to have a city’s fire or police department close up shop for months at a time just because wearing the uniforms in the summer heat is uncomfortable. To the extent that this oddity has figured in the policy conversation, the main topic of interest has been what’s known as summer learning loss—the idea that kids actually regress in their academic competencies over the summer months. The classic study on this, done way back in 1996, found that summer vacation corresponds to a decline in achievement roughly equivalent to one month of in-school time. The decline was bigger for math than for reading because kids at all points of the income spectrum experienced math decline, whereas reading loss was seen only in low-income students.* Some more recent research has called those findings into question.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

He was scolded by the judge, who instructed him to "leave the old manner... whereupon he after called himself Moston, according to the name of his principal house, and left that name to his posteritie" (William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Dunn [1605; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984], p. 122). This "administrative" last name almost certainly remained unknown to Thomas's neighbors. 52. See the classic study by Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. 160-64. 53. I am particularly grateful to Rosanne Ruttan, Otto van den Muijzenberg, Harold Conklin, and Charles Bryant for putting me on the track of the Philippine case.

Harlan, Crops and Man, p. 129, reports that a selection of barley left in the field as seed stock over a trial of sixty years produced 95 percent of the yield that plant breeders would have been able to achieve and were almost certainly hardier and more disease resistant strains of barley. 90. The classic study of the family development cycle is A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, introduction by Teodor Shanin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). One of the policy arguments for the stable family farm as an institution is that it is more likely than a capitalist firm to have an intergenerational interest in maintaining or improving the quality of the land and environment.


pages: 7,371 words: 186,208

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

These internal feuds were mild and easily recomposed in the citystates that were winning in the competitive struggle, most notably in Venice, but they were severe and uncontainable in the case of those city-states that were losing out (most notably in Genoa). In any event, as vividly portrayed by Jacob Burckhardt (1945: 4-64) in his classic study, Renaissance Italy was one of the clearest historical instances of “war of all against all.” The ruling groups of the city-states were constantly beset by enemies, THE RISE OF CAPITAL 93 and the pursuit of profit came to be embedded more firmly than ever in the pursuit of power: There were implacable exiles, the leaders of the faction out of power, prowling just beyond reach.

With her also came Tangier, England’s first base in the Mediterranean” (Hill 1967: 129). 204 THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY The foundations were thus laid of that “Empire of Outposts” out of which came the “continental inland expansion” of the next two centuries (Knowles 1928: 9-15) and the incorporation in the British-centered capitalist world-economy of the continents of America, India, Australia, and Africa. In the short run, however, England’s most important gain was the takeover of the so-called triangular Atlantic trade from the Dutch, which soon became for England what Levant trade had been for Venice and Baltic trade for Holland — its “mother trade.” As Eric Williams (1964) argued in his classic study, the circuit of trade through which (1) British manufactures were exchanged for African slaves, (2) African slaves were exchanged for American tropical products, and (3) American tropical products were exchanged for British manufactures, boosted at a critical conjuncture the effective demand and the capital resources required by the take-off of the British “industrial revolution.”


Longevity: To the Limits and Beyond (Research and Perspectives in Longevity) by Jean-Marie Robine, James W. Vaupel, Bernard Jeune, Michel Allard

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, computer age, conceptual framework, confounding variable, demographic transition, Drosophila, epigenetics, life extension, longitudinal study, phenotype, stem cell, stochastic process

These same principles of stochastic cell determination found in the lateral line system of frogs may also prevail in the vertebrate brain. In mammals and other vertebrates, it is well established that many more neurons are produced during development than survive in the adult, as presented in the classical,studies of Victor Hamburger, Ronald Oppenheimer, and others in the spinal cord, in which non-innervated neurons do not survive. The cerebral cortex, furthermore, develops through the dispersal of clonally related cells by migration within a generalized proto cortical map that does not precisely specify where each neuron will reside or what its connections will be (e.g.


pages: 260 words: 78,229

Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us by Robert D. Hare

classic study, delayed gratification, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, junk bonds, longitudinal study, Norman Mailer, Savings and loan crisis, sparse data, systems thinking, twin studies

In the dark we are enjoying, with a subtle consciousness, aggressive and sexual pleasure at seemingly no cost.”4 These cinematic experiences may have a beneficial effect on psychologically healthy people, reminding them of the danger and destructiveness that psychopathy carries with it. On the other hand, these experiences may also serve as powerful role models for those with poorly developed internal standards, serious psychological problems, or feelings of alienation from mainstream society. REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE In 1944, psychoanalyst Robert Lindner wrote a classic study of criminal psychopathy, Rebel Without a Cause.5 Lindner viewed psychopathy as a plague, a terrible force whose destructive potential is greatly underestimated. He described psychopaths in terms of their relationship to society: The psychopath is a rebel, a religious disobeyer of prevailing codes and standards a rebel without a cause, an agitator without a slogan, a revolutionary without a program; in other words, his rebelliousness is aimed to achieve goals satisfactory to him alone; he is incapable of exertions for the sake of others.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

Millet and Joseph Fielding McConkie, The Life Beyond (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1986). Chapter 3, Monday-Night Hunters Harvey Araton, "Nuggets' Abdul-Rauf Shouldn't Stand for It," The New York Times, March 14, 1996. A good anecdotal summary of professional sports and its admirers is Fans! by Michael Roberts (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Book Co., 1976). A classic study of hunter-gatherer society is The IKung San by Richard Borshay Lee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Most of the hunter-gatherer customs mentioned in this book apply to the IKung and to many other nonmarginal hunter-gatherer cultures worldwide—before they were destroyed by civilization.


pages: 231 words: 73,818

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

You can never be sure what someone else is thinking. Second, I was sure I would resist temptation, yet when push came to shove, I easily rationalized away my principles once someone gave me an excuse to do so. It gives me a lot of compassion for friends who, at the crucial moment, choose to drive the tractor. A classic study of anxiety over how one will act under pressure is described in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage. This novel gives us a vivid psychological portrayal of a young soldier beset by the anxiety that under fire he will be overcome by fear. As the war proceeds, he exposes his cowardice and ultimately his heroism.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Companies, like ant species, must adopt strategies that enable them to thrive or they will be at risk of extinction. As I soon discovered, other areas of complexity research also provide helpful models for how the economic world operates. For example, the Danish theoretical physicist Per Bak coauthored a classic study of sandpiles that showed what happens when you keep dropping grains of sand in one area. The resulting pile reaches a state of “self-organized criticality”; avalanches then occur, but it’s impossible to predict either their timing or their size. This model offers intriguing insights into market crashes, which have much in common with these avalanches.


Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children 1997 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997); UNICEF, The Progress of Nations 1996 (New York: UNICEF House, 1996). 2. Thomas Friedman, New York Times (NYT), June 2, 1992; National Security Adviser Antony Lake, NYT, Sept. 26, 1993; historian David Fromkin, NYT Book Review, May 4, 1997, summarizing recent work. 3. On the general picture and its historical origins, see, inter alia, Frederic Clairmont’s classic study, The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism (Asia Publishing House, 1960), reprinted and updated (Penang and Goa: Third World Network, 1996); Michael Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty (Penang: Third World Network, 1997). Clairmont has been an UNCTAD economist for many years; Chossudovsky is a professor of economics at the University of Ottawa. 4.


pages: 275 words: 82,640

Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History by Milton Friedman

Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, currency peg, double entry bookkeeping, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, German hyperinflation, income per capita, law of one price, Money creation, money market fund, oil shock, price anchoring, price stability, Savings and loan crisis, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs

All in all, linking together the "gold yuan" and the earlier currency, prices in Nationalist territory in April 1949—by which time power had effectively changed hands—were more than 54 million times their level in December 1946. This was an average rate of rise of nearly 90 percent a month—far above the 50 percent a month that Phillip Cagan adopted, in his now classic study of hyperinflation, as separating hyperinflation from other inflationary episodes (1956, p. 25). The hyperinflation not only helped sweep the communists into power. Once the warfare was over, the communists were able to eliminate the hyperinflation, and that unquestionably helped to cement them in power (Greenwood and Wood 1978).


pages: 263 words: 78,433

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine by Danielle Ofri

affirmative action, classic study, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, job satisfaction, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, Multics, RAND corporation

Two-thirds of the doctors felt angry and depressed in the days and weeks after receiving the disciplinary complaint. One-third felt guilty and ashamed. One-third lost all joy and pleasure in the practice of medicine. The shame component lingered, sometimes for years. Doctors retained strong emotional responses long after the incident—anger, depression, cynicism, wariness toward patients. A classic study of medical error polled more than 250 medical residents who had each committed a serious medical error, the type that led to severe adverse outcomes or even death.9 Only half of the residents ever discussed the error with their attendings, and only a quarter talked with the patients and families.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The best churn models used machine learning, and (neural net) deep learning models generally outperformed all others. What changed? First, the data and computers were finally good enough to enable machine learning to dominate. In the 1990s, it was difficult to build large enough data sets. For example, a classic study of churn prediction used 650 customers and fewer than 30 variables. By 2004, computer processing and storage had improved. In the Duke tournament, the training data set contained information on hundreds of variables for tens of thousands of customers. With these additional variables and customers, machine learning methods started to perform as well, if not better, than regression.


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

“Its founders prefer to treat technology as an autonomous and fully objective force rather than spending sleepless nights worrying about inherent biases in how their systems—systems that have grown so complex that no Google engineer fully understands them—operate.”25 A narrative thread often explored in books and articles about Google is the degree to which Google’s rise has helped speed up the decline of traditional news outlets, like newspapers. In this sense, Google has displaced traditional media, even though it does not generate news stories itself. If Google’s algorithms ought to be subject to the same standards as newspapers, though, this poses some problems. In a classic study of newsroom objectivity, sociologist Gaye Tuchman observed that it was a fear of defamation that kept journalism objective. By reporting the views of others rather than relying on their own opinion, journalists were protected against allegations that they were biased in their reporting. In terms of Google’s auto-complete algorithm, it had also relied on quoting others rather than expressing opinions, since its suggested terms were based on the previous searches of thousands, or even millions, of users.


pages: 287 words: 80,180

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Asian financial crisis, Blue Ocean Strategy, borderless world, call centre, classic study, cloud computing, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, endogenous growth, Ford Model T, haute couture, index fund, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, machine translation, market fundamentalism, NetJets, Network effects, RAND corporation, Salesforce, Skype, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

When individuals feel recognized for their intellectual worth, they are willing to share their knowledge; in fact, they feel inspired to impress and confirm the expectation of their intellectual value, suggesting active ideas and knowledge sharing.6 Similarly, when individuals are treated with emotional recognition, they feel emotionally tied to the strategy and inspired to give their all. Indeed, in Frederick Herzberg’s classic study on motivation, recognition was found to inspire strong intrinsic motivation, causing people to go beyond the call of duty and engage in voluntary cooperation.7 Hence, to the extent that fair process judgments convey intellectual and emotional recognition, people will better apply their knowledge and expertise, as well as their voluntary efforts to cooperate for the organization’s success in executing strategy.


pages: 222 words: 76,854

Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

classic study, fear of failure, G4S, Mahatma Gandhi, pattern recognition, South China Sea

In the two years following my first experience in Taiwan, I really buckled down in my training. I’ve described much of that work in the early chapters of Part II, but there was also another component to this preparation. Chinese martial arts tend to be very secretive, and Tai Chi Chuan is a particularly enigmatic discipline. If you read the Tai Chi Classics, study the philosophical foundation, practice the moving meditation, you will gain a sense of awareness, feel supple, and possibly be able to generate a lot of speed and power. But it is hard to translate these principles into viable martial application until you test yourself out in the ring and incrementally separate the real from the mythical.


pages: 257 words: 76,785

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

Iain Tate is quoted in Patrick Coffee, “W+K London Experiments with Forcing Employees Not to Overexert Themselves,” Adweek, March 25, 2016, www.adweek.com/agencyspy/wk-london-experiments-with-forcing-employees-not-to-overexert-themselves/104813, and Tate, “Working Differently at W+K London,” Medium, March 15, 2016, https://medium.com/@iaintait/thoughts-about-working-differently-at-w-k-london-802b09763ec5. On relaxation, the default mode network, and creativity, see Pang, Rest, 33–50. Four-Day Weeks Boost Long-Term Happiness and Job Satisfaction. The classic study of the Hawthorne Effect is Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The Swedish study of reduced working hours and happiness is in Helena Schiller et al., “Total Workload and Recovery in Relation to Worktime Reduction: A Randomised Controlled Intervention Study with Time-Use Data,” Occupational and Environmental Medicine 75 (2018): 218–226, https://oem.bmj.com/content/75/3/218.


pages: 274 words: 72,657

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Cal Newport, call centre, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, fear of failure, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, meta-analysis, peak-end rule, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, TED Talk

I do this to ‘pop the cork’ and show that it’s safe.” He’s right to be concerned about people staying silent: One study found that 85% of workers felt “unable to raise an issue or concern to their bosses even though they felt the issue was important.” His solution—the confederate with the tough question—is well supported by evidence. There’s a classic study, conducted by Charlan Nemeth and Cynthia Chiles, demonstrating that one act of courage supports another. Let’s say you are a participant in the study. You are matched with three other people, and a researcher shows your group a series of 20 slides. After each one is presented, the researcher pauses to ask each of you what color the slide is.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

As McAfee and Brynjolfsson put it: It is exactly because incumbents are so proficient, knowledgeable and caught up in the status quo that they are unable to see what’s coming, and the unrealised potential and likely evolution of the new technology . . . Existing processes, customers and suppliers all blind incumbents to things that should be obvious, such as the possibilities of new technologies that depart greatly from the status quo.21 In fact, this can be seen experimentally. A classic study by Robert Sternberg and Peter French pitted experts and novices at the card game bridge. Unsurprisingly, the experts performed better. They were the experts, after all. But then the researchers made some structural changes to the rules. Instead of players who put out the highest card winning, this was reversed.22 This change had little effect on the performances of the novices.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

All kinds of research points to the idea that humans are social and spiritual by design. Our behavior is driven by a desire for belonging and purpose. We’re “cultish” by nature. This fundamental human itch for connection is touching, but when steered in the wrong direction, it can also cause an otherwise judicious person to do utterly irrational things. Consider this classic study: In 1951, Swarthmore College psychologist Solomon Asch gathered together half a dozen students to conduct a simple “vision test.” Asch showed four vertical lines to the participants, all but one of whom were in on the experiment, and asked them to point to the two that were the same length. There was one obviously correct answer, which you needed zero skills other than eyesight to figure out, but Asch found that if the first five students pointed to a blatantly wrong answer, 75 percent of test subjects ignored their better judgment and agreed with the majority.


pages: 252 words: 73,387

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham

active measures, classic study, clean water, Columbine, coronavirus, fixed income, Mason jar, place-making

Here in New Hampshire, there are a number of farming organizations—including one sponsored by the state—intended specifically for beginning farmers! Similar groups exist all across the country. Speaking of the Cooperative Extension Service, every state has at least one so-called land grant university. These universities were originally established under the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 with primary missions to teach agriculture, classical studies, mechanical arts, and military tactics. The Hatch Act of 1887 established agricultural experiment stations at these universities to advance the state of agricultural science, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established the Cooperative Extension Service to disseminate the data gained at the experiment stations.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The second claim is that (2) ‘The double-­ballot system and proportional representation tend to multipartyism.’41 While originally stated as a universal law, Duverger subsequently suggested that these claims were only probabilistic generalizations.42 The conditions under which this relationship holds, and its status as a law, have attracted considerable debate in the literature marked by continued reformulations of the original statement and many efforts to define precisely what is to ‘count’ as a party in order to verify these claims.43 Much of the literature, notably Lijphart’s classic study, supports Duverger’s generalization that Plurality electoral systems tend toward party dualism, while Proportional Representation is associated with multipartyism.44 Previous research compared the results of the national election for the lower house of parliament in 170 contests worldwide from 316 Party Fortunes and Electoral Rules 1995 to 2000.45 It found that the mean number of parliamentary parties (based on the simplest definition of parties as holding at least one seat) was around 5.22 under Majoritarian systems, 8.85 under Mixed systems, and 9.52 under Proportional Representation.

In the 2015 general election, while 8.4 percent of the Interwar generation reported voting UKIP, only 2 percent of the Millennials did so. As well as birth cohorts, Model 1 in Table 11.1 also includes a range of social background factors; none is significant except for education. This finding has been widely noted in previous studies of Brexit as well as in classic studies of authoritarianism.60 College education is consistently one of the strongest predictors of socially liberal and socially conservative values – and of support for Authoritarian-­Populist parties and Brexit 386 % Voted Leave .06 .04 .61% .55% .45% .02 .00 .28% Interwar Baby boomers Gen X Millennials Generation Figure 11.4.


pages: 695 words: 194,693

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

“Modeling the Survival of Athenian Owl Tetradrachms Struck in the Period from 561–42 BC from Then to the Present,” in Proceedings of the 30th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, vol. 5. St. Gallen, Switzerland: Systems Dynamics Society, pp. 4024–4043. 18. Xenophon. 1892. The Works of Xenophon, H. G. Daykins (trans.). London: Macmillan and Co., p. 331. 19. Aperghis, G. G. 1998. “A reassessment of the Laurion Mining lease records.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 42(1): 1–20. 20. Papazarkadas, N. 2012. “Poletai,” in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah04267/full. 21. Camp, John McKesson. 2007. “Excavations in the Athenian Agora: 2002–2007.” Hesperia 76(4): 627–663. CHAPTER 6 1. Van Wees, Hans. 2013.

Andreau, Jean. 1999. Banking and Business in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Angela, Alberto. 2009. A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome. New York: Europa Editions. Aperghis, G. G. 1998. “A reassessment of the Laurion mining lease records.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 42(1): 1–20. Archibald, Zosia, John K. Davies, and Vincent Gabrielsen (eds.). 2011. The Economies of Hellenistic Societies, Third to First Centuries BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Archibald, Zosia Halina. 2013. Ancient Economies of the Northern Aegean: Fifth to First Centuries BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

Even if, as data suggest, the migrants on average did not end up with better jobs or higher wages than those who stayed behind, they were at least able to escape the oppressive cultures from which they came. The natural response to disquietude was to look for changes in one’s natural and physical environment.4 Even for people who didn’t move permanently during these earlier eras, there was significantly more mobility back and forth between regions. Nicholas Lemann, in his classic study of African American migration, wrote: “For a time, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it seemed as if the whole black society of Clarksdale and the Mississippi Delta had transferred itself to Chicago. Everybody was either living in Chicago, or back and forth from Chicago, or occasionally visiting Chicago.”5 This was a way to earn more money and see more of the world, but without cutting ties altogether with one’s home community.


pages: 296 words: 86,188

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, classic study, demographic transition, Drosophila, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, mouse model, out of africa, place-making, scientific mainstream, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, women in the workforce

Gowaty, Patricia Adair, Rebecca Steinichen, and Wyatt W. Anderson. “Mutual Interest Between the Sexes and Reproductive Success in Drosophila pseudoobscura.” Evolution 56, no. 12 (2002): 2537–40. Gowaty, Patricia Adair, Yong-Kyu Kim, and Wyatt W. Anderson. “No Evidence of Sexual Selection in a Repetition of Bateman’s Classic Study of Drosophila melanogaster.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 29 (2012): 11740–45. Trivers, Robert L. “Sexual Selection and Resource-Accruing Abilities in Anolis garmani.” Evolution 30, no. 2 (1976): 253–69. Janicke, Tim, et al. “Darwinian Sex Roles Confirmed Across the Animal Kingdom.”


pages: 312 words: 86,770

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Brownian motion, classic study, dark matter, Drosophila, Gregor Mendel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method

Everything in our bodies is a variation on a mammalian or primate template. Thus, I believe that the weight of genetic evidence is telling us that the evolution of primates, great apes, and humans is due to changes more in the control of genes than in the proteins the genes encode. I am not the first to reach this conclusion. In a classic study three decades ago, Mary Claire King and Allan Wilson showed that the sequences of chimp and human proteins were nearly identical and drew the conclusion that evolutionary differences were due to changes in gene regulation. A host of eminent biologists in the 1960s and 1970s—including Linus Pauling, Emile Zuckerkandl, Eric Davidson, Roy Britten, and François Jacob—also deduced the same.


pages: 309 words: 86,909

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are clear that increased income inequality is responsible for increasing the segregation of rich and poor.281–283 The concentration of poor people in poor areas increases all kinds of stress, deprivation and difficulty – from increased commuting times for those who have to leave deprived communities to find work elsewhere, to increased risk of traffic accidents, worse schools, poor levels of services, exposure to gang violence, pollution and so on. Sociologist William Julius Wilson, in his classic study of inner-city poverty, refers to poor people in poor neighbourhoods as the ‘truly disadvantaged’.225 Two studies from the USA have shown that residential economic segregation increases people’s risk of dying, and one showed that more unequal cities were also more economically segregated.284–285 These processes will of course feed back into further reductions in social mobility.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Out of these conflicts rose a whole new set of industries dependent on the development and exploitation of science. As a prescient Winston Churchill remarked, “The new empires are those of the mind.”37 Despite the threat of thermonuclear war, the 1950s and 1960s were suffused with a spirit of technological optimism. In his classic study The Technological Society (1967), French philosopher Jacques Ellul drew a contemporary picture of the world of 2000, complete with regular shuttle service to the moon, widespread synthetic foods, and an end to both hunger and poverty.38 These assumptions, of course, have not been fulfilled even now, but the promise of such improvements—as is the case today—captivated many observers at the time.


pages: 336 words: 83,903

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

This new form is characterised not by the exclusion of human qualities from the labour process, but by the enrolment and exploitation of these qualities. The problem here is not that the labour process presents no opportunities for expression and identification, but that the employer expects workers to become fully involved and invested in the job. The insights developed around this new form of alienation are indebted to C. Wright Mills’ classic study White Collar (Mills, 1956), though discussions in this area were subsequently popularised by Arlie Hochschild and her theory of ‘emotional labour’ (Hochschild, 1983). Both authors essentially posed the same question: what are the consequences when instead of being asked to leave their human qualities at home in the morning, workers are expressly asked to bring their emotions, their personalities and their individuality to work?


pages: 304 words: 85,291

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

(Liège, Belgium: Université de Liège, 1999), 119–23. Among the most desired objects: Michael Fulford, “Gallo-Roman Sigillata: Fresh Approaches, Fresh Challenges, Fresh Questions,” in Seeing Red: New Economic and Social Perspectives on Terra Sigillata, ed. Michael Fulford and Emma Durham (London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2013), 1–17. Feathered Serpent Pyramid: Cowgill, Ancient Teotihuacan. At Tikal, the excavation: Jones, “Marketplace at Tikal.” the same impressive stonework: McMahon, “Waste Management in Early Urban Southern Mesopotamia,” 19–39. McMahon discusses the appearance of stone orthostats in bathrooms; for the discussion of orthostats in public buildings, see Ömür Harmanşah, “Upright Stones and Building Stories: Architectural Technologies and the Poetics of Urban Space,” in Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013).


pages: 332 words: 81,289

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Claims by active managers that they are favoured by bear markets as they can hold cash and defensive positions is not borne out in the two market crashes during the past ten years. To quote: ‘the opportunity does not translate to reality’. Investment policy outweighs investment strategy A classic study (Brinson et al., 1986) relating to actively managed US pension plans and the role of long-term policy versus short-term active management decisions concludes that: ‘Investment policy dominates investment strategy, explaining on average 93.6% of the variation in total plan returns.’ This has also become one of the most misquoted pieces of research in investment academia.


pages: 303 words: 83,564

Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World by Paul Collier

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, charter city, classic study, Edward Glaeser, experimental economics, first-past-the-post, full employment, game design, George Akerlof, global village, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, language acquisition, mass immigration, mirror neurons, moral hazard, open borders, radical decentralization, risk/return, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, white flight, zero-sum game

The Cultures of Migrants So mutual regard, trust, and moral outrage against those who free ride all support an equitable and cooperative society. How does this relate to migration? Migrants bring not only the human capital generated in their own societies; they also bring the moral codes of their own societies. Thus, unsurprisingly, Nigerian immigrants to other societies tend to be untrusting and opportunistic. In a classic study of differences in cultural attitudes, Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel compared the payment of parking fines by diplomats in New York.8 During the key period, diplomats had legal immunity from fines, and so the only restraint on a refusal to pay was their own ethical standards. Fisman and Miguel found that the behavior of diplomats from different countries varied enormously but was well explained by the corruption level prevailing in the country of the diplomat, as measured by standard surveys.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

Ants can build nests that are over a metre high and that are dug several metres deep into the ground, they can construct a network of supply chains covering several square kilometres and some species even grow and farm their own food. But if you put ants in a bucket they become very stupid indeed. I first heard about the bucket experiment from biologist Nigel Franks at the University of Bristol. He and his colleagues were in Panama in 1989 when they came up with the idea, inspired by classic studies from the 1940s. They placed army ants in a bucket, the edges of which were coated with a material that prevented them from escaping, and filmed them from above. The ants went round and round in circles, and as they did so they got faster and faster. As they walked, they deposited a chemical pheromone, which led the ants behind them to think there must be something interesting to find further on.


pages: 263 words: 81,542

Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever

British Empire, classic study, George Santayana, Howard Zinn, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, trade route, white picket fence

There are also, the CDC report says, more than a million alcohol-related emergency room visits as well as 10,000 traffic fatalities a year caused by drinking.2 Drinking is a cherished American custom—a way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. It brings people together. It makes social connection easy. It loosens inhibitions. “Alcohol has immediate and profound effects on behavior,” writes Dr. James Milam in his classic study Under the Influence. “At low doses, alcohol stimulates the brain cells, and the drinker feels happy, talkative, energetic, and euphoric. After one or two drinks, the normal drinker may experience some improvement in thought and performance.”3 This is the alcoholic sweet spot, and its looseness and clarity have been woven into the fabric of American history.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Atlanta, Georgia, has the Centers for Disease Control, research universities Emory and Georgia Tech . . . Cleveland, Ohio, was an early home to venture capital, and the Cleveland Clinic is one of the premier research hospitals in the nation. Neither city today has significant activity in biotech” (pp. 4–5). [>] In a fascinating and now classic study: Zucker, Darby, and Brewer, “Intellectual Human Capital and the Birth of U.S. Biotechnology Enterprises”; Zucker et al., “Minerva Unbound”; Zucker, Darby, and Armstrong, “Commercializing Knowledge”; Zucker and Darby, “Capturing Technological Opportunity via Japan’s Star Scientists”; Zucker, Darby, and Armstrong, “Geographically Localized Knowledge”; Zucker and Darby, “Present at the Biotechnological Revolution.” [>] The attractive nature of economic development: In more recent work, Zucker and Darby show that today the United States has just over half of the world’s biotech stars.


Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes

Asperger Syndrome, behavioural economics, classic study, complexity theory, epigenetics, Higgs boson, intermodal, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, phenotype, social intelligence, the built environment, theory of mind, twin studies

When imitating retrieval of a toy from a box, three- and four-year-old children do not only release the latches and open the doors impeding their access to the prize. They also copy the model’s extraneous actions—such as tapping the box with a wand—and show this “overimitation” even when they are able to tell the experimenter which actions are “silly” and which are necessary (Lyons, Young, and Keil, 2007). In this classic study of overimitation, and many others, it is not clear whether children are copying relations among body parts—what is called “imitation” in this book, and in cognitive science more generally—or whether they are reproducing relations among inanimate objects (for example, between the box and the wand), which is sometimes called “emulation.”


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The professed admiration for her was therefore complicated, exploitative on the part of the media and, sometimes, tacitly dehumanizing. The randomness, misfortune and complexity of cultural wants that led to Dobyne’s celebrity is typical of the way stars are made. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, in her classic study of Hollywood, noticed that the randomness of success led to a tendency towards magical thinking in the movie industry.20 Hollywood formulae were like spells, their market research like divination, executive decisions justified by pseudo-telepathic ‘instinct’. These were magical techniques in aid of compelling Lady Luck.


pages: 254 words: 81,009

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

What is important though, is what happened over the coming weeks. The researchers observed how often the children chose to draw of their own free will, when no reward was involved. Those who hadn’t been rewarded spent around twice as much time drawing as those who had been rewarded.5 This is the classic study that launched a focus on intrinsic motivation: motivation that comes from the activity itself, not from rewards. Remember, the children loved drawing, but after being rewarded, they were less interested unless there was a reward. They had a reason for drawing, and it wasn’t for the fun of it. The reward turned play into work, and it stayed work.


The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

Fig. 17: Hirmer Fotoarchiv Fig. 19: Reprinted with permission from Robert Dixon, Mathographics (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1987). Figs. 22 & 23, bottom: Reprinted with permission from H. E. Huntley, The Divine Proportion (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1970). Fig. 23, top: Alison Frantz Photographic Collection, American School of Classical Studies at Athens Fig. 28: Reprinted with permission from Trudi Hammel Garland, Fascinating Fibonaccis Mystery and Magic in Numbers © 1987 by Dale Seymour Publications, an imprint of Pearson Learning, a division of Pearson Education, Inc. Figs. 31–32: Reprinted with permission from Trudi Hammel Garland, Fascinating Fibonaccis Mystery and Magic in Numbers © 1987 by Dale Seymour Publications, an imprint of Pearson Learning, a division of Pearson Education, Inc.


pages: 266 words: 85,265

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal by Erik Vance

classic study, fixed income, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hive mind, impulse control, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, nocebo, personalized medicine, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, side project, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Yogi Berra

And each time you make a copy, it looks a little different—a little more blurry and faded. So eventually you have to take a permanent marker and fill in some of the edges to make it appear sharper. Simply put, a false memory is an error in one of these steps. And once that error occurs, it’s almost impossible to correct. Take, for instance, a classic study by the legendary psychologist and memory expert Ulric Neisser. The morning after the explosion of NASA’s space shuttle Challenger in 1986, Neisser took a poll of where his students were when they first heard about it. Almost three years later he ran the poll again; almost all the answers had changed in some way.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, 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, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Data on national and world incomes after 1980 are provided by the IMF in the World Economic Outlook database, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2019/01/weodata/index.aspx. 2. For a captivating history of the British industrial revolution with a strong focus on technological advances, including the steam engine, see the classic study by David Landes, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 3. Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development,” GGDC Research Memorandum 174, January 2018. 4.


pages: 263 words: 81,527

The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind by Nick Chater

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, classic study, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, double helix, Geoffrey Hinton, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, loose coupling, machine translation, speech recognition, tacit knowledge

The output of each cycle will feed into the next – if we are to have a stream of coherent thought rather than an aimless daydream. 12 For example, K. A. Ericsson and H. A. Simon (1980), ‘Verbal reports as data’, Psychological Review, 87(3): 215–51. 13 J. S. Mill, The Autobiography (1873). 11. PRECEDENTS NOT PRINCIPLES 1 For analysis of the psychology of chess, see classic studies by A. D. de Groot, Het denken van de schaker [The thought of the chess player] (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1946); updated translation published as Thought and Choice in Chess (The Hague: Mouton, 1965; corrected second edition published in 1978); W. G. Chase and H. A. Simon (1973), ‘Perception in chess’, Cognitive Psychology, 4: 55–81; and more recently, F.


pages: 442 words: 85,640

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help by New Scientist, Helen Thomson

Abraham Wald, Black Lives Matter, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Flynn Effect, George Floyd, global pandemic, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lock screen, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, nocebo, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, social distancing, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, TED Talk, TikTok, ultra-processed food, Walter Mischel

Oh, and if you came to the conclusion you were less likely to fall prey to biased thinking, that’s the illusory superiority bias, or the ‘above average’ effect. This is the belief, harboured by many in the West at least, that they are above average at everything from driving to performance at work. In one classic study, 93 per cent of drivers in the United States rated themselves as above average on their driving ability. In fact, the effect first came to light among a small sample of drivers in an earlier study who all rated themselves as above-average – despite having all been recently hospitalised in car crashes.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

Gratwick, A. S. “Sundials, Parasites, and Girls from Boeotia.” The Classical Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1979): 308–23. Hannah, Robert. Time in Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Hoff, M. “The Early History of the Roman Agora at Athens.” Bulletin Supplement (University of London, Institute of Classical Studies), no. 55, The Greek Renaissance in the Roman Empire: Papers from the Tenth British Museum Classical Colloquium, 1989, 1–8. Hung, Wu. “Monumentality of Time: Giant Clocks, the Drum Tower, the Clock Tower,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, ed. Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin, 107–32.


Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt by Peg Streep

classic study, financial independence

Tronick found that in the conversation-like pattern of mother-infant interactions in which each partner appears to be responsive to the other, the mother and the infant were both equally influential in directing the interaction A mother’s facial expressions, her voice, her touch—all the areas of communication between mother and infant—teach her child much more than the lesson of “I love you.” The mother communicates all manner of information about the world and the baby’s place in it, including whether the world is safe or dangerous. In one classic study, researchers placed one-year-old infants on a visual cliff. Their mothers were then instructed to make their facial expressions communicate either happiness or fear. An astonishing 74 percent of infants whose mothers communicated happiness—the “It’s okay, sweetie” signal—“went over” the visual cliff; not one infant whose mother’s face communicated fear—the “Don’t go there” or “Stop” signal—did.


pages: 1,051 words: 334,334

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

centre right, classic study, company town, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ought to be enough for anybody, plutocrats, random walk

Structurally, it's a stiffened chain of aromatic rings, hexagons like the gold one that slides and taps above Hilary Bounce's navel, alternating here and there with what are known as heterocyclic rings. The origins of Imipolex G are traceable back to early research done at du Pont. Plasticity has its grand tradition and main stream, which happens to flow by way of du Pont and their famous employee Carothers, known as The Great Synthesist. His classic study of large molecules spanned the decade of the twenties and brought us directly to nylon, which not only is a delight to the fetishist and a convenience to the armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and well within the System, an announcement of Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature.

Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in the ACS Journal, year before last. Jamf was on loan again, this time as a chemist, to the Americans, whose National Research Council had begun a massive program to explore the morphine molecule and its possibilities—a Ten-Year Plan, coinciding, most oddly, with the classic study of large molecules being carried on by Carothers of du Pont, the Great Synthesist. Connection? Of course there's one. But we don't talk about it. NRC is synthesizing new molecules every day, most of them from pieces of the morphine molecule. Du Pont is stringing together groups such as amides into long chains.

Playful Seaman Bo-dine—none other—has seeded tonight's grounds with a massive dose of Laszlo Jamf's celebrated intoxicant, scored on Bodine's most recent trip to Berlin. The property of time-modulation peculiar to Oneirine was one of the first to be discovered by investigators. "It is experienced," writes Shetzline in his classic study, "in a subjective sense ... uh ... well. Put it this way. It's like stuffing wedges of silver sponge, right, into, your brain!" So, out in the mellow sea-return tonight, the two fatal courses do intersect in space, but not in time. Not nearly in time, heh heh. What Beláustegui fired his torpedo at was a darkrust old derelict, carried passively by currents and wind, but bringing to the night something of the skull: an announcement of metal emptiness, of shadow, that has spooked even stronger positivists than Beláustegui.


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Thomas Robisheaux has argued that the enormous impact of the war came not just ‘from the harsh and inhuman conduct of the soldiery, but from the way all social, political, and religious order vanished and so contributed to the wild disorder and confusion at every level of society’.104 ‘The outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict'? In the conclusion to her classic study of the Thirty Years War, first published in 1938, Dame Veronica Wedgwood stated sadly: ‘The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. It is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.‘105 The evidence presented in this chapter lends some support to her verdict: not only Germany but also northern Italy, the Dutch Republic, Sweden, Switzerland and Denmark all suffered effects that were ‘either negative or disastrous’.

Had Don Gaspar persevered with his clerical career, he might have pursued advanced studies at one of Castile's Colegios Mayores (graduate colleges), which prepared men not only to be bishops and abbots but also to fill senior administrative and judicial positions in Castile and its American colonies. As Richard Kagan remarked in his classic study of the universities of Habsburg Spain, ‘no other occupation or career offered such possibilities for economic and social advancement’.21 Even Wang Daokun might have felt a twinge of envy. 49. Universities founded in Europe, 1600–60. Although the expansion of institutions of higher education in Europe slowed after 1600, the following decades also saw numerous foundations, particularly in areas where Catholics and Protestants struggled for control.

In Spain, a government committee called on Philip IV to ‘close down some grammar schools newly founded in villages and small towns, because with the opportunity of having them so near, the peasants divert their sons from the jobs and occupations in which they were born and raised, and put them to study’. In France, Cardinal Richelieu wanted to close three-quarters of the collèges de plein exercice (schools that provided a general education in Classical studies) because he, like Philip IV, reasoned that, if everyone received an education, ‘the sons of the poor would desert the productive occupations of their parents for the comforts of office’. The French scholar Gabriel Naudé agreed, predicting in 1639 that ‘the great number of colleges, seminaries and schools’ would increase the frequency of ‘revolutions of state’.


The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease by Lanius, Ruth A.; Vermetten, Eric; Pain, Clare

autism spectrum disorder, classic study, cognitive load, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, Helicobacter pylori, impulse control, intermodal, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, p-value, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, yellow journalism

Part 3 synopsis In Ch. 12, De Bellis focuses on perhaps the least studied and yet most detrimental form of early life trauma, neglect. Indeed he concludes that child neglect is the most chronic and prevalent form of child maltreatment. As opposed to the authors of Chs. 9 and 11, he brings the concept of attachment directly into the conceptualization of early life trauma. Reviewing Harlow’s classic studies of maternal deprivation and citing John Bowlby’s seminal work, De Bellis notes, “the social attachment between mother and infant is an essential experience-dependent interaction of normal development.” Thus, along with a large number of other current researchers, he moves the timeline of early trauma back to infancy.

Abusive families are likely to coerce children to minimize or deny abuse or its after-effects. This will affect memory as well as conscious withholding. In reviewing the evidence regarding recovered memory of abuse, Dalenberg and Palesh (Ch. 21) emphasize the comparable accuracy of recovered versus continuous memory of abuse. Perhaps the most startling aspect of Williams’ classic study of a past traumatic event [6,7] was the fact that 38% of women interviewed 17 years after the event reported no conscious recollection of it. An additional 14% reported that during some period of their life they could not recall the traumatic event. Documentation of the event occurrence had been obtained from hospital emergency room records.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

Jobs on the black market grew exponentially; the possibility of demanding decent working conditions became more and more utopian. Migration multiplied among those who could manage it. For those who couldn’t, the possibilities of social improvements disappeared; the future—a word without much meaning—ended up looking much too similar to the present. In their classic study, Free Markets and Food Riots (1994), authors John K. Walton and David Seddon note almost 150 protests against the IMF between 1976 and 1992 in these countries.10 Most started as food riots. During the 1990s the tendency was clear: the number of hungry people started to increase again, reaching about 850 million and continuing upward.

Hence, the US law stipulated that 75 percent of its food aid would be in the form of food manufactured, processed, and packaged in their country. The large grain companies that dominate the sector, such as Cargill, Bunge, and company, are those who benefit most: they get half the orders—and according to a classic study by Barrett and Maxwell, they charge receiving countries between 10 and 70 percent more than market price.7 The law also stipulates that 75 percent of the food be transported on US-owned ships. US merchant shipping is an unstable business; other countries with lower taxes and fewer labor rules ship at lower cost; only 3 percent of international trade to and from the United States is transported on US ships, so the transport of that food is one of the sector’s main life preservers.


pages: 298 words: 95,668

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, 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, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

Other recent works in this line include Thomas Hall and David Ferguson’s The Great Depression: An International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies (1998), Gene Smiley’s 2002 Rethinking the Great Depression and Jim Powell’s 2003 FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. Smiley writes: “Although various aspects of their analysis have been criticized, chapters 7–9 of Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz’s classic study A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 remain the starting point for studying the Great Depression and the recovery in the 1930s.”18 Friedman reviewed Powell’s manuscript in draft and provided this promotional blurb: “Admirers of FDR credit his New Deal with restoring the American economy after the disastrous contraction of 1929–33.


pages: 313 words: 94,490

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

Cialdini opens with the dilemma of the weatherman in a rainy city who regularly receives hate mail because viewers associate him with the news he delivers; he also discusses research on the “luncheon technique” that showed people were more likely to endorse political statements that they first heard while eating lunch. Cialdini’s book is the classic study on influence and one of the best books in the social sciences. “Rashomon can be seen as”: C. Vognar, “Japanese Film Legend Kurosawa Dies at 88,” Dallas Morning News, September 7, 1998, 1A. In 1929, Einstein protested: Einstein’s comments about the way people used the term relativity is from David Bodanis, E = mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation (New York: Walker & Company, 2000).


pages: 262 words: 73,439

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) by Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox

BRICs, centre right, classic study, dematerialisation, informal economy, Kickstarter, land reform, new economy, the built environment, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, urban renewal

Other key works include Bear 2007; Chalfin 2010; Jensen and Winthereik 2013; Larkin 2008; and the Lockrem and Lugo curated collection of Cultural Anthropology (2012). Key interventions on Latin American include Campbell and Hetherington 2014 and Carse 2014. 9. See Graham and Thrift 2007. 10. See, for example, the classic study by James Scott (1998) and, in a different vein, the ethnographic work of Caroline Humphrey (2005). 11. Tsing (1993) has discussed the failure of the promise of infrastructures to deliver in Indonesia; and Navaro-Yashin (2012) has explored the relationship between infrastructures and social differentiation in Cyprus.


pages: 420 words: 98,309

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

Ayatollah Khomeini, classic study, climate anxiety, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, false memory syndrome, fear of failure, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, medical malpractice, medical residency, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, psychological pricing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sugar pill, telemarketer, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

The story of this couple is in chapter 4, "Extramarital Affairs: The Pearl in the Oyster," by Julie Gottman, p. 50. 12 John Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail, p. 127; for his description of the fifty-six couples, see p. 128; note 7. 13 Donald T. Saposnek and Chip Rose (1990), "The Psychology of Divorce," in D. L. Crumbley and N. G. Apostolou (eds.), Handbook of Financial Planning for Divorce and Separation. New York: John Wiley. Their article is available online at http://www.mediate.com/articles/saporo.cfm. For a classic study of the ways that couples reconstruct their memories of their marriage and each other, see Janet R. Johnston and Linda E. Campbell (1988J, Impasses of Divorce: The Dynamics and Resolution of Family Conflict. New York: Free Press. 14 Jacobson and Christensen, Acceptance and Change in Couple Therapy, note 3, discuss new approaches to help partners accept each other rather than always trying to get the other to change. 15 Vivian Gornick (2002), "What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude, the Pleasure of Self-Knowledge," in Cathi Hanauer (ed.), The Bitch in the House.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Yes, Goldman might be guilty of many things, they may even have stolen billions of your hard-earned tax dollars to buy themselves yachts and blowjobs, but we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater! But things did shift a bit. The Narrative was wounded. The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals: at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move. That’s what happened in the summer of 2009: for a variety of reasons, including the Friedman and Aleynikov scandals, the tide of public opinion turned against Goldman. The same on-their-knees/at-your-throat media reversal that George Bush felt at the end of his term was now being experienced by the bank.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

In dozens of studies, people in possession of some form of power (managerial authority, say, or social status or just plain old wealth) are measurably more likely to violate social norms in the pursuit of self-interest. We’re more apt to be rude, to invade personal space, to use stereotypes, to cheat, and even to break the law. In one now-classic study, University of California–Berkeley psychologist Paul Piff found that “high-status” drivers (those in really nice cars) were nearly four times as likely as low-status drivers to cut off other drivers at an uncontrolled intersection and nearly three times as likely to drive through a crosswalk while a pedestrian was crossing.


pages: 292 words: 94,324

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, fear of failure, framing effect, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, iterative process, lateral thinking, machine translation, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, stem cell, theory of mind

Arthur Elstein studied clinical reasoning, testing physicians' acumen with written descriptions of cases as well as with actors posing as patients with various diseases. Overall, Elstein estimated the rate of error in diagnosis at 15 percent, meaning one in six to seven patients was incorrectly assessed. Elstein's estimate agrees with classic studies of diagnostic errors of 10 to 15 percent, based on autopsies that revealed the missed diagnosis: A. S. Elstein, "Clinical reasoning in medicine," in Clinical Reasoning in the Health Professions, ed. J. Higgs and M. A. Jones (Woburn, Mass.: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1995), pp. 49–59; W. Kirch and C.


pages: 293 words: 91,412

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

As more goods are produced and owned, the greater are the opportunities for fraud and the more property that must be protected. If the provision of public law enforcement services does not keep pace, the counterpart of increased well-being will, we may be certain, be increased crime. The city of Los Angeles, in modern times, was the near-classic study in the problem of social balance. Magnificently efficient factories and oil refineries, a lavish supply of automobiles, a vast consumption of handsomely packaged products, coupled for many years with the absence of a municipal trash collection service which forced the use of home incinerators, made the air nearly unbreathable for an appreciable part of each year.


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

Chapter 2 1Beesley quote from an interview with Fran Schechter for NOW magazine (2010, Available at: https://nowtoronto.com/art-and-books/features/art-as-organism/) 2Philip Beesley’s curriculum vitae may be found at: http://philipbeesleyarchitect.com/about/14K24_PB_CV.pdf 3One of the early and most influential accounts of rapid scene recognition may be found in Mary Potter’s landmark 1969 paper titled “Recognition Memory for a Rapid Sequence of Pictures,” published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, (1969, Volume 81, pages 10–15). 4Fritz Heider’s classic study with Marianne Simmel was published in a paper titled “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior,” in 1944 in the American Journal of Psychology (Volume 57, pages 243–259). The video I described is easy to find online, for example at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76p64j3H1Ng 5Albert Michotte’s work on causality is found in his beautiful book The Perception of Causality (Methuen, Andover, MA, 1962). 6I heard the story of the hoarder and the wet containers at a workshop held in Toronto in 2012 by the renowned psychologist David Tolin.


pages: 302 words: 92,546

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin

23andMe, classic study, do well by doing good, double helix, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, life extension, longitudinal study, mandelbrot fractal, medical residency, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, sugar pill, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Today, however, most abdominal aortic aneurysms are discovered by ultrasound or CT, imaging that can show structures much smaller than three centimeters, which is the diameter of a normal aorta. A two-centimeter difference in what can be detected—less than an inch—may not sound like much, but it is. A classic study of 201 men between ages sixty and seventy-five with hypertension and/or heart disease—the group most likely to have aneurysms—demonstrated just how much ultrasound can affect the apparent prevalence of aneurysms.15 Five aneurysms were found in this population during physical examinations, while eighteen were detected by ultrasound.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

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

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

Mill was the product of a group of Victorian intellectuals—the philosophical radicals—who devoted their lives to fashioning an al­ternative to Britain’s ancien régime of landed aristocrats and Anglican clergymen. They included the most important influence on him by far, his father. James Mill (1773–1836) had been born in poverty in Scotland but had earned a plum job with the mighty East India Company by dint of talent and hard work, producing a classic study of Britain’s involvement in India while also supporting his young family as a freelance journalist and training his eldest son, John Stuart, as an intellectual racehorse. James’s great watchwords were “liberty,” “reason,” and “effort,” and he believed that Britain’s traditional overlords were threats to all three.2 How could industry prosper when idle landlords lived off the fruit of other people’s labor?


The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities by Violet Moller

Book of Ingenious Devices, British Empire, classic study, double entry bookkeeping, Johannes Kepler, Murano, Venice glass, Republic of Letters, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

Pasche, Sciences at the Court of Frederick II (Belgium: Brepols, 1994) Justin Marozzi, Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (London: Allen Lane, 2014) John Jeffries Martin, Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilisation of an Italian City State, 1297–1797 (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) María Rosa Menocal, Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (London: Little, Brown, 2002) Elizabeth Nash, Sevilla, Córdoba and Granada: A Cultural and Literary History (Oxford: Signal Books, 2005) Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (London: Macmillan, 2017) John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (London: Penguin, 2012) Vivian Nutton, The Unknown Galen (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2002) ———, Ancient Medicine (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004) Norbert Ohler, The Medieval Traveller (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989) Katherine Park & Lorraine Daston (eds), The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) O.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

Justin Smith Morrill, a representative from Vermont, pushed through the first Morrill Land-Grant Act, which was signed into law by President Lincoln. It granted each state rights to federal land in the western territories, the income from which would be used to create at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts . . . in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. Mechanic arts and practical education for the industrial classes were a far cry from Horace and Demosthenes, and for good reason.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

The authors believe that age segregation is closely connected to ageism, since it sets up sharp distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and leads to stereotyping and associated prejudices. When the three stages become multiple stages, then people from different ages have a chance to engage in similar experiences. As Gordon Allport showed in his classic study, one weapon against stereotypes and prejudices is contact between groups.31 Perhaps as this happens, the age homogeneity of networks will begin to disintegrate, as people from different ages share experiences and, from this, create friendships. Perhaps old age will become less of a ‘separate country’.32 Agenda for Change This book is about what happens when many people across the world live to 100.


pages: 408 words: 94,311

The Great Depression: A Diary by Benjamin Roth, James Ledbetter, Daniel B. Roth

bank run, banking crisis, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, financial independence, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, short selling, statistical model, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

Two indispensable books (complete with photos) on the devastating impact of the Great Depression on the everyday life of Americans are The Great Depression: America in the 1930s (Little, Brown, 1993) and Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940 (Ivan R. Dee, 2002) by David E. Kyvig. John A. Garraty’s Great Depression: A Classic Study of the Worldwide Depression of the 1930s (Anchor Books, 1987) provides a thorough background on the effects of the economic downturn around the world. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (University of Illinois Press, 1998) by Richard H. Pells offers a valuable cultural history of the era from a leftist perspective.


Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology by Adrienne Mayor

AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, deep learning, driverless car, Elon Musk, industrial robot, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, life extension, Menlo Park, Nick Bostrom, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, popular electronics, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing test

Classical Philology 86, 1:17–29. Donohue, Alice A. 1988. Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture. Oxford. Dougherty, Carol. 2006. Prometheus. London: Routledge. Dow, Sterling. 1937. “Prytaneis. A Study of the Inscriptions Honouring the Athenian Councillors.” Hesperia Suppl. 1, Athens: American School of Classical Studies. Dudbridge, Glen. 2005. “Buddhist Images in Action.” In Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture: Selected Papers on China, 134–50. Leiden: Brill. Dunbabin, Katherine. 1986. “Sic erimus cuncti . . . The Skeleton in Greco-Roman Art.” Jahrbuch des Deutsches Archäologischen Instituts 101 (1986): 185–255.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

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

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

The figures of the auditing department’s formal structure and informal network are reproduced from this article. 8 For an analysis of how the visual representation of networks changes how we interpret them, see Cathleen McGrath, Jim Blythe, and David Krackhardt, “The Effect of Spatial Arrangement on Judgments and Errors in Interpreting Graphs,” Social Networks 19, no. 3 (1997): 223–242. 9 For an empirical study showing the (limited) influence of the formal chart on the advice network of an organization, see Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo, “Affective Primacy in Intraorganizational Task Networks,” Organization Science 26, no. 2 (2015): 373–89; for a review of research on the link between formal structure and networks in organizations, see Bill McEvily, Giuseppe Soda, and Marco Tortoriello, “More Formally: Rediscovering the Missing Link between Formal Organization and Informal Social Structure,” Academy of Management Annals 8, no. 1 (2014): 299–345. 10 Krackhardt, “Social Networks and the Liability of Newness,” 166. 11 Battilana and Casciaro, “Change Agents, Networks, and Institutions,” 381–98; Battilana and Casciaro, “The Network Secrets,” 62–68; and Debra Meyerson, “Radical Change, the Quiet Way,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 9 (2001): 92–100. For a theory of the firm as a political entity, see James G. March, “The Business Firm as a Political Coalition,” The Journal of Politics 24, no. 4 (1962): 662–78. 12 For a classic study of how people gain influence through their network, see Daniel J. Brass, “Being in the Right Place: A Structural Analysis of Individual Influence in an Organization,” Administrative Science Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1984): 518–39. 13 For a historical recounting of the power of networks, see Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (New York: Penguin Books, 2017). 14 William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, “Status Quo Bias in Decision-Making,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1, no. 1 (1988): 7–59. 15 Battilana and Casciaro, “The Network Secrets,” 62–68. 16 David Krackhardt measured reputational power by asking every company employee to rate everybody else in the company for their capacity to get things done despite resistance, and their capacity to influence others based on personal magnetism.


pages: 326 words: 88,968

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

., “Sleep duration and all-cause mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies,” Sleep 33, no. 5 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/33.5.585. 41Bob Morris, “Arianna Huffington’s Sleep Revolution Starts at Home,” The New York Times, last modified April 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/realestate/arianna-huffingtons-sleep-revolution-starts-at-home.html; Marie Kondo, “The Joy of Sleep, With Arianna Huffington,” KonMari, accessed July 28, 2020, https://konmari.com/arianna-huffington-sleep/. 42Erin Wigger, “The Whitehall Study,” Unhealthy Work, last modified June 22, 2011, https://unhealthywork.org/classic-studies/the-whitehall-study/; Vicki Brower, “Mind-body research moves towards the mainstream,” EMBO reports 7, no. 4 (2006), https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.embor.7400671. 43“What is Cortisol?,” Endocrine Society, last modified November, 2018, https://www.hormone.org/your-health-and-hormones/glands-and-hormones-a-to-z/hormones/cortisol; “Chronic stress puts your health at risk,” Mayo Clinic, last modified March 19, 2019, https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/indepth/stress/art-20046037; Bruce S.


pages: 316 words: 94,886

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

This leads us to an important concern about multitracking. Psychologists such as Barry Schwartz have written about the dangers of “choice overload,” our tendency to freeze in the face of too many options. Is multitracking likely to plunge people into choice overload? There is research suggesting that extreme multitracking is detrimental. A classic study by Columbia’s Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper monitored the behavior of consumers in a grocery store. One day, the store set up a sampling table with 6 different kinds of jam, and customers loved it; another day, the store set up a table with 24 different kinds of jam, and it was even more popular than the first.


Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge PHD

Abraham Maslow, active measures, Albert Einstein, classic study, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, Menlo Park, tacit knowledge, the map is not the territory

We expect current events to be like what has recently happened. Personal interests, occupations, and personality can strongly influence people’s experience. This fact is used in tests like the Rorschach inkblot test that use interpretations of ambiguous figures for personality assessment. In a classic study of imagination, Bartlett noted that subjects asked to interpret inkblots frequently reveal much information about their personal interests and occupation. For example, the same inkblot reminded a woman of a ““bonnet with feathers,” a minister of ““Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace,” and a physiologist of ““an exposure of the basal lumbar region of the digestive system.”2 See Figure 5.2: what does the inkblot look like to you?


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Kennedy’s reflection came in the introduction he wrote to Sorensen, Theodore C. Decision-making in the White House: The Olive Branch or the Arrows. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963, p. xxxi. 16. See my forthcoming article, ‘Empathy and enmity: Kennedy and Khrushchev’s dance of minds’. The classic study is White, Ralph K. Fearful Warriors: A Psychological Profile of U.S.-Soviet Relations. London: Collier Macmillan, 1984. 17. BBC World News Impact, ‘Interview with Mark Sagar and Baby X’, 4 October 2013, https://youtu.be/XBsl3HlB8VE. For the research, Sagar, Mark , Mike Seymour, and Annette Henderson.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Each trade is less costly owing to the elimination of commissions and less of a gap between the bid and offer price, but the new crop of retail investors, including those who propelled the GameStop squeeze, might be leaving nearly as much money on the table as their grandparents. And of course a lot more of them are in the market. “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth” “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth,” a classic study of retail-investor returns by Brad Barber of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis, and Terrance Odean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, looked at data from more than sixty-six thousand retail brokerage accounts in the 1990s.[1] It showed that, even without the effect of commissions, the more people traded, the less they earned on average compared with just being passively invested in stocks.


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

Feudal lords wanted cash or grain, which could be easily stored and marketed, and they overwhelmingly consumed the modest surpluses wrung from the soil, leaving precious little to reinvest in agriculture.31 Absent the lords’ power and demands, peasants might have shifted to crop mixes that included garden produce alongside grains, perhaps solving the food problem. As for the number of people, family formation and population growth are not determined by an eternal procreational drive but rather shaped by a host of historical conditions turning on culture, class, and land availability. As Guy Bois notes in his classic study of Norman feudalism, a transition to different ways of working land, with more peasant autonomy and power over what and how to grow, would have allowed medieval Europe to feed up to three times as many people.32 But that transition never happened, and feudal arrangements staggered on until receiving a final coup de grace in 1347: the Black Death.33 Europe emerged from the Medieval Warm Period in poor shape.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

There is a poetic as well as historical truth in the fact that the imperial vastness of Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete. ‘The everyday life of the average man – his whole political, economic, and social life – was transformed during Late Antiquity’, writes Hans Peter L’Orange, whose book Art Forms and Civic Life in the Late Roman Empire is a classic study of the relationship between the architecture and broader values of this period.150 His study brings out one after another the features of left-hemisphere dominance so beautifully, and in ways that are so relevant by analogy with our own situation, that I allow him to speak for himself. ‘The free and natural forms of the early Empire, the multiplicity and variation of life under a decentralised administration, was replaced by homogeneity and uniformity under an ever-present and increasingly more centralised hierarchy of civil officials.’

Their influence on the whole art of the West is undeniable, and extended to the landscape-painting of the Italians, but without preventing the characteristic interest of the Italian eye for nature from finding its own expression’ (p. 181). Later Kenneth Clark was to write that ‘Hubert van Eyck has painted in the Adoration of the Lamb the first great modern landscape … As in a landscape by Claude, our eye floats over the flowery lawns into a distance of golden light’ (1949, p. 15). The classic study of the topic, apart from a passage in Humboldt’s Cosmos, is that of Alfred Biese (1905); in 1882 he had published a volume on the development of a feeling for nature in the Ancient world (Die Entwicklung des Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und Römern), although it has to be admitted that, for a fascinating topic, it is rather a dull read. 36.

He lamented the lack of wisdom exhibited by the Cartesian philosophy of his time, and complained that the scholars of the day, ‘although they may become extremely learned in some respects, their culture on the whole (and the whole is really the flower of wisdom) is incoherent’ (1990, p. 77). His thought is known to many through his influence on James Joyce, but more significant is his impact on thinkers as diverse as Horkheimer, Croce, Collingwood, Heidegger, Habermas, Gadamer, Benjamin, Ricoeur, and Auerbach. He was the subject of a classic study by Isaiah Berlin (1976). See also Price, 1999. 32. Gray, 1935, vol. 3, pp. 1107 & 1079. 33. Gilpin, 1808, p. 47. 34. Packe, 1954, p. 16. 35. Mill, 2003, p. 66 (emphasis in original). 36. On reading Helvétius, who gave the opinion that legislation was the most important of earthly pursuits, he gasped: ‘And have I indeed a genius for legislation?


pages: 753 words: 233,306

Collapse by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

Hence surviving on Tikopia required solving two problems for 3,000 years: How could a food supply sufficient for 1,200 people be produced reliably? And how could the population be prevented from increasing to a higher level that would be impossible to sustain? Our main source of information about the traditional Tikopian lifestyle comes from Firth's observations, one of the classic studies of anthropology. While Tikopia had been "discovered" by Europeans already in 1606, its isolation ensured that European influence remained negligible until the 1800s, the first visit by missionaries did not take place until 1857, and the first conversions of islanders to Christianity did not begin until after 1900.

Three books by Mats Lundahl will serve as an introduction into the literature on Haiti: Peasants and Poverty: A Study of Haiti (London: Croom Helm, 1979); The Haitian Economy: Man, Land, and Markets (London: Croom Helm, 1983); and Politics or Markets? Essays on Haitian Undervelopment (London: Routledge, 1992). The classic study of the Haitian revolution of 1781-1803 is C.L.R. James, The Black Ja-cobins, 2nd ed. (London: Vintage, 1963). The standard English-language history of the Dominican Republic is Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998). The same author wrote a different text in Spanish: Manual de Historia Dominicana, 9th ed.


pages: 706 words: 237,378

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn

airport security, Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, Columbine, digital rights, epigenetics, fear of failure, Higgs boson, impulse control, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, medical residency, mirror neurons, New Journalism, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, traumatic brain injury, Whole Earth Catalog, Yogi Berra

Self-Efficacy: Your Confidence in Your Ability to Grow Influences Your Ability to Grow One thought pattern that appears to be extremely powerful in improving health status is what is called self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a belief in your ability to exercise control over specific events in your life. It reflects confidence in your ability to actually do things, a belief in your ability to make things happen, even when you might have to face new, unpredictable, and stressful occurrences. Classic studies by Dr. Albert Bandura and his colleagues at Stanford University Medical School showed that a strong sense of self-efficacy is the best and most consistent predictor of positive health outcomes in many different medical situations, including who will recover most successfully from a heart attack, who will be able to cope well with the pain of arthritis, and who will be able to successfully make lifestyle changes (such as quitting smoking).

They also studied self-referential processing in the narrative brain region described earlier in the Toronto study (page xlii), which is involved in mind wandering in general and, in people with social anxiety, with an exaggerated and highly critical self-focus that makes social interactions very challenging and unsatisfying for them. They showed that activity in this narrative region was reduced after MBSR, suggesting greater control over such negative self-perspectives.† In another classic study, Dr. Lynch showed that people lived longer after a myocardial infarction if they had a pet than if they didn’t. He also showed that just the presence of a friendly animal can decrease one’s blood pressure. This is suggestive evidence that relationality is key to our health. And it is relationality above all else, we might say, that is at the heart of mindfulness.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

Then assistant secretary of state Dean Acheson, visiting Greece in December 1944, warned that “[t]he peoples of the liberated countries… are the most combustible material in the world….They are violent and restless.” He foresaw “agitation,” “arbitrary and absolutist controls,” and the “overthrow of governments.”14 Benn Steil, the author of the classic study of the Marshall Plan, points out that after World War I, when borders changed, people generally remained in place. After World War II, Europe was crisscrossed by tens of millions of displaced peoples, former slave laborers, released prisoners of war, and liberated but devastated Jews. Reprisals were a way of life.

In September, Colonel Leslie Groves, who had just completed building the massive new Pentagon, became chief of a new “Manhattan Engineering District” project. Bush became head of a three-person committee that would serve as a “board of directors,” with Conant guiding day-to-day issues.41 In Danger and Survival, the classic study of the first fifty years of the atomic bomb, McGeorge Bundy concluded that Bush was the “indispensable man” in the U.S. program. Bush understood the science, the engineering, and FDR’s Washington. Bush also had a direct relationship with the president—and Roosevelt’s trust.42 Bush did not engage in debates about the goals of atomic research.


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

If you’re the first out of the gate with a new product, service, or technology, you can move up the learning curve earlier, gobble up prime space, and monopolize customers. These edges create barriers to entry for your competitors: their own efforts to innovate will be stifled by your patents and superior capabilities, and their growth will be stymied by the fact that it’s expensive to convince customers to make a switch. In a classic study, marketing researchers Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis compared the success of companies that were either pioneers or settlers. The pioneers were first movers: the initial company to develop or sell a product. The settlers were slower to launch, waiting until the pioneers had created a market before entering it.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

My account of the interwar period relies heavily on Ahamed’s fascinating book. 28 Laura Beers, “Education or Manipulation? Labour, Democracy, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain,” Journal of British Studies, 48 (January 2009), p. 129. 29 Ibid. 30 Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, p. 451. 31 The classic study of this experience is Albert O. Hirschman’s National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, first published 1945). 32 Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, Table 8.3. As these authors note (p. 467) there is evidence that countries in the periphery that resorted to protection recovered sooner from (or were less affected by) the Great Depression. 33 See Barry Eichengreen and Doug Irwin, “The Protectionist Temptation: Lessons from the Great Depression for Today,” VoxEU.org, March 17, 2009, http://voxeu.org/index.php?


pages: 314 words: 101,034

Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders

classic study, data acquisition, discovery of penicillin, high batting average, index card, medical residency, meta-analysis, natural language processing, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan

It’s essential to know how well each of these individual tests performs. But this research still leaves the big question unanswered: is there any evidence that this old-fashioned practice really makes a difference in how patients do? There is surprisingly little research on this. Several now classic studies done in the 1960s and 1970s tried to assess which tools are most useful in helping doctors make a diagnosis. In these studies the most important tool was the simplest—doctors were able to correctly diagnose patients’ illnesses in most cases just by talking. The patient’s story contained the diagnostic tip-off up to 70 percent of the time.


pages: 435 words: 95,864

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

classic study, epigenetics, fear of failure, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), TED Talk

The child can’t predict exactly when, why, or from where the next emotional or physical hit is coming. Researchers refer to stress that happens in unpredictable ways and at unpredictable times as “chronic unpredictable stress,” and they have been studying its effects on animal development for decades—long before Felitti and Anda’s investigation into ACEs first began. In classic studies, investigators expose animals to different types of stressors for several weeks, to see how those stressful stimuli affect their behavior. In one experiment, McCarthy and her postdocs exposed male and female rats to three weeks of chronic unpredictable mild stress. Every day, rats were exposed to a few low-grade stressors: their cage was rotated; they were given a five-minute swim, their bedding was dampened; they went for a day without food; they were physically restrained for thirty minutes; or they were exposed to thirty minutes of strobe lights.


pages: 146 words: 43,446

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K

Beneath the hospital bill and the clinical description of Clark's shattered leg was a rough draft of a paper written by Clark, and dated just after his motorcycle accident. His paper was called "The Telecomputer." Page 50 4 Disorganization Man In 1956 a Fortune magazine writer named William H. Whyte published his classic study of American corporate life, The Organization Man. The book found its way onto the shelf crammed with evocative 1950s titles such as The Lonely Crowd and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. All these texts tried in one way or another to explain the strange uniformity of the American businessman. He commuted to work in his immaculate gray suit from his neat suburban tract house.


Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky

Alfred Russel Wallace, classic study, finite state, Great Leap Forward, John von Neumann, language acquisition, lateral thinking, machine translation, pattern recognition, phenotype, tacit knowledge, theory of mind

This poses a problem for the biologist, since, if true, it is an example of true “emergence” – the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organization. Recognition of this fact, though formulated in entirely different terms, is what motivated much of the classical study of language by those whose primary concern was the nature of mind. And it seems to me that today there is no better or more promising way to explore the essential and distinctive properties of human intelligence than through the detailed investigation of the structure of this unique human possession.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Shafiqul Islam, “Capitalism in Conflict,” Foreign Affairs, special issue on “America and the World” (Winter 1989-90). 27. For discussion, keeping to the special case of protectionism, see Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). Among many other sources, see Frederic Clairmont’s classic study, The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism (Asia Publishing House, 1960; reprinted and updated, Third World Network, 1996). On the general picture, see my World Orders Old and New, chap. 2. On the historic role of the state system (often military) in economic development in the US, see Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box (Cambridge Univ.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

American Economic Review 85, 872–890. Temple, Jonathan. 1999. “The New Growth Evidence.” Journal of Economic Literature 37, 112–156. Templer, Robert. 1999. Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam. New York, Penguin. Thompson, Homer A. 1976. The Athenian Agora: A Short Guide, Princeton, N.J., American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Timmer, C. Peter. 1997. “How Well Do the Poor Connect to the Growth Process?” Discussion Paper 17, Harvard Institute for International Development, Cambridge. Trouiller, Patrice, and Olliaro, Piero. 1999. “Drug Development Output: What Proportion for Tropical Diseases?” Lancet 354 (July 10).


pages: 327 words: 97,720

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo

Alfred Russel Wallace, biofilm, butterfly effect, Celebration, Florida, classic study, corporate governance, delayed gratification, experimental subject, gentrification, impulse control, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, placebo effect, post-industrial society, Rodney Brooks, Ted Kaczynski, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, Walter Mischel

Health, Wealth, and Happiness Most of us eventually learn that genuine happiness over time does not equate with anything as simple as more gadgets, a bigger car, or a full belly. Happiness is not merely the opposite of pain, sadness, or discomfort.15 Nor is genuine happiness simply a transient mood state.16 Years ago a classic study showed that, within two years, the happiness of lottery winners, as well as the happiness of accident victims left quadriplegic by their injuries, returned to approximately the same level enjoyed by the particular individuals before they experienced either their windfall or their misfortune.17 Our research with older residents of Cook County has shown a similar stability in levels of happiness when tested over subsequent years, suggesting that it has a great deal to do with one’s fundamental disposition.


pages: 358 words: 95,115

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman

affirmative action, classic study, cognitive load, Columbine, delayed gratification, desegregation, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, index card, job satisfaction, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, theory of mind

Simultaneously as they learn to craft and maintain a lie, kids also learn what it’s like to be lied to. But children don’t start out thinking lies are okay, and gradually realize they’re bad. The opposite is true. They start out thinking all deception—of any sort—is bad, and slowly realize that some types are okay. In a now classic study by University of Queensland’s Dr. Candida Peterson, adults and children of different ages watched ten video-taped scenarios of different lies—from benevolent white lies to manipulative whoppers. Children are much more disapproving of lies and liars than adults are; children are more likely to think the liar is a bad person and the lie is morally wrong.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Britain’s economic indebtedness to the United States would soon be matched culturally and socially. In May 1917, the young Aldous Huxley, glimpsing the future, wrote in a letter that ‘France is really a first class power no longer. We [Britain] shall go on till on a level with Haiti and Liberia.’ As Paul Fussell puts it in his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, ‘The economic ruin uncomplete by the Great War was finished by the Second, which necessitated a replay, but much magnified, of immense indebtedness to the United States. The Americanization of Europe from 1945 to the late sixties was the result.’ In 1919 the idea of such ‘Americanization’ was still as exotic and intoxicating as ragtime or the dry martini.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

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

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

“I call our work ‘gathering with a sense of purpose,’” says Roy. “I really believe that if we could get everyone in the country to go through our discussion courses, we could change the culture overnight.” Roy’s beliefs are right on target with research about how, and why, behavior change happens. Commitment, trust, and intent are all key factors. In one classic study, conducted thirty years ago, a researcher posed as a sunbather, spreading a blanket near another sunbather. After a few minutes, he asked, “Excuse me, I’m here alone and have no matches—do you have a light?” The researcher then got up and walked down the beach, leaving his blanket and radio behind.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

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

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

But finance has a split personality. Lurking in the soul of the cautious, conventional Dr. Jekyll is an economically murderous Mr. Hyde who breaks out from time to time in a destructive speculative rampage. Virtually from the beginning of capitalism, money markets have shown a tendency to become casinos. In his classic study, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, economic historian Charles Kindleberger observed that financial booms had led to busts in virtually every part of the capitalist world since the seventeenth century. The objects of financial desire differ—coins, tulips, real estate, commodities, mines, oil wells, housing, canals, roadways, government bonds—but the manias and panics follow a similar pattern.


pages: 400 words: 99,489

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

HUNDREDS OF YEARS The mini-DVD is expected to last approximately five hundred years. Bruce Betts, “We Make It Happen,” The Planetary Report. THE OLDEST PIECES INCLUDED “Visions of Mars: The Stories,” The Planetary Society. VOLTAIRE’S “MICROMÉGAS” Voltaire, “Micromégas,” Blake Linton Wilfong, ed., Free Sci-Fi Classics. STUDY DROSOPHILA Jeffrey R. Powell, Progress and Prospects in Evolutionary Biology: The Drosophila Model (Oxford University Press, 1997). DUTCH BOOK Kees Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (New York: John Day Company, 1957). This book was also the inspiration for a famous short film, Powers of Ten, produced by Ray and Charles Eames in 1977.


pages: 535 words: 103,761

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

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

In turn, the weakening of moral authority has both undermined the status of adulthood and led to a crisis of socialisation. The significance of this development has acquired its most striking expression in society’s struggle to endow meaning to people’s identity. This development was eloquently explained by the sociologist Peter Berger and his collaborators in their classic study, The Homeless Mind (1974). The authors of this text drew attention to the weakening of what they characterised as the ‘identity defining powers of institutions’. Their emphasis on the difficulty that society’s institutions had in providing norms and values through which individuals could lend meaning to their values drew attention to what would – with the passing of time − turn into one of the greatest problems facing public life.


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

Turkheimer notes that the e2 coefficient for IQ is only a bit larger than what is observed for height—0.2 in adulthood, 0.25 in childhood, versus 0.1 for height. But even that marginal difference could be due to greater difficulty with measuring IQ reliably. In studies using statistical techniques to correct for measurement error, the e2 for intelligence test performance is closer to 0.1. In a classic study of twins separated at birth and raised in separate households, the average difference in intelligence test scores between twins was about equal to the average difference in the test scores of a single person who took the test twice.19 That’s general cognitive ability, but we can also examine more-basic cognitive processes.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Leslie, J. ( 1998) . The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction. London, New York. Routledge. A catalogue of real apocalyptic threats facing humanity. M anuel, F.E. and Fritzie, P . M . (1979) . Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) . The classic study of utopian thought and thinkers, from Bacon to Marx. Noble, D. (1998) . The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) . A somewhat overwrought attempt to unveil the millennia! and religious roots of the space programme, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering.

From the human experience thus far, especially in sciences such as physics and astronomy, the cost ofrunning large simulations may be very high, though it is still dominated by the capital cost of computer processors and human personnel, not the energy cost. However, as the hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful and the simulating tasks more complex, we may expect that at some point in future the energy cost will become dominant. Computers necessarily dissipate energy as heat, as shown in classical studies of Landauer ( 1 961) and Brillouin ( 1 962) with the finite minimum amount ofheat dissipation required per processing of 1 bit of information. 1 5 Since the simulation of complex human society will require processing a huge amount of information, the accompanying energy cost is necessarily huge.


pages: 801 words: 242,104

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

Hence surviving on Tikopia required solving two problems for 3,000 years: How could a food supply sufficient for 1,200 people be produced reliably? And how could the population be prevented from increasing to a higher level that would be impossible to sustain? Our main source of information about the traditional Tikopian lifestyle comes from Firth’s observations, one of the classic studies of anthropology. While Tikopia had been “discovered” by Europeans already in 1606, its isolation ensured that European influence remained negligible until the 1800s, the first visit by missionaries did not take place until 1857, and the first conversions of islanders to Christianity did not begin until after 1900.

Three books by Mats Lundahl will serve as an introduction into the literature on Haiti: Peasants and Poverty: A Study of Haiti (London: Croom Helm, 1979); The Haitian Economy: Man, Land, and Markets (London: Croom Helm, 1983); and Politics or Markets? Essays on Haitian Undervelopment (London: Routledge, 1992). The classic study of the Haitian revolution of 1781-1803 is C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd ed. (London: Vintage, 1963). The standard English-language history of the Dominican Republic is Frank Moya Pons, The Dominican Republic: A National History (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998). The same author wrote a different text in Spanish: Manual de Historia Dominicana, 9th ed.


pages: 916 words: 248,265

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, David Brooks, Etonian, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, loose coupling, low cost airline, oil shale / tar sands, period drama, pneumatic tube, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, work culture

His was a very personal business, and – like those of other early railway contractors – it effectively died with its founder. Brassey was perhaps the closest thing to a railroad baron that the British network produced. As for a British counterpart to the mighty folk heroes of the American frontier, the railway navvy has a very good claim. The archetype is described in Terry Coleman’s classic study The Railway Navvies (1965). Distinctive in his dress of bright velveteens, impenetrable in his slang, contemptuous of religion and hostile to the conventions of marriage and homemaking, the navvy lived apart from society in temporary shack-towns, until a rumour of better-paid work elsewhere sent him off ‘on the tramp’ once again.

Yet the new lines, infrastructure and improved rolling stock no longer delivered the same rates of return that had excited earlier generations of investors. Especially expensive projects included the enormous new stations and goods depots that were required to service the ever-growing cities. John Kellett’s classic study of railways and urban change cites the example of Huskisson goods station, built in the 1870s in Liverpool’s docks at a cost of £712,527.** If the traffic handled there had been surcharged at a rate to reflect the interest on this investment, the increase would have amounted to a prohibitive 3s 10½d per ton.


pages: 322 words: 107,576

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, in his paper ‘The Sorcerer and his Magic’, doesn’t quite know what to make of it: ‘but it is evident that he carries on his craft conscientiously, takes pride in his achievements, and warmly defends the technique of the bloody down against all rival schools. He seems to have completely lost sight of the fallaciousness of the technique which he had so disparaged at the beginning.’ Of course, it may not even be necessary to deceive your patient in order to maximise the placebo effect: a classic study from 1965—albeit small and without a control group—gives a small hint of what might be possible here. They gave a pink placebo sugar pill three times a day to ‘neurotic’ patients, with good effect, and the explanation given to the patients was startlingly clear about what was going on: A script was prepared and carefully enacted as follows: ‘Mr.


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

Pauly, The Wharton School Mark Pauly is the Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Systems at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Virginia and is a former commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission, an active member of the Institute of Medicine, and one of the nation’s leading health economists. His classic study on the economics of moral hazard was the first to point out how health insurance coverage may affect patients’ use of medical services. Professor Pauly’s interest in health policy has led him to investigate ways to reduce the number of uninsured people through tax credits for public and private insurance and to create an appropriate design for Medicare in a budget-constrained environment.


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

Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York, 2005), is an excellent biography. For those inclined to explore further the contradictions of this extraordinary figure, the two volumes by Jean Guéhenno would be very rewarding: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York, 1966). The classic study of Rousseau is by Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1988). See also Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969); Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago, 1990); and Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA, 1994).


pages: 403 words: 106,707

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance by Alex Hutchinson

airport security, animal electricity, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frederick Winslow Taylor, glass ceiling, Iridium satellite, medical residency, megaproject, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Walter Mischel

As a restless undergraduate in the late 1970s, Joyner had been on the verge of dropping out of the University of Arizona—at six-foot-five, and with physical endurance that eventually enabled him to run a 2:25 marathon, he figured he might make a pretty good firefighter—when he was outkicked at the end of a 10K race by a grad student from the school’s Exercise and Sport Science Laboratory.39 After the race, the student convinced Joyner to volunteer as a guinea pig in one of the lab’s ongoing experiments, a classic study that ended up demonstrating that lactate threshold, the fastest speed you can maintain without triggering a dramatic rise in blood lactate levels, is a remarkably accurate predictor of marathon time. The seed was planted and Joyner was soon volunteering at the lab and embarking on the first stages of an unexpected new career trajectory that eventually led to a position as physician-researcher at the Mayo Clinic, where he is now one of the world’s mostly widely cited experts on the limits of human performance.


pages: 267 words: 79,905

Creating Unequal Futures?: Rethinking Poverty, Inequality and Disadvantage by Ruth Fincher, Peter Saunders

barriers to entry, classic study, ending welfare as we know it, financial independence, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, open economy, pink-collar, positional goods, purchasing power parity, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The CDC, which facilitates and promotes joint venture arrangements between industry and indigenous people, will have its previously fixed capital base of $60 million augmented by an additional $10 million. LAND In a Western sense, land is a special case of capital. Notwithstanding the more romantic writings in classical studies of political economy, land is now regarded in economic theory as another 135 PDF OUTPUT c: ALLEN & UNWIN r: DP2\BP4401W\MAIN p: (02) 6232 5991 f: (02) 6232 4995 36 DAGLISH STREET CURTIN ACT 2605 135 CREATING UNEQUAL FUTURES? input in the production process. In contrast, land rights are a central plank of social justice and reconciliation processes for indigenous peoples.


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

Numerous follow-up studies (Granovetter 1983; Lin, Vaughn, and Ensel 1981; Lin, Ensel, and Vaughn 1981; Lin 1982; Lin and Dumin 1986; DeGraaf and Flap 1988; Lin and Erickson 2008; Kendall 2008) demonstrate that weak ties are “strong” in facilitating occupational attainment. In short, whom you know matters. For example, in one early and now classic study of job placement, Granovetter (1974) showed that 56 percent of all job applicants found out about the job through a personal contact. An additional 19 percent of job applicants found out about the job through third-party contacts such as advertisements, employment agencies, university placement services, professional associations, or other formal means.


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

Work now retains so fewjtraces of play and the daily routine affords so few oppor, , , , , tunities to escape from the ironic self-consciousness that has itself assumed the qualities of a routine that people seek abandon in , play with more than the usual intensity. "At a time when image is one of the most frequently used words in American speech and writing, Joseph Epstein notes in a recent essay on sports, "one does not too often come upon the real thing The history of culture as Huizinga showed in his classic study of play Homo Ludens, appears from one perspective to consist of the gradual eradication of the play element from all cultural forms-from religion from the law, from warfare, above all from " " . , . , lete's pleasure to the spectator's, and reduced the spectator himself to a state of vegetative passivity-the very antithesis of the health and vigor sport ideally promotes.


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

., ‘The History of Research on Blood Group Genetics: Initial Discovery and Diffusion’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 18 (1996), 282 On Rosalind Franklin’s grandfather Piper, Anne, ‘Light on a Dark Lady’, Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 23 (1998), 151–4 http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/articles/franklin/piper.html Richard Lewontin’s classic study on the biology of race Lewontin, R.C., ‘The Apportionment of Human Diversity’, Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972), 381–98 This paper has been subject to much scrutiny over the years, much worth reading, as it is not a simple subject. Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong discuss it in The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), and Anthony Edwards critiqued it in 2003 in a paper entitled ‘Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy’ (BioEssays 25: 8, 798–801).


pages: 414 words: 108,413

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

The product of a 1971 merger that linked two small, struggling securities firms—Burnham & Company and Drexel Firestone—the combined entity would rise to power on the strength of a young Wharton School graduate, Michael Milken, who had launched his business career with Drexel Firestone. Fascinated by a now-classic study of corporate bonds (conducted by W. Braddock Hickman), Milken came to the conclusion that bonds carrying low ratings from Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s were not the high risk instruments many thought them to be. In fact, by investing in a broad mix of long-term, low-rated bonds (which paid higher interest than top-grade bonds) investors could secure more attractive returns without assuming additional risks.


pages: 349 words: 104,796

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman by Ken Auletta

Bear Stearns, book value, business climate, classic study, corporate governance, financial independence, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Herman Kahn, interest rate swap, junk bonds, New Journalism, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, traveling salesman, zero-coupon bond

Volatility, not stability, became the normal market environment—in 1983 alone, thirty billion shares or 60 percent of all outstanding stock changed hands. Among the traders who dominated the market, Lew Glucksman was one of the best. To the traders he hired Glucksman often handed out free copies of Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the classic study of mob psychology and the irrationality of markets.* It gnawed at Glucksman that despite this rise of trading activity on the Street and at Lehman, despite the new importance of commercial paper and equities—trading and sales functions for which he had long been responsible at Lehman—he felt traders were still being treated shabbily.


Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

Even 12,000 years ago, as Wadley and Hayden note, villages in the Fertile Crescent contained 200 to 300 people and already showed signs of private property, wealth inequality, and social stratification. After that, things got much worse, very quickly. Empirical studies have shown that the effect of alcohol on the human response to stress is similar to its effect on that of rats, as might be expected from our survey of alcohol’s physiological effects in Chapter Two. In one classic study,35 male volunteers from the Indiana University community were subjected to arguably more intense stressors than overcrowding in a cage: They were made to watch a digital clock countdown from 360 to 0, at which point they would receive a painful electric shock or have to give an extemporaneous speech, into a camera, on the topic, “What I like and dislike about my physical appearance.”


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Haidt speaks of moral beliefs and statements, as opposed to identity-defining ones; I take the concepts to be similar. 21. See Dominic Abrams and John Levine, “The Formation of Social Norms: Revisiting Sherif’s Autokinetic Illusion Study,” in J. R. Smith and S. A. Haslam, eds., Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies (Sage Publications, 2012). 22. Saul McLeod, “Solomon Asch—Conformity Experiment,” Simply Psychology, December 28, 2018. 23. Interviewed by Sam Harris, Making Sense, podcast, October 8, 2019, 48:00. 24. Paul Starobin, Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War (PublicAffairs, 2017). 25.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

(Suite Et Fin),” Revue Archéologique 3, no. 1 (March 27, 1846): 293–304. 24 “Alexandros Rizos Rangavis,” Aiora Press, accessed March 27, 2021, https://aiorabooks.com/2019/05/24/alexandros-rangavis/; Alexander Kitroeff, “Memoirs of First Greek-US Ambassador Offer Glimpse Into Post-Civil War America,” The Pappas Post (Gregory C. Pappas, July 29, 2020), https://www.pappaspost.com/memoirs-of-first-greek-us-ambassador-offer-glimpse-into-post-civil-war-america/. 25 Mabel Lang, “Herodotos and the Abacus,” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 26, no. 3 (April 16, 1957): 271–288, https://doi.org/10.2307/147100. 26 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 2.36.4, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng1. 27 Keith F. Sugden, “A History of the Abacus,” The Accounting Historians Journal 8, no. 2 (April 16, 1981): 3–5; “Papyrus Sallier 4 (EA10184,6),” British Museum, accessed April 16, 2021, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA10184-6. 28 Demosthenes, Demosthenes with an English Translation, trans.


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

A “Neo-Confucian” movement swept through the gentry, and in China’s hour of need, with the Khitans and Tanguts pressing in, the empire’s finest minds emulated Confucius by stepping forward to advise the ruler. Forget about rebirth and immortality, they insisted; the here-and-now is everything, and fulfillment comes from action in the world. “The true scholar,” one concluded, “should be the first to worry about the world’s troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures.” The Neo-Confucians turned classical studies into a program for perfecting society. Men who had the philological and artistic skills to understand ancient culture properly, they claimed, could use antiquity’s virtue to save the modern world. Ouyang Xiu, for instance, who had stumbled across Han Yu’s writings as a boy, invented his own “ancient prose” style, made a name as a poet, historian, and collector of two-thousand-year-old bronzes, then rose high in the imperial service, championing fiscal and military reforms.

China’s new steppe frontier, by contrast, produced much milder challenges. The well-paid scholars in Kangxi’s scientific institutes felt no need to invent calculus for themselves or figure out that the earth went around the sun. There seemed to be much more profit in turning mathematics—like medicine—into a branch of classical studies. East and West each got the thought they needed. THE IRON LAW When Kangxi died in 1722, social development was moving higher than ever before. Twice in the past, in the Roman Empire around 100 CE and Song dynasty China a thousand years later, development had reached forty-three points, only to generate disasters that drove it down again.


pages: 918 words: 260,504

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

active transport: walking or cycling, book value, British Empire, business cycle, City Beautiful movement, classic study, conceptual framework, credit crunch, gentleman farmer, it's over 9,000, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, New Urbanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, short selling, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Harrison declared that “Nature .. . wrote on that low divide the first engineer’s report in favor of a ship-canal to unite the Mississippi and the lakes.” “Speech of Hon. Carter H. Harrison, of Illinois, on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, in the House of Representatives, Tuesday, May 21, 1878.” 39.On internal improvements schemes generally, see Howard, Illinois, 193–212; the classic study of canal development in the Old Northwest is Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861 (1969). See also Donald J. Pisani, “Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy,” JAH 74 (1987): 740–68. 40.Putnam, Illinois and Michigan Canal; Pierce, History of Chicago, vol. 1; Andreas, History of Chicago, 1:165–73; F.

., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (1985). 111.Census figures cited in Henry J. Fletcher, “The Doom of the Small Town,” Forum 19 (April 1895): 215. 112.Ibid., 214, 222. On the general reasons for urban growth at the expense of rural areas, see the classic study of Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (1899; reprint, 1963). 113.Wyckoff, Day with a Tramp, 61, 79. See also the fascinating discussion of urban-rural exploitation in the text of a contemporary socialist, A. M. Simons, The American Farmer (1906), 63–73.


pages: 382 words: 115,172

The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat by Tim Spector

biofilm, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, David Strachan, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, life extension, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, satellite internet, Steve Jobs, twin studies

They all gained weight to very different extents, but in each case their weight gain was very similar to their twin’s.6 Although all the twins gained total weight and fat mass, some details varied too. Some pairs converted the calories not just into fat, but into additional muscle. They also seemed to gain the fat in the same places as their twin, around the belly or more unhealthily around the intestines and liver – what is called visceral fat. This classic study, in which the students were overfed like lab rats, might now have trouble getting ethical approval (though we don’t protect actors like Bradley Cooper who gained 40 lb for the film American Sniper and was paid millions of dollars for his role in it). The twins study unequivocally shows that much of how quickly we use energy or store fat and so gain weight is clearly down to our genes.


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT calls this self-censored media product “The Daily Me.”5 It represents another step toward a world in which people increasingly isolate themselves in a bubble of self-sustaining beliefs and immerse themselves in like-minded communities. Although we may like the idea of a debating chamber, in reality we prefer an echo chamber. In one classic study, Republicans and Democrats were offered various research reports from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive coherent arguments that corroborated their preexisting mindsets. Bill Bishop, author of The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, says that as the United States grows more politically segregated, “the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”6 A twelve-nation study found that Americans, particularly highly educated ones, are the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In addition, any project that provides planning solutions in the form of strong medicine, without consultation of the people it is going to affect, is also likely to confront unexpected consequences. Solutions from planners, developers, architects, politicians and urban bloggers are legion; but what if the community wants to reboot itself rather than have transformation imposed upon it from well-meaning decision-makers? Robert Putnam’s classic study of community, Bowling Alone, offers a disheartening view of modern society. With an abundance of observation material and statistics, he makes the watertight argument that our sense of community and our participation in communal activity has collapsed. Using the image of the lonely bowler throwing his ball down the alley, where once he would be part of a team, our sense of who we are and where we fit in has atomised and become dangerously small.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Dutton, 1940); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), pp. 41–53. The internal stratification of African American neighborhoods—and of all ghettos—in the face of racial segregation is, of course, widely noted, from such classic studies as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899), E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), and St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis (1945), to Mary Pattillo’s Black Picket Fences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Black on the Block (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 25.


pages: 395 words: 118,446

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Martha Banta

Albert Einstein, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Veblen was (to borrow James’s term) a ‘restless analyst’ of the American scene whose non-fiction study opened the way for the insistence by the novelists that sociology, economics, and literature share (and must share) a common aim to expose (through satire, wit, and passion) the lopsided nature of social institutions of power. Even today there are those who do not know how to deal with all the implications of Veblen’s classic study. Perhaps their quandary is caused by the fact, as one observer has stated, ‘no one remotely like Thorstein Veblen can ever be expected to appear again’.2 Certain economists and sociologists prefer to look away from this volume, finding themselves more at home with Veblen’s weighty series of articles on political economy, land systems, finance, business management, and the industrial arts.


pages: 349 words: 114,914

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

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

They often saw themselves as reluctant caretakers of the less enlightened.” In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil rights movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.


Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies by Christopher Grey

Bletchley Park, call centre, classic study, computer age, glass ceiling, index card, iterative process, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, post-war consensus, seminal paper, work culture

Secondly, notwithstanding the ideal-type of bureaucracy as evacuating all discretion from work by virtue of standard, formalized systems, spaces for discretion persist, and, moreover, their persistence is necessary in order for those systems to operate effectively. This was one of the basic insights of the ‘bureaucratic dysfunctionalist’ literature of the 1950s (Blau, 1955; Gouldner, 1954). So one point to note is that these classic studies continue to have a purchase and help us to make sense of organizational phenomena. However, what is also important is to appreciate how the bureaucratic aspects of BP undermine not only the received image of BP but also some of the analyses of its organization. Ratcliff (2006) makes much of how BP ‘encouraged everyone from intercept personnel to the top cryptanalysts to collaborate and brainstorm for improvements.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

As name suggests, by analogy with physical capital or financial capital, social capital is a stock of wealth. It is something that can be accumulated over time, invested in, but a form of wealth linked to society rather than just an individual. An important book in stimulating the recent interest in the idea of social capital was a classic study of towns in Italy by Robert Putnam, the eminent Harvard sociologist. He noted from his field research that something intangible but vitally important distinguished towns in the north of the country from the south, making the former prosperous and dynamic places, and the latter persistently poor and suspicious.6 The “something” in those northern Italian towns comprised civic mindedness, an openness and willingness to help people outside the immediate family group, a sense of being part of a community whose success would bring collective and individual benefits.


pages: 426 words: 115,150

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Even people who are doing well financially are not necessarily fulfilled. On those same worksheets we asked our seminar participants, “How much money would it take to make you happy?” Can you guess the results? It was always “more than I have now” by 50 to 100 percent. These findings are confirmed by numerous other studies on happiness. In one classic study, Roy Kaplan of the Florida Institute of Technology tracked 1,000 lottery winners over a span of ten years. Very few felt any greater happiness—or had any idea of what to do with the money. A surprising number were less happy six months later, having left jobs that had been a source of self-esteem and gained money they felt they didn’t deserve.


pages: 408 words: 114,719

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, classic study, complexity theory, Eratosthenes, George Santayana, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, work culture

The most promising student was Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, a man about ten years older than Poggio, and like Poggio, from a very modest background. Bruni had set out to study law, but, along with other intellectually gifted men of his generation and particularly those in the orbit of Salutati, he had been seized by a passion for classical studies. In his case, the decisive factor was the study of ancient Greek, made possible when in 1397 Salutati invited the preeminent Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysolaras to reside in Florence and give classes in a language that had been almost completely forgotten. “At the coming of Chrysolaras,”20 Bruni later recalled, “I was made to halt in my choice of lives, seeing that I held it wrong to desert law, and yet I reckoned it a crime to omit so great an occasion of learning the Greek literature.”


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Searle noted that by 1990, more than half of the students at Berkeley were non-white. There was no clamor in the general public to suppress heterodox thinking. Americans’ views on free speech had been remarkably consistent. In 1955, in the immediate aftermath of McCarthyism, the Harvard sociologist Samuel A. Stouffer published a classic study called Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties. His goal was to figure out how willing people really were to let communists do three things: make a speech in their community, teach in a university, or have a book kept in the public library. After 1972, the National Opinion Research Center added several scenarios to Stouffer’s to test communities’ tolerance for speech that insulted their sensibilities on race, religion, and democracy.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Each of us wanted that puck like a greyhound wants the bunny—and would have taken one another’s head off to get it. But on another level, what I felt was an intense love for the moving bodies who chased it with me. Together we did something beautiful to behold, and we knew it. In Homo Ludens, his classic study of “the play element in culture,” Johan Huizinga wrote that play is marked by “a spirit of hostility and friendship combined.” He found this in sport; in ritualized combat; in the competitive dances, stylized insult trading and boasting matches of every culture that remains vital. I think this captures pretty well the social element of motor sport.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Now humans produce hundreds Ibid., 228. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 3: The Containment Problem Understanding technology is, in part Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), gives the classic study, but see also Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity (London: SAGE, 1992), for how society has become dominated by the management of risks it has itself created. See also Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Vintage, 1997), and Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

Papyrus continued to be used in Greek and Roman times, especially in lands close to the source of supply in the Nile delta. The largest find of classical papyri, some 800 in number, was extracted from the lava-sealed ruins of Herculaneum. Papyrology—the science of papyri—has made an immense contribution to classical studies. Since very few other forms of writing have survived over two millennia, it has greatly advanced knowledge of ancient Palaeography; and it has helped bridge the philological chasm between ancient and medieval Greek. It has supplied many texts from the lost repertoire of classical literature, including Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, Sophocles’ Trackers, and Menander’s The Discontented Man.

[BIBLIA] [XATIVAH] BLACK ATHENA NO thesis has divided the world of classics more profoundly than that associated with the title of Black Athena. The traditionalists regard it as freakish; others maintain that it deserves close attention.1 The thesis has two separate aspects—one critical, the other propositional. The critical part argues with some force that classical studies were moulded by the self-centred assumptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europeans, and that the cultural debt of Greece and Rome to the older civilizations of the Near East was systematically ignored. The critic’s purpose, ‘to lessen European cultural arrogance’, would seem to be fruitful, though talk of ‘the Aryan model of Greek civilization’ is provocative.

They provide one of the basic explanations why western Germany escaped the tide of ‘neoserfdom’ which was to occur in the East (see pp. 583–4). In some parts of eastern Europe, such as Bohemia and Silesia, the influx of German settlers led to the merger of German and of local legal customs. In the later centuries, the revival of classical studies helped Roman law to extend its sphere at the expense of customary law. In 1495, for example, it was admitted to the Reichskammergericht or Supreme Court of Justice of the German Empire. Its impact was to be profound. Given the growing fragmentation of sovereignty in the Empire, it encouraged all princes to regard themselves as the sole fount of legislation, and in due course to flood every aspect of life with regulations.


pages: 405 words: 130,840

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

Abraham Maslow, classic study, coherent worldview, crack epidemic, delayed gratification, do well by doing good, feminist movement, hedonic treadmill, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, Peter Singer: altruism, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Waldo Emerson, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, stem cell, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the scientific method, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

But although people quickly adapt to having more space,36 they don't fully adapt to the longer c o m m u t e , particularly if it involves driving in heavy traffic.37 Even after years of c o m m u t i n g , those whose c o m m u t e s are traffic-filled still arrive at work with higher levels of stress hormones. (Driving under ideal conditions is, however, often enjoyable and relaxing.)38 It's worth striving to improve your c o m m u t e . Lack of control. On e of the active ingredients of noise and traffic, the aspect that helps them get under your skin, is that you can't control them. In one classic study, David Glass and Jerome Singer exposed people to loud bursts of random noise. Subjects in one group were told they could termi-nate the noise by pressing a button, but they were asked not to press the button unless it was absolutely necessary. N o n e of these subjects pressed the button, yet the belief that they had some form of control m a d e the noise less distressing to them.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

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

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

For a sophisticated history of the relationship of commercialism to popular music in the United States, see David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 34. Tim Wu succinctly and persuasively explains the economic value of media conglomeration for giant firms in Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Knopf, 2010), chap. 17. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 228–29. 37. A classic study along these lines is Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 38. This is a finding that predominates in the political economy of communication tradition. A classic example: Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on Modern Potentates (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 39.


pages: 415 words: 127,092

Dawn of Detroit by Tiya Miles

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

Anne’s Church in Detroit and the “corporation of the college of Detroit” (Michigania) in order to better prepare their own children in a moment when territorial administrators had their minds set on statehood and a citizenry defined mainly as white. Michigan officials would later trade a portion of this original 1817 land grant on the River Raisin for acreage in Ann Arbor near the Huron River. Here, the college was relocated from its original site in downtown Detroit and expanded to offer advanced courses of classical study.9 An iconic Midwestern and American educational institution, the University of Michigan was born of a compromise made by Native people in the context of a century of colonial warfare and land dispossession in the Great Lakes. Built on ill-gotten lands and funded, in part, by family wealth derived from slave labor, the University of Michigan system now shines as a cultural star of the state.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Rural America was dominated by small, diversified farms employing nearly half of the country’s workforce and supporting nearly twenty-two million work animals. Today the agricultural sector is concentrated in sparsely populated rural areas on “large, specialized … highly productive and mechanized farms [that] employ a tiny share of U.S. workers and use five million tractors in place of the horses and mules of earlier days.”1 According to a classic study by Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, this transformation was “a gigantic Schumpeterian confrontation as the defenders of entrenched methods appealed to popular sentiments and tried to capture legal and political institutions to forestall the process of creative destruction.”2 Sensing that they were swimming against the tide, however, they sought accommodation and coexistence.


pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

affirmative action, assortative mating, blue-collar work, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, gentrification, George Gilder, Haight Ashbury, happiness index / gross national happiness, helicopter parent, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Tipper Gore, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working-age population, young professional

Tocqueville, 1840, 514. 3. Olasky, 1992, 86. Chapters 5 and 6 of The Tragedy of American Compassion have a wide range of similar data. 4. Pollock, 1923, in Skocpol, 2003, 63–64. 5. Skocpol, 2003, especially chapters 2 and 3. 6. Ibid., 108–9. 7. Ibid., 110–11. 8. When Robert and Helen Lynd conducted their classic study of Muncie, Indiana, in the mid-1920s, they reported the memberships in organizations among their samples of “business-class” and “working class” respondents, effectively representing the white-collar and blue-collar occupations. Fifty-seven percent of working-class men and 36 percent of working-class wives (all of the respondents were married) belonged to at least one organization, numbers that are higher than any observed for Fishtown in the data present, but they pale in comparison to the percentages for the business class: 97 percent among the men and 92 percent among their wives.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

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

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

., Territoriality, Citizenship, and Peacebuilding: Perspectives on Challenges to Peace in Africa (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Adonis & Abbey, 2013). 16. Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, “Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 3 (2011), pp. 487–89. 17. The World Bank’s classic study Voices of the Poor highlighted that the poor suffered not just from a lack of income but from insecurity and a lack of voice. This was subsequently reflected in the decennial World Bank’s World Development Report on Poverty in 2000. The International Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Well-Being (2010) emphasized that metrics of performance (including output and inequality) had to be expanded beyond just conventional measures of GDP and/or income.


pages: 490 words: 117,629

Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment by David F. Swensen

asset allocation, asset-backed security, Benchmark Capital, book value, buy and hold, capital controls, classic study, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, junk bonds, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, money market fund, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pez dispenser, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, the market place, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

During the seventy-eight years of the Ibbotson series, as shown in Table 1.1, one dollar invested in large-company stocks expanded 2,285 times, while bonds produced a 61 multiple, and cash, an 18 multiple. Small stocks demonstrated even more impressive results, as the 1925 dollar multiplied 10,954 times by 2003. Equity ownership beats holding bonds or cash, hands down. Similar results can be found in Jeremy Siegel’s Stocks for the Long Run. The third edition of Siegel’s classic study of capital markets returns shows U.S. stocks producing an 8.3 percent per annum compound return over the two centuries spanning 1802 to 2001. In a hard-to-believe statistic, one dollar invested in the stock market at the outset of the nineteenth century, with all gains and dividends reinvested, grows to $8.8 million at the beginning of the twenty-first century!


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

This simplistic example shows one thing: the connection between performance and shareholders, and between owners and companies, is compromised in today’s capitalism. That connection makes up the control room of capitalism. Destroy that connection and a key feature of capitalism is lost. Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, running with Smith’s old insight, raised this concern in a classic study first published in 1932. What happens, they asked, to companies that have diffused ownership fraught with agency problems? The separation of ownership and control, they argued, will eventually lead to companies that get led solely by management and executives because owners have far too little supervisory control.44 Management legend Peter Drucker answered the question posed by Berle and Means concerning the institutionalization of ownership and increased pension savings.


pages: 440 words: 128,813

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg

carbon footprint, citizen journalism, classic study, deindustrialization, digital rights, fixed income, gentrification, ghettoisation, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, loose coupling, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, postindustrial economy, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In addition, Martinez and colleagues (1989) discovered geographical patterns in heat wave mortality among the elderly. 7. See note 12 of the introduction for a discussion of Chicago’s community areas. 8. There is an enormous literature on the historical development and social conditions of Chicago’s African-American regions. The classic study of the Black Belt is St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis ([1945] 1993). 9. Despite significant reductions in the crime rates during the late 1990s, the levels of violent crime in poor black areas of the city remain comparatively high, making it difficult for residents to feel safe in the streets.


pages: 561 words: 120,899

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, full text search, government statistician, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, prediction markets, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, Teledyne, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

At Amherst College he majored in classics and ancient history and took courses in economics and physics. He enrolled in calculus, his only formal math class, solely to capture a large cash prize for the best student. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa at the age of 19, he studied in Athens at the American School of Classical Studies between 1937 and 1939 and earned a Ph.D. in ancient history at Harvard in 1940. Over the next few years he published several articles about religious cults and slavery in ancient Greece. Schlaifer was a quick study, and he filled in for Harvard historians, economists, and physicists as they left for defense work during the Second World War.


pages: 386 words: 122,595

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

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

The team worked six hours a day for forty-two weeks in order to get eleven different permits from seven different government bodies. Their efforts, not including the time, cost $1,231, or 31 times the monthly minimum wage in Peru—all to open a one-person shop.11 Chapter 4 outlined all the reasons government should stick to the basics. Harvard economist Robert Barro’s classic study of economic growth in roughly one hundred countries over three decades found that government consumption—total government spending excluding education and defense—was negatively correlated with per capita GDP growth. He concluded that such spending (and the required taxation) is not likely to increase productivity and will therefore do more harm than good.


pages: 459 words: 123,220

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

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

Yet in terms of enrollment in early childhood education the United States ranks 32nd among the 39 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). On average, across these advanced countries, 70 percent of three-year-olds are enrolled, compared to 38 percent in the United States.44 A few high-quality programs have been studied using the gold standard of program evaluation, with randomized controls and follow-up over decades. The classic studies of the initial Head Start program in the 1960s in Michigan and the Abecedarian Project in the 1970s in North Carolina showed remarkable effects: they boosted initial educational progress, reduced trouble with the law as the children became adults, and increased the participants’ lifetime income.45 Subsequent studies of Head Start have not shown such substantial effects, leading some to question whether the cost-benefit ratio of early childhood education is quite so favorable.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, 2002), pp. 12, 14, 15, 17. 64 Abdelal, Capital Rules, pp. 50f., 57-75. 65 Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics (London, 1999). 66 ‘The Fund Bites Back’, The Economist, 4 July 2002. 67 Kenneth Rogoff, ‘The Sisters at 60’, The Economist, 22 July 2004. Cf. ‘Not Even a Cat to Rescue’, The Economist, 20 April 2006. 68 See the classic study by Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder and the Building of the German Empire (Harmondsworth, 1987). 69 George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market (New York, 1987), pp. 27-30. 70 Robert Slater, Soros: The Life, Times and Trading Secrets of the World’s Greatest Investor (New York, 1996), pp. 48f. 71 George Soros, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means (New York, 2008), p. x. 72 Slater, Soros, p. 78. 73 Ibid., pp. 105, 107ff. 74 Ibid., p. 172. 75 Ibid., pp. 177, 182, 188. 76 Ibid., p. 10. 77 Ibid., p. 159. 78 Nicholas Dunbar, Inventing Money: The Story of Long-Term Capital Management and the Legends Behind It (New York, 2000), p. 92. 79 Dunbar, Inventing Money, pp. 168-73. 80 André F.


pages: 465 words: 124,074

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

In moments of high stress and threat, people can be said to have three psychological alternatives: (1) to remain calm and rational, (2) to refuse to believe that the threat is imminent or significant, or (3) to panic, lashing out frantically and incoherently at the threat. Generally, people react in one of the first two ways. In her classic study of disaster behavior, Martha Wolfenstein concludes, “The usual reaction is one of being unworried.”32 In addition, the historical record suggests that wars simply do not begin by accident. In his extensive survey of wars that have occurred since 1400, diplomat-historian Evan Luard concludes, “It is impossible to identify a single case in which it can be said that a war started accidentally; in which it was not, at the time the war broke out, the deliberate intention of at least one party that war should take place.”


pages: 385 words: 121,550

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

But Johnson knows the answer: they do so, in England at least, because knowingness is essential to being included. You have to be ‘in on the joke’ – and Johnson has shown just how far some English people will go in order not to look like they are not getting it. The anthropologist Kate Fox, in her classic study Watching the English, suggested that a crucial rule of the national discourse is what she called The Importance of Not Being Earnest: ‘At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription of “earnestness.”’ Johnson has played on this to perfection – he knows that millions of his compatriots would rather go along with his outrageous fabrications than be accused of the ultimate sin of taking things too seriously.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) Working Paper 14631, 2009. Ther, P. Europe since 1989: A History. Princeton University Press, 2016. Thornton, D. “Evidence on the Portfolio Balance Channel of Quantitative Easing.” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Working Paper Series 2012-015A, 2012. Toffler, A. The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow. Bantam Books, 1989. Tucker, P. Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State. Princeton University Press, 2018. Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. HarperCollins, 2016. Van Creveld, M. More on War. Oxford University Press, 2017.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Ross, “Enforcing the Kulturkampf in the Bismarckian State and the Limits of Coercion in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Modern History 56, no. 3 (1984): 456–482. On Italy, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Compare also the classic study in this genre, on France: Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976). 10. See Francis Ludwig Carsten, The Rise of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Sheri Berman, “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” World Politics 49, no. 3 (1997): 401–429; and the classic treatment of the question in William L.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

Still, the emergence of drugs such as remdesivir and dexamethasone, and others to come, vindicated the whole strategy of deploying the nonpharmaceutical interventions to flatten the curve. By buying time, we allowed ourselves the opportunity to use our capacities for teaching and learning in order to enhance our survival. * * * One classic study of immunity and symptoms related to coronavirus (involving the 229E strain, which causes the common cold), published in 1990, involved an odd twist.85 Fifteen volunteers were deliberately infected with the virus. They all went on to develop cold symptoms, and the amount of circulating antibodies in their blood was periodically monitored for a year, at which point the levels were observed to be very low.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Plus, for me, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972); Sennett, The Corrosion of Character; Richard Sennett, Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (New York: W. W. Norton and London: Allen Lane, 2003); Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 17. The classic study of gentrification is Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). ‘Holdouts’ are described by ShelterForce, a community organization. See shelterforce.org. 18. See Rachel Lichtenstein, Diamond Street: The Hidden World of Hatton Garden (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012). 19.


From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

Some notable though under-regarded contributions to this field are by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, whose The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500 – 1700: A Political and Economic History (Oxford, 2012) and Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Brandeis, 2011) are essential reading. The Opium Wars (London, 2011) by Julia Lovell ably replaces the classic studies of the subject by Maurice Collis and Arthur Waley; it is especially good on the uses of the opium wars by Chinese nationalists over the decades. Jonathan Spence, in his masterpiece The Search for Modern China (New York, 1999), gives a characteristically elegant account of the opium tangles in addition to much else, while John K.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Surveys have shown that religious people live longer (probably because they have healthier lifestyles) and feel happier (perhaps owing to the social support they get from church). Judging from birthrate patterns in the United States and Europe, they also seem to be outbreeding secular types, a definite Darwinian advantage. On the other hand, Dawkins is probably right when he says that believers are no better than atheists when it comes to behaving ethically. One classic study showed that “Jesus people” were just as likely to cheat on tests as atheists and no more likely to do altruistic volunteer work. Oddly, Dawkins does not bother to cite such empirical evidence; instead, he relies, rather unscientifically, on his intuition. “I’m inclined to suspect,” he writes, “that there are very few atheists in prison.”


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

When people are asked to verify the logic of these arguments, both of which commit the formal fallacy of denying the antecedent, liberals mistakenly ratify the first and correctly nix the second; conservatives do the opposite.28 In Duck Soup, Chico Marx famously asked, “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” When people are in the throes of the myside bias, the answer may not be their own eyes. In an update of a classic study showing that football fans always see more infractions by the opposing team, Kahan and collaborators showed a video of a protest in front of a building.29 When the title labeled it a protest against abortion at a health clinic, conservatives saw a peaceful demonstration, while liberals saw the protesters block the entrance and intimidate the enterers.


pages: 1,261 words: 294,715

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

“Sweetie, I love that you question things, but if you run into the street and I scream ‘Stop,’ you stop.” A lower-SES childhood is rife with threat. The other theme is preparing the child for the tough world out there—for the poor, adulthood consists of the socially dominant treating them in an authoritarian manner. Class differences in parenting were explored in a classic study by the anthropologist Adrie Kusserow of St. Michael’s College, who did fieldwork observing parents in three tribes—wealthy families on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; a stable, blue-collar community; and a poor, crime-ridden one (the last two both in Queens).58 The differences were fascinating. Parenting in the poor neighborhood involved “hard defensive individualism.”

What is the neurobiology of obedience to authority, when you’re being ordered to do something wrong? A similar mixture as with conformity, with the vmPFC and the dlPFC mud-wrestling, with indices of anxiety and glucocorticoid stress hormones showing up to bias you toward subordination. Which leads us to consider classic studies of “just following orders.” Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo The neurobiology of conformity and obedience won’t soon be revealing much about the core question in this field: if the circumstances are right, is every human capable of doing something appalling simply because they’ve been ordered to, because everyone else is doing it?


pages: 964 words: 296,182

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fixed income, invention of the sewing machine, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, means of production, New Journalism, New Urbanism, night-watchman state, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, unemployed young men, wage slave

What has now to be explained is how family circumstance, the critical condition of German religion and philosophy, and, above all, Karl’s own soaring intellectual ambitions combined to shape such a singular stance. 2 The Lawyer, the Poet and the Lover 1. HENRIETTE PRESSBURG AND HER CHILDREN So far, nothing has been said about Karl’s mother, Henriette, née Pressburg. Generally, she has received cursory and for the most part condescending treatment. In his classic study of 1918, Franz Mehring devoted less than half a paragraph to her, noting only that ‘she was completely absorbed in her domestic affairs’, and that she could only speak broken German.1 Why her German grammar and spelling remained so poor remains a mystery. It cannot simply be ascribed to her upbringing in the Netherlands, or her preference for Dutch, since her sister, Sophie, not only spoke and wrote good German, but also had mastered several other languages.

Therefore, as noted earlier (see here), Maurer, the historian of ancient Germany, when ‘analysing this commune of secondary formation, was able to reconstruct the archaic prototype’.169 ‘The vitality of primitive communities’, Karl claimed, ‘was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and a fortiori that of modern capitalist societies.’170 Or, as he noted of the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, both on the Grecian gens and on the character of the Iroquois, ‘unmistakeably … the savage peeps through’.171 Karl was inspired by Morgan’s depiction of the gens as that form of primitive community which preceded patriarchy, private property, class and the state. Morgan inferred the existence of the gens, both from his contemporary researches on the tribes of North America, especially the Iroquois, and from his classical study of Greece and Rome.172 Excited by the new world which prehistory had opened up, Karl now had a vision that encompassed not ‘merely’ bourgeois society, but the whole trajectory of ‘civilization’ since the downfall of the primitive community. Remarkably, Karl had come to agree with the French ‘utopian’ socialist Charles Fourier that ‘the epoch of civilization is characterised by monogamy and private property in land’ and that ‘the modern family contained within itself in miniature all the antagonisms which later spread through society and its state’.173 ‘Oldest of all’, he noted, primitive community contained ‘the existence of the horde with promiscuity; no family; here only mother-right could have played any role’.174 One of the most interesting features of Karl’s new focus upon the durability and ‘viability’ of the archaic village community was the way in which it invited the restatement of the conception of human nature so eloquently spelled out by him in 1843 and 1844 during his time in Paris.


pages: 879 words: 309,222

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

In descending order of height, it consists of Natalie (Cameron Diaz), Alex (Lucy Liu), and the misleadingly named Dylan (Drew Barrymore). The first is blond, the second dark, and the third a redhead, but they switch wigs, outfits, and, occasionally, languages with such reckless zeal that, were Wim Wenders directing this picture, I would call it a classic study of ontological meltdown and the disintegrating self. At one genuinely troubling moment, two of the three girls turn into guys, complete with suits and mustaches; I caught the sound of spluttering and zapping, and a quick look around the theatre confirmed that this innocent twist of plot had caused five hundred male sexual radars to implode simultaneously.

In the event that you ever come across the three volumes of Housman’s Classical Papers in a secondhand bookstore, grab them; even if you don’t have a word of Latin or Greek (and Housman convinces you that it is better to have no words than to have the wrong ones), his sense of passionate glee, as he whets his intellectual knives for the purposes of ritual disembowelment, offers the reader as unflagging a demonstration of native wit as can be found in English since the reign of Sydney Smith. Housman has none of Smith’s tolerance or Christian benignity, but this is the arena of pure scholarship, where slackness is a sin beyond purgation. By now you could be forgiven for thinking that what Housman meant by classical studies had nothing to do with literature—or, at any rate, that he treated ancient texts not as founts of wisdom but as diseased bodies that required unflinching attention if they were to be made whole. He even dismissed Manilius, on whom he expended half his existence, as “facile and frivolous.” Some readers have found this attitude not merely perplexing but distressing, as if Housman were using his professional skills to deny himself the pleasures of the text—as if to admit that you were moved by Propertius, say, were somehow to admit failure.


pages: 539 words: 139,378

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

The exception to this rule is that when the material benefits of a policy are “substantial, imminent, and well-publicized,” those who would benefit from it are more likely to support it than those who would be harmed. See also D. T. Miller 1999 on the “norm of self-interest.” 36. Kinder 1998, p. 808. 37. The term is from Smith, Bruner, and White, as quoted by Kinder 1998. 38. See the classic study by Hastorf and Cantril (1954) in which students at Dartmouth and Princeton came to very different conclusions about what had happened on the football field after watching the same film showing several disputed penalty calls. 39. Lord, Ross, and Lepper 1979; Munro et al. 2002; Taber and Lodge 2006.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

babies universally prefer faces of their own race: Just Babies, Paul Bloom (Bodley Head, 2013), p. 105. Children as young as six: Just Babies, Paul Bloom (Bodley Head, 2013), p. 113. The effect of our tribal brains has been shown in numerous experiments: For more information, see my previous book, The Heretics (Picador, 2013). One classic study of this effect is ‘Experiments in intergroup discrimination’, H. Tajfel, Scientific American (1970), vol. 223, pp. 96–102. we are great apes that sit in the primate superfamily Hominoidea: http://australianmuseum.net.au/­humans-are-apes-great-apes. Caring about what others think of us: The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood (Constable, 2011), p. 138.


pages: 428 words: 134,832

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

There is a corresponding sense of group: our cozy warrens are just for us, not for those of you outside.” Today’s expressways cover ancient canals, and major avenues follow the ridge and valley roads of ancient Edo. “In Europe, cities grew by repeatedly breaking through and expanding beyond the hard shell of the city walls,” Jinnai Hidenobu wrote in his classic study, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology. “In Edo, by contrast, the location of the temples and shrines and their use of the land around them meant that the city’s life solidified inside a series of soft shells.” In European cities, stone walls were built to protect the people; in densely settled Japanese cities, the people served as the walls.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

Ronald Roberts had gone to sniff the scene ahead of us and ask BP questions without raising questions himself. His real name isn’t Ronald, it’s Zachary : Zach Roberts the photojournalist. But if you Google “Ronald” Roberts, you get a photo of a Florida sex offender, deceased, as well as the author of the classic study Fish Pathology. Despite the oil still barfing out of its Macondo hole, BP was in holocaust denial mode: The fish were not dead. And, BP said, if they were dead, BP didn’t kill them. Investigating fish murder isn’t my game. So I would need an expert who wasn’t full of shit and wasn’t full of industry money.


pages: 497 words: 130,817

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera

affirmative action, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, classic study, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, meritocracy, messenger bag, meta-analysis, new economy, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, young professional

For discussions, see Ambady and Weisbuch 2010; Collins 2004. 24. Addressing methodological issues of interviewing elites, sociologist Susan Ostrander (1993) noted that a hallmark of elites is that they tend to begin research interviews by interviewing the researcher. 25. For example, in her classic study The Managed Heart, Arlie Hochschild (1983) found that airplane flight crews were hired for their ability to engage in surface acting, presenting a consistently cheerful attitude to passengers. Such sustained performance required a large amount of emotional labor that could take a toll on employees’ well-being.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

That we stayed alive is our guilt.9 Jaspers’s most famous pupil, Hannah Arendt, made an abstract point which the German de-Nazification tribunals turned, with few philosophical niceties, into a concrete form of judicial practice. Arendt, a Jew, spent much of the 1930s and the war years in exile in the US. Author of the classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of the first books to argue that fascism and communism were essentially two sides of the same coin, she passionately opposed the concept of collective guilt: ‘Where all are guilty, nobody in the last analysis can be judged.’10 * As time went on, the questionnaire became more thorough – and a lot more bureaucratic.


Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

See the Hackers' DIctIonary, avail- able on-line at the following ftp address: ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/ etext9 2!j argn I o. txt. 25. See MacCormac (1984), for an examination of the "brain as a computer" metaphor in the histoncal perspective of the eighteenth-century metaphor of "man as a machIne." Also see Mitcham (1986) for a thorough survey of the classic studies concerning the human (socIal, cultural, ethIcal, and relIgious) dImensIons of com- puters. Lars-Erik Janlert has focused on this representation of "the computer as a person," and concluded, at the opposite of the original eighteenth-century metaphor of "man as a machine," that "the person view, however, is the exact antithesis: make man the measure of mach,nes!"


pages: 505 words: 127,542

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? by Raj Raghunathan

behavioural economics, Blue Ocean Strategy, Broken windows theory, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Phillip Zimbardo, placebo effect, science of happiness, Skype, sugar pill, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Ariely and his colleagues conducted several other studies to assess the impact that incentives have on performance. Across all these studies, a consistent pattern emerged: participants performed better when they didn’t have the pressure of a monetary reward hanging over their heads like Damocles’ sword.* These findings are, of course, broadly consistent with those from the classic studies (conducted in the 1980s) on intrinsic motivation. As those studies showed, extrinsic rewards and incentives—carrots and sticks—worsen (rather than improve) performance. The reason why extrinsic rewards hurt our performance is because they distract us from getting into flow; when we are rewarded or punished based on outcome of goal pursuit, we lose the ability to focus on the process of goal pursuit.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, 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, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

(One can see why many of today’s academics fear the return of economics to its philosophical and literary roots.) If any of these giants of economic thinking lived today and submitted their papers to leading academic journals or applied for jobs at elite universities, they would be ridiculed and rejected. As Thomas Kuhn explained fifty years ago in his classic study of scientific progress, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, academic establishments fight hard to resist paradigm shifts, even in physics, chemistry, and other objective, empirically testable hard sciences. In economics, with all its ideological connections, a paradigm shift will be resisted even more fiercely, despite the spectacular failures the crisis revealed.


To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

Ferrier, acclaimed by some in his own time as the most significant philosopher in Europe, and Alexander Bain, Regius Professor of Logic at Aberdeen, also with a distinguished international reputation, are very worthy of serious academic consideration. So too is Edward Caird, leader of the ‘Scottish Idealists’. In social studies, Sir James Frazer was a pioneering anthropologist. Educated at both Glasgow and Cambridge, his background in classical studies was also influenced by Kelvin, who stimulated him to search for the absolute laws of nature. His seminal work was the monumental two-volume The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, which gave powerful new insights into the study of early societies. His contemporary, Patrick Geddes, also established a world-class reputation through his studies of the new cities that were transforming all the industrializing countries and his conviction that life for their citizens could be improved through effective planning and a serious effort to understand the environment.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Tom Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nano-second Nineties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 6. 15. William Gibson, with his trilogy of works in the early eighties (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive), introduced the notion of cyberspace (from Norbert Wiener’s classic study of interactive communications technology and cybernetics in the late forties) into general parlance. Technically, the term refers to the invisible electronic information space between the computer keyboard (input) and the computer screen (output). The New York Times devoted nearly an entire issue of its Book Review to computer-generated books and the literary culture of cyberspace in 1994, and since then it has reviewed CD-ROM “books” as well. 16.


pages: 483 words: 134,377

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

Over the succeeding centuries, individual freedom would take shape in these free cities in northern Italy and spread to other parts of Europe. FROM TYRANNY TO RIGHTS IN EUROPE It was going to be a long journey to get to individual rights. The starting point in Europe was not hopeful. As one classic study of the individual in the Middle Ages in Europe puts it: “the individual was no more than a recipient of orders, of commands, of the law, and as a layman, in particular, he was merely a passive spectator who was to obey.”10 Medieval culture placed no value on the individual; it recognized no right for the individual to choose his (much less her) own path.


pages: 934 words: 135,736

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

Cf. the entry under 'Reichs-Autobahnen' in the Volksbrockhaus, p. 563: 'die nationale Bedeutung der Reichsautobahnen liegt darin, dass sie weite Landesteile dem Verkehr erschliessen und das ineinanderwachsen der deutschen Stämme färdern.' 14. See R. J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery 193238 (London: Macmillan, 1982); V. Berghahn, Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 1489. 15. See Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, op. cit., ch. 7; the classic study is David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969; orig. 1966). 16. Quoted in Helmut Krausnick, 'Judenverfolgung' in Hans Buchheim et al., Anatomie des SS-Staates (Munich: dtv, 1967), vol. II, p. 279. 17. Cf. David Astor, 'Adam von Trott: A Personal View' in Hedley Bull (ed.), The Challenge of the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 2732; see also Michael Balfour's discussion of Trott in Withstanding Hitler, pp. 17987.


pages: 407 words: 136,138

The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler

always be closing, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, classic study, David Brooks, full employment, illegal immigration, late fees, low skilled workers, payday loans, profit motive, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, working poor

This can set up a culture clash between the Latino parent and “the harried, hurried medical care provider in the United States,” he noted. “If you feel that you’ve been slighted, you’re not going to follow through with therapy, you’re not going to come back for a return visit, and that will affect your health.” Fatalism figured in “a classic study showing that Latinos are significantly more likely to believe that a diagnosis of cancer is an act of God and there’s not much you can do about it,” he said. “They probably won’t screen themselves as much, they won’t adhere to therapy, and they’ll present in the later stages of the disease.” Language also divides, sometimes dangerously.


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

One possible starting point among many is Urban (2000). Two other judicial rulings that were instrumental in the process of extending patents to the agricultural and biotechnological sector are Ex parte Hibbert in 1985 and Ex parte Allan in 1987. 24. Alston and Venner (2000), Abstract. For a classical study of the diffusion of agricultural innovation in the US in the period before the PVPA bill made it a big monopolies feast, the technically inclined reader should consult Griliches (1957), who beautifully documents competitive innovation at work. The many sweeping statements we have made, here and in the previous chapter, in relation to the agricultural sector and the irrelevance of patents for its technological development, are based on the scientific research reported in Butler and Marion (1985), Campbell and Overton (1991), Griliches (1960), Kloppenburg (1988), McClelland (1997), among others. 25.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

The Diplomat, May 12, 2017, https://​thediplomat​.com/​2017/​05/​who​-is​-actually​-attending​ -chinas​-belt​-and​-road​-forum/. 70. Wang, The Belt and Road Initiative, 37. 71. Ibid., 191. chapter 3 1. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 31. 2. For the classic study of Deng Xiaoping and his key role in making Chinese politicaleconomic history, see Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 2011). 3. On the early genesis of the Four Modernizations, see Immanuel Chung-yueh Hsu, China without Mao: The Search for a New Order, 2nd ed.


pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

But if so, then landing-site selection is still a necessary evil. Missions that land add to our understanding of a planet with data that simply can’t be sensed from orbit. There is no way to explore without them. And as they add to the science, they also change its context. They provide us with the opportunity to create real places. In his classic study Place and Placelessness, the Canadian geographer Edward Relph explains how much more there is to a place than the objective facts of its spatial coordinates. “In our everyday lives places are not experienced as independent, clearly defined entities that can be described simply in terms of their location or appearance.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

As Friedrich Hayek explained: ‘civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge that we do not possess’.17 Such constant cooperation and exchange give us better access to the services and goods we need, so long as we can trust that others will be there to scratch our backs if we have scratched theirs. One classic study showed that chimpanzees are more willing to share food with chimps who have recently groomed them, and more likely to respond aggressively to requests for food from chimps who had not recently groomed them.18 But chimps have not taken this to the next level by systematically keeping track of free riders and helpers in the larger group, to administer rewards and punishments.


pages: 353 words: 148,895

Triumph of the Optimists: 101 Years of Global Investment Returns by Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, Mike Staunton

asset allocation, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, European colonialism, fixed income, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, junk bonds, negative equity, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, purchasing power parity, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, yield curve

Ball and Bowers (1986) provide a complementary, though brief, historical analysis. We are grateful to Bob Officer for making his database available to us, and also to Ray Ball and John Bowers for providing their own data for Australia. Officer compiled equity returns from a variety of indexes. The early period made use of data from Lamberton’s (1958) classic study. This is linked over the period 1958–74 to an accumulation index of fifty shares from the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) and over 1975–79 to the AGSM value-weighted accumulation index. Subsequently, we use the Australia All-Ordinary index. Bond returns are based on the yields on New South Wales government securities from the start of the century until 1914.


pages: 421 words: 147,305

The Medical Detectives by Berton Roueche

Albert Einstein, classic study, double entry bookkeeping, germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur, sugar pill

DeMonbreun, professor of pathology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, successfully isolated a colony of H. capsulatum spores and cultivated them to definitive fungoid maturity. Darling's other errors eluded detection even longer—until 1945. Their exposure was the joint accomplishment of three now classic studies. One of these was the Archives of Internal Medicine case review. The others were the work of the team of Amos Christie and J. C. Peterson, both professors of pediatrics at Vanderbilt, and a team headed by C. E. Palmer, then director of the United States Public Health Service Tuberculosis Research Office, in Washington.


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

Still, those who became professionally engaged with Japan were with few exceptions uncommonly zealous in insisting upon their subject’s “uniqueness” and its unparalleled predisposition to the “irrational” and the “illogical.” The English scholar-diplomat George Sansom, the most esteemed Western expert on Japanese culture in the years prior to Pearl Harbor, was attracted to Japan because it was “so peculiarly sui generis.” John Embree, an American anthropologist who wrote a classic study of a Japanese village in the 1930s, agreed that “Japan and the Japanese are different from other nations, or rather, as Japanese nationalists phrase it, they are ‘unique among the peoples and cultures of the world.’ ”3 Compton Pakenham, an English military officer raised in Japan, who knew Konoe Fumimaro, later prime minister, as a boy and spent a half year attached to a Japanese Army regiment before the war, contributed a long series of articles on Japanese psychology to Newsweek magazine in 1945.


pages: 535 words: 151,217

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Reimer, the director of the Centre for Climate, Environment, and Chronology at Queens University, Belfast’s School of Geography, have also written on the topic, encouraging the acceptance of 1950 as the “present” in the new dating system that has replaced AD and BC with BP. CHAPTER 1: THE GREAT THERMONUCLEAR SEA Details of the crucial conversations between President Truman and his CIA director, Admiral Souers, which led to the decision to develop fusion weapons, later to be tested on Bikini and Enewetak atolls, can be found in Richard Rhodes’s classic study of the development of hydrogen bombs, Dark Sun. The matter of then selling the test program to the Bikinians is more than amply covered in Holly Barker’s Bravo for the Marshallese, Connie Goldsmith’s Bombs over Bikini, and Jack Niedenthal’s For the Good of Mankind—the last being the cynically persuasive argument put forward by the generals and admirals who came a-courting the eagerly patriotic islanders.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

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

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

There is an obvious temptation to think that the growth of big cities is a direct function of population growth. But this is not necessarily so. Every human on earth could be packed into Texas, with each family living in its own detached house with a yard, and still have some of Texas left over. As Adna Weber argued in the classic study The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, population growth alone does not explain why people live in urban settings rather than dispersed in the countryside. In 1890, Bengal had about the same population density as England. Yet Bengal's urban population was just 4.8 percent, while England's was 61.7 percent.25 Historically, cities were walled off from the countryside to keep marauders and the lower classes out.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

A Bibliography of Computer Music: A Reference for Composers. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1981. Toepperwein, L. L., et al. Robotics Applications for Industry: A Practical Guide. Park Ridge: Noyes Data Corporation, 1983. Toffler, Alvin. Powershift. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. ————. The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Toffoli, Tommaso and Norman Margolis. Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Torrance, Stephen B., ed. The Mind and the Machine: Philosophical Aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood, 1986.


pages: 488 words: 144,145

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Hazlitt made the case that the U.S. policy of flooding the world with dollars, via loans, grants and other measures, would not generate wealth in the United States or the recipient nations.12 That is precisely the policy that Washington followed, however, on again and off again, since 1867; to use the expansion of the paper money supply to drive nominal economic growth, even if it meant a reduction in the real value of the currency. In a similar vein, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz calculated the growth in the U.S. money supply over the period of their classic study of American money, 1867 to 1960: The public held 50 times as many dollars of currency at the end of the 93 years spanned by our figures as at the beginning; 243 times as many dollars of commercial bank deposits; and 127 times as many dollars of mutual savings deposits. The total we designate as money multiplied 157-fold in the course of these nine decades, or at the rate of 5.4 per cent.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Good advice for keeping your schedule and sanity intact, but not for keeping your job—which entails cultivating the community at every turn and engaging in every corner of a city’s civic network. Local democracy demands commitment. No doubt, Harvard would also advise against having His Honor run into burning buildings or break up muggings, but it’s hard imagining a mayor worth his salt who would heed such counsel. As Robert Dahl wrote in his classic study of governance, the success of most mayors is not gained from being “at the peak of a pyramid but rather at the center of intersecting circles.”32 What we find at the center of intersecting circles in the city is a home-boy. Mayors are homeboys—“homies” if you like. “People know who we are, they see us on the street,” notes Philadelphia’s Mayor Nutter.


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

Deleting the name Harley from the registration form is perceived as an insult to the owner, and this insult is stitched together in the article with others that come from the gov­ ernment toward bikers (restricting meeting places, insisting on helmet­ wearing, being overly enthusiastic in enforcing traffic violations by bikers ). This is a pure example of the politics of essence, of identity politics. It is echoed in many areas of life, for example, in James Davis' ( 1 99 1 ) classic study Who Is Black ? where the question of the one-drop rule in the United States, and the rejection of mixed-race people as a legitimate category is an old and a cruel story. The central process here is the distillation of the sine qua non out from the messy and crenellated surrounds-the rejection of marginality in favor of purity.


pages: 517 words: 147,591

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

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

The conflict data were even detailed enough for Vanden Eynde to see that the large majority of victims belonged to the specific groups of civilians who typically collaborated with the Indian government against the rebels. This type of retaliatory violence has gone largely unstudied in the recent empirical literature, for lack of large data sets and variation that lends itself to estimating causal effects. It is more common in earlier, more qualitative research, such as Stathis Kalyvas’s classic study of the Greek civil war.65 In order to rule out reverse causality (violence affecting economic conditions), Vanden Eynde studied the consequences of variation in income generated by variation in rainfall; this is a very strong relationship in rural India, which has a highly localized pattern of monsoon rains affecting crop yields within regions and within years.66 Decreases in income generated by weak rainfall increase violence initiated by insurgents, which might seem at first glance like evidence for relative deprivation or opportunity costs—except that the increased violence is not directed against security forces but against civilians.


pages: 618 words: 160,006

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

Lehmann, ‘The Polyeric Quest: Renaissance and Baroque Theories about Ancient Men of War’, PhD thesis, Rotterdam, 1995, pp. 59–60. 40. F. Oliviera, Arte de Guerra do Mar: Estrategia e Guerra naval no Tempo dos Descombrimentos, Lisbon: Ediçöes 70 Lda, for a facsimile and a modern setting of the text. Introduction by A. S. Ribeiro, 41. Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, pp. 47–8. 42. Ibid., pp. 49–53. 43. The classic study of Portugal’s client relationship with the British is in A. D. Francis, The Methuens and Portugal, 1691–1708, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, p. 268. 44. Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, pp. 65–8. 45. Ibid., pp. 81–2, 87–8. 46. Ibid., p. 54. Chapter 7 1. In the case of Russia and China the need of the post-1950 United States navy for a suitable naval threat has sustained impressive research efforts directed at the naval development of first the Soviet Union and then China.


Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Taking the position of Chamber secretary in 1918, Mises was obliged to advise the government and write expert evaluations of new laws in the interwar period, a duty that peaked with leading a three-­person Economic Commission in 1930.12 Even if he is remembered for his work on social philosophy and theories of money and credit, Mises earned his livelihood for much of his adult life as a forthright advocate for the needs of business, including with the Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s and 1930s, and the National Association of 32 GLOBALISTS Manufacturers (NAM) and Foundation for Economic Education ­a fter his emigration to the United States.13 The location of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce on the Ringstrasse was heavy with symbolism and helps illustrate the milieu out of which the Austrian strain of neoliberalism emerged. The boulevards themselves w ­ ere built in the wake of the revolutions of 1848 on the vacant land that had once been the medieval city walls. In his classic study of fin-­ de-­siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske describes how the liberal city government used the Ringstrasse to showcase its vision of social order, building the parliament and city hall alongside theaters and the university.14 The developments echoed ­those ­under way in Paris ­under the direction of Baron George-­Eugène Haussmann.


pages: 475 words: 156,046

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

By the standards of the early twenty-first century some of these improvements seem minor and from a base so low that it seems like an injustice. But this creeping piecemeal process is exactly how progress in the material conditions of the people of England has come about. The Condition of the English Working Class is, as the name implies, a classic study of the condition of England question. The rhetoric of Orator Hunt at St Peter’s Field provided the stimulus to seek representation in Parliament. The rhetoric of John Bright and Richard Cobden in the Free Trade Hall and in Parliament provided the answer that comes from the good will of commerce.


pages: 744 words: 142,748

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

See AT&T, Notes on Distance Dialing, 1968, section 5, p. 14 <db1001>. 227–228 “We would sit there”: Mark Bernay, author interview, 2011. 228 “We didn’t even know,” “It’s not something”: Wayne Perrin, notes and author interview, 2008. 228 “all sorts of shortages these days” and subsequent description: Andrew H. Malcolm, “The ‘Shortage’ of Bathroom Tissue: A Classic Study in Rumor,” New York Times, February 3, 1974 <db1031>. The perception of a shortage was due to a confluence of factors, not just Carson’s joke. In particular, a congressman had issued a press release a few weeks earlier stating that the United States might soon face a serious shortage of toilet paper and that rationing might be necessary.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

There is no way to conceive of the U.S. military at this point as “the people in arms.” It seems rather that in postmodern warfare, as in ancient Roman times, mercenary armies tend to become the primary combat forces. It is strange to have to note how backward the theories of an RMA are with respect to the classic studies of the art of war by such authors as Machiavelli and Clausewitz—something of which today’s traditionalist military theorists are keenly aware. The insistence on a war without casualties, and on the technological asymmetry of the ruling armed forces with respect to all others, strips the social face from the art of war, along with the problem of bodies and their power.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

This pattern of giving without expectation of immediate reward had deep roots in the San Francisco Bay area counterculture; for Rheingold and others, it was this pattern that distinguished the sorts of information exchange happening in places like the WELL from those of ordinary, cash-and-carry markets.43 As several generations of sociologists and anthropologists have pointed out, though, a gift economy is not simply a system for the exchange of valuable goods. It is also a system for the establishment of social order.44 Marcel Mauss argued in The Gift, his classic study of exchange relations in pre-industrial societies, that there is no such thing as a “pure gift.” Gifts entail obligations and generate cycles of exchange that serve to establish and maintain structural relations between givers and receivers. Moreover, as Mauss suggested, the gift itself never stands outside social or economic relations.


pages: 509 words: 153,061

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E. Ricks

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Berlin Wall, classic study, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, interchangeable parts, It's morning again in America, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman

After four years in Iraq, no one seemed to expect the Americans to develop a way to operate differently and more effectively. The shift was all the more unexpected because it came as President Bush was politically cornered. Usually, “sustained strategic boldness . . . requires a solid foundation of popular support,” Oxford historian Piers Mackesy observed in The War for America, his classic study of how the British managed to lose the American Revolutionary War in 1781 after appearing to have won it just a year earlier. But in agreeing to a troop escalation, Bush was operating from a position of extraordinary political weakness. Not only was he deeply unpopular, he had reversed course at a time when it seemed that stubborn persistence was his sole virtue as a leader: After years of saying he would heed the advice of his military, Bush had split with the overwhelming view of his top military leaders, from the Pentagon to Central Command to the top general in Iraq.


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

Other accounts of group identity and prejudice without competitive circumstances can be found in Henri Tajfel’s Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination, in volume 223 issue 5 of Scientific American or Social Categorisation and Intergroup Behaviour, by Henri Tajfel, MG Billig, RP Bundy and Claude Flament, in volume 1 issue 2 of the European Journal of Social Psychology. For a general modern appraisal of these studies read Social Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies, edited by Joanne R. Smith and S. Alexander Haslam. The potentials and dangers, but mostly dangers, of new technology are laid out in The People Vs Tech, by Jamie Bartlett, which is very cogent and well judged, and Stand Out of Our Light by James Williams, which is the best account of the attention economy and a poetic, melancholic description of what it is doing to the quality of human life.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Between five and seven thousand people, divided into loosely coordinated battalions and armed primarily with machetes, rose up at the peak of the harvest season to overturn the order of coffee production, to “make the workers the owners.” Some of the revolutionaries were members of the Communist Party of El Salvador; the “great majority” were people who had worked on coffee plantations and had decided that they would not live that way another day.2 “In a revolution,” wrote historian C. L. R. James in his classic study of Haiti, The Black Jacobins, “when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts forth into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.”3 In El Salvador in January 1932, revolution ran through the center of the coffee economy as surely as the railroad tracks and telegraph lines ringing the Santa Ana Volcano.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

When groupthink strikes, even smart, motivated, well-intentioned, rational individuals working in highly cohesive groups make poor collective decisions. How can this be? Because cohesion turns out to be a double-edged sword. The problem isn’t that there’s too much friction in the group. It’s that there’s too little. Irving Janis, the psychologist who coined the term groupthink in his classic study of the Vietnam War and other U.S. foreign policy fiascoes, found that in high-pressure, high-stakes situations, the need for group affiliation and cohesion can assume overwhelming importance, fostering over-optimism, sloppy thinking, and an inflated sense of the group’s morality. Maintaining group cohesion in the face of external pressures drives members to shy away from questioning, dissenting, and exploring alternative viewpoints—even though these are precisely the types of behaviors found to improve analysis.89 When groupthink arises, the whole becomes worse than the sum of the parts.


pages: 482 words: 150,822

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 by Thomas E. Ricks

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Black Lives Matter, classic study, colonial rule, COVID-19, critical race theory, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Their interview ended memorably with Gandhi’s farewell comment that “it may be through the [American] Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.” Speaking with another American in the 1940s, Gandhi asked about the treatment of its Black people and then said, “A civilization is to be judged by its treatment of minorities.” King also was familiar with Thurman’s classic study, Jesus and the Disinherited, which portrays Christianity as a “survival kit” for “people who stand with their backs against the wall.” So King may not have been showing all his nonviolent cards to Rustin and other out-of-town experts. And if he consciously put a Christian face on Gandhi’s philosophy, as he appears to have done, following Thurman’s lead, that was an act of strategic genius.


pages: 559 words: 155,777

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece by Kevin Birmingham

banking crisis, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, death of newspapers, full employment, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, new economy, New Journalism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Singer: altruism, trade route, traveling salesman

.: Harvard University Press, 2016); Claudia Verhoeven’s detailed examination of Dmitri Karakozov’s assassination attempt as well as the investigation, trial, and uproar surrounding it, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009); Abbott Gleason’s Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (New York: Viking, 1980); and Franco Venturi’s classic study, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Knopf, 1960). Dostoevsky’s Dead House guides much of my narration of his prison years. Dostoevsky disguised names and altered enough details to present the work as fiction in order to appease the imperial censors, but the memories were so painful that he once became ill after reading excerpts.


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

The demands on heritage require appropriate display and packaging: tweeds and sheepdogs; cheese wrapped in paper, not plastic; a little soil on vegetables to indicate their natural freshness. In reality, of course, heritage is an industry like any other and local markets exist in the modern world, not outside it. Local farmers, too, use abattoirs. Nor are vegetables automatically organic because they are local, as many customers presume. In her classic study of the regional market in Carpentras, near Avignon, Michèle de la Pradelle reconstructed this theatre of illusion and self-deception. Potatoes here were deliberately kept muddy and presented in bulk to suggest they came straight from the farm. In reality, very few small farmers survived in the region.

., ‘Firms and Public Service Provision in Russia’, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition, BOFIT Discussion paper no. 16 (2003), Helsinki. 47. Michael Heller, ‘Sport, Bureaucracies and London Clerks 1880–1939’, in: International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 5, 2008: 579–614. 48. James E. Roberson, Japanese Working-class Lives: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Workers (London, 1998). The classic study of the salaryman is Ezra Feivel Vogel, Japan’s New Middle Class: The Salary Man and His Family in a Tokyo Suburb (Berkeley, CA, 1963). 49. Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004). 50. http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,3746,en_2649_33933_38141385_1_1_1_1,00.html. 51.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

Because a high degree of competition exists among families, reflecting the absence of a generalized sense of trust within the society, cooperation in group activities outside family or lineage ties is strictly limited. Compare this situation to the description of social life in the small southern Italian town of “Montegrano” in Edward Banfield’s classic study, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society: The individual’s attachment to the family must be the starting place for an account of the Montegrano ethos. In fact, an adult hardly may be said to have an individuality apart from the family: he exists not as “ego” but as “parent”…. In the Montegrano mind, any advantage that may be given to another is necessarily at the expense of one’s own family.


pages: 661 words: 169,298

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

New York: Brentano’s, 1920. Losee, J. An Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Short survey, with an emphasis on the history of the concept of experimentation. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. Classic study of a durable metaphor. Lubbock, Constance A. The Herschel Chronicle. New York: Macmillan, 1933. Memoirs by William Herschel’s granddaughter. Lucretius. De Rerum Natura, trans. Cyril Bailey. London: Oxford University Press, 1947. —————. On Nature (De Rerum Natura), trans. Russel Geer. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.


pages: 600 words: 174,620

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.

anesthesia awareness, British Empire, classic study, conceptual framework, deskilling, different worldview, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, feminist movement, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, sugar pill, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Yogi Berra

Marilyn remembered having turned to her mother for protection, but when she ran to her and tried to hide herself by burying her face in her mother’s skirt, she was met with only a limp embrace. At times her mother remained silent; at others she cried or angrily scolded Marilyn for “making Daddy so angry.” The terrified child found no one to protect her, to offer strength or shelter. As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome: “Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. Any attempts by the child to divulge the secret will be countered by an adult conspiracy of silence and disbelief.


pages: 584 words: 170,388

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

classic study, gravity well, hallucination problem, invisible hand, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Plato's cave

Both had lived their entire lives on Barnard’s World, one of the oldest but least exciting members of the Hegemony. Barnard’s was in the Web, but it made little difference to Sol and Sarai since they could not afford frequent farcaster travel and had little wish to go at any rate. Sol had recently celebrated his tenth year with Nightenhelser College, where he taught history and classical studies and did his own research on ethical evolution. Nightenhelser was a small school, fewer than three thousand students, but its academic reputation was outstanding and it attracted young people from all over the Web. The primary complaint of these students was that Nightenhelser and its surrounding community of Crawford constituted an island of civilization in an ocean of corn.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

By the early twentieth century it was marketing half the electrical products in the international market. At the same time Germany achieved almost a monopoly of European commerce in fine chemicals, dyestuffs, and optics. The Scope of Industries Germans devoted substantial resources to scientific education even while they shared the high premium Europeans put on classical studies. German researchers during the nineteenth century only later found practical applications for their discoveries. And those applications were astounding! Germans gained more knowledge of energy, electricity, and optics than their peers in France and Great Britain combined. Academic researchers and business leaders worked hand in glove in what contemporaries sometimes called a secret marriage.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

.: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp. 152-153. 3 Internal dissent against Hitler was manifest in the July 1944 plot against his life, and would perhaps have become as pervasive as it did in the Soviet Union had the regime survived a few more decades. 4 On this point, see the Introduction to Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986d), p. 15. 5 5. The classic study of this subject is Juan Linz, ed., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibriation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 6 Quoted from a Swiss journalist in Philippe C. Schmitter, “Liberation by Golpe: Retrospective Thoughts on the Demise of Authoritarianism in Portugal,” Armed Forces and Society 2, no. 1 (November 1975): 5-33. 7 See ibid.; and Thomas C.


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

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

Research Division, Detroit Commission on Community Relations, “Earnings of the Experienced Labor Force By Sex, Color, and Industry, Detroit Metropolitan Area,” February 1963, in DNAACP, Part I, Box 24, Folder: Commission on Community Relations. 79. Michigan Chronicle, September 21, 1946; Detroit Free Press, November 10, 1961. 80. Michigan Chronicle, September 21, 1946; Incident Report, CCR, Part I, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 47–57a; Monthly Report, Northwest Branch, Detroit Urban League, October 1951, DUL, Box 44, Folder A8–9. 81. The classic study remains Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), see especially 29–71. Descriptions of street corner life, like Liebow’s, were deeply humanistic and offered liberal policy prescriptions for the alleviation of poverty. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, cultural descriptions of poverty became the basis of conservative arguments about the fecklessness of black men.


The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947 by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, long peace, South China Sea

Marshall’s refusal to craft history is doubly striking because he so highly valued its study. It was the only subject at which he excelled in school. Even in the middle of the war, he read thick volumes on Napoleon and ancient Rome, and asked newspaper publishers to encourage Americans to study history’s “great lessons pertinent to the tragic problems of today.” Decades later, in a classic study of how decision makers use (and misuse) history, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May would single out Marshall for his ability to think in “time-streams”—drawing a web of connections between the present and the past in order to illuminate possible paths into the future. “By looking back,” they wrote, “Marshall looked ahead.”


pages: 568 words: 162,366

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, computerized trading, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fixed income, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, John Deuss, Khyber Pass, megastructure, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, oil rush, Potemkin village, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, trade route, vertical integration

A thirty-seven-year-old Indiana native, Forsythe wore enormous round glasses and her hair up in an attempt to look older. Like White, her youthful appearance had caused her to be chronically underestimated. She had grown up as a child prodigy, graduating from Indiana University at age sixteen with a triple major—political science, Russian literature, and classical studies. After sticking around for an additional two years “just to get old enough to do something,” Forsythe toured the far-flung Soviet republics, acquainting herself with its non-Russian nationalities. “I looked like I was about twelve,” she said, “so I was fairly unthreatening to the Russians.” In 1987, she entered government service in the State Department.


pages: 615 words: 175,905

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, South China Sea

Lyndon Johnson, Remarks at the Department of Defense Cost Reduction Awards Ceremony, 28 July 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, vol. 2, p. 793. 78. The following is from Lyndon Johnson, The President’s News Conference of July 28, 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, vol. 2, pp. 794–803. EPILOGUE 1. George Herring’s now classic study of American involvement in Vietnam provides the most lucid statement of this interpretation. “U.S. involvement in Vietnam was not primarily a result of errors of judgment or of the personality quirks of the policymakers, although these things existed in abundance. It was a logical, if not inevitable outgrowth of a world view and a policy—the policy of containment—which Americans in and out of government accepted without serious question for more than two decades.”


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

He was a famous seducer of women, who managed to marry his long-term mistress, the wife of Lord Cowper, only when he was fifty-five and she fifty-eight, even though smart society in London knew that they had been occasional lovers for twenty years. He was a sportsman who enjoyed boxing and field sports, but was also regarded as something of an intellectual and had, unusually, gone to Edinburgh University for a couple of years to learn some Philosophy and Economics, before resuming, at Cambridge University, the customary Classical studies he had pursued at Harrow.6 With a practised diplomat’s eye, Palmerston could see that, in the early 1840s, competition among European manufacturers would make commercial markets on the continent of Europe difficult for British goods to penetrate. As a consequence of this competition, Britain should ‘unremittingly endeavour to find in other parts of the world new vents for our industry’.


pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

To accomplish this, Senator Justin Morrill, a founder of the Republican Party, proposed massive federal intervention (a rather different sort of radical Republican agenda than we see today). Morrill wanted the government to contribute land whose sale would fund colleges to, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics… teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts… [and] promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”7 The Morrill Act of 1862 provided over seventeen million federal acres for those purposes, an area slightly larger than the state of West Virginia.


pages: 687 words: 165,457

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health by Daniel Lieberman

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, death from overwork, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Santayana, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social distancing, Steven Pinker, twin studies, two and twenty, working poor

Knopf). 29 King, W. (1864), The reputed fossil man of the Neanderthal, Quarterly Journal of Science 1:88–97. The quotation is from page 96. 30 Among the Inuit, body fat percentages are about 12 to 15 percent in males and 19 to 26 percent in females. See Churchill, S. E. (2014), Thin on the Ground: Neanderthal Biology, Archeology, and Ecology (Ames, Iowa: John Wiley & Sons). 31 One classic study showed that the racket arm professional tennis players use to whack millions upon millions of balls can be one-third thicker than the arm used just for tossing. Because muscles generate the major forces that bones must resist, it makes sense to infer that archaic humans such as Neanderthals were very strong.


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

According to historian Rowland Berthoff, “the immigrants, who had been accustomed to a more tightly knit communal life than almost any American could now recall, were quick to adopt the fraternal form of the American voluntary association in order to bind together their local ethnic communities against the unpredictable looseness of life in America.”22 The growing importance of associations among blacks followed much the same pattern, including mutual aid, burial, and social associations, and fraternal and women’s groups. In his classic study The Philadelphia Negro at the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized the importance of black societies, such as the Odd Fellows and Freemasons, in furnishing “pastime from the monotony of work, a field for ambition and intrigue, a chance for parade, and insurance against misfortune”—virtually the same benefits that attracted millions of whites into such organizations in these years.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts. Imprisonment physically removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them and subtracting the crimes they would have committed from the statistics. Incarceration is especially effective when a small number of individuals commit a large number of crimes. A classic study of criminal records in Philadelphia, for example, found that 6 percent of the young male population committed more than half the offenses.157 The people who commit the most crimes expose themselves to the most opportunities to get caught, and so they are the ones most likely to be skimmed off and sent to jail.

That jibes with a psychological theory that myopic discounting arises from a handoff between two systems inside the skull, one for rewards that are imminent, another for rewards that are far in the future or entirely hypothetical.81 As Thomas Schelling put it, “People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert, or one who yearns to improve himself by reading Adam Smith on self-command . . . and another who would rather watch an old movie on television.” 82 Freud’s theory of the id and the ego, and the older idea that our lapses are the handiwork of inner demons (“The devil made me do it!”) are other expressions of the intuition that self-control is a battle of homunculi in the head. The psychologist Walter Mischel, who conducted classic studies of myopic discounting in children (the kids are given the agonizing choice between one marshmallow now and two marshmallows in fifteen minutes), proposed, with the psychologist Janet Metcalfe, that the desire for instant gratification comes from a “hot system” in the brain, whereas the patience to wait comes from a “cool system.” 83 In previous sections we have caught glimpses of what the hot and cool systems might be: the limbic system (whose major parts are exposed in figure 8–2) and the frontal lobes (seen in figure 8–3).


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

Yet, as Nathan Sivin (1975, p. 161) notes, “in China the new tools were used to rediscover and recast the lost mathematical astronomy of the past and thus to perpetuate traditional values rather than to replace them.” Unlike Europe, Chinese intellectuals found it difficult to shake loose from the iron grip of the past. Mathematics, medicine, and most other forms of useful knowledge were studied and reflected on, but remained mostly a branch of classical studies. Attempts to apply this knowledge to practical uses were taking place, and when new ideas or products appeared, the Chinese were not averse to them. But unlike their European counterparts, Chinese scholars never came to believe that useful knowledge and its capacity to generate material progress through its applications was one of the raisons d’être of natural philosophy.


pages: 580 words: 194,144

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

British Empire, classic study, disinformation, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Indeed, both were to publish detailed accounts of their adventures and experiences with the mujahedin. Meanwhile, though foiled by Palmerston in his attempt to bring Russia and Britain into collision, Urquhart had returned with fresh vigour to the Russophobe cause, and, among other things, was organising the smuggling of arms to the Circassians. John Baddeley, in his classic study The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, published in 1908, attributes the successes of the Circassians in large part ‘to these efforts’. However, he accuses Urquhart and his collaborators of thus prolonging a war which the Circassians could never win, and of feeding them with false hopes of receiving British support.


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

Syphilis may have been brought back to Europe from America, but to a much less widely destructive effect than smallpox had in the Americas. 36 Heinz (1975), 21. 37 Tajfel & Turner (1979). 38 Bain et al. (2009). 39 Koval et al. (2012). 40 Reese et al. (2010); Taylor et al. (1977). 41 As far as I can tell there is little research on this question, although one study shows that infants maintain more eye contact with same-race individuals (Wheeler et al. 2011) and there is a classic study demonstrating that white people maintain less eye contact with black job applicants (Word et al. 1974). 42 Mahajan et al. (2011); but see also Mahajan et al. (2014). 43 Another option is that the link we make between outsiders and the sense of disgust arose in humans (D Kelly 2013). 44 Henrich (2004a); Henrich & Boyd (1998); Lamont & Molnar (2002); Wobst (1977). 45 Gil-White (2001). 46 Reviewed by Kleingeld (2012). 47 Leyens et al. (2003), 712. 48 Castano & Giner-Sorolla (2006). 49 Wohl et al. (2011).


Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

From one point of view, the exchange of bride-wealth is adaptive, because, during times of drought, men cannot assemble the requisite amount, and so marriages (and, quite likely, births) are postponed to a time when the food supply might again be adequate (though it is unclear whether the Turkana themselves are aware of the possible benefits of such cyclicity). 46. Gulliver, Preliminary Survey, p. 199. 47. Ibid., pp. 198–199. This classic study of Turkana marriage, conducted in 1951, reported no instance in which this trait (fertility) was noted as essential in a partner. As many as 50 percent of firstborn children are conceived prior to marriage, according to Dyson-Hudson, Meekers, and Dyson-Hudson, “Children of the Dancing Ground,” p. 26. 48.


pages: 654 words: 191,864

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book value, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demand response, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, framing effect, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, index card, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, loss aversion, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, nudge unit, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, peak-end rule, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Shai Danziger, sunk-cost fallacy, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systematic bias, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, union organizing, Walter Mischel, Yom Kippur War

In one experiment, rats were consistently exposed to a sequence in which the onset of a light signals that an electric shock will soon be delivered. The rats quickly learned to fear the light, and the intensity of their fear could be measured by several physiological responses. The main finding was that the duration of the shock has little or no effect on fear—all that matters is the painful intensity of the stimulus. Other classic studies showed that electrical stimulation of specific areas in the rat brain (and of corresponding areas in the human brain) produce a sensation of intense pleasure, so intense in some cases that rats who can stimulate their brain by pressing a lever will die of starvation without taking a break to feed themselves.


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

AThe Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals (Jonathan Kingdon; 2nd ed, 2015) The latest edition of the classic field guide covering over 1150 species. There's also the travel-friendly Kingdon Pocket Guide to African Mammals (2016). AThe Behavior Guide to African Mammals (Richard Despard Estes; 1991) Classic study of the behaviour of mammal species. Estes' follow-up The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals (1993) is an excellent, slightly more accessible alternative. ABirds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania (Dale A Zimmerman, David J Pearson and Donald A Turner; 2005) The birding field guide of choice for East Africa.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The price of eternity, in other words, has been a greatly diminished political role. During the Tokugawa era (1603-1867), real political power was exercised by the military in the person of the shogun. The emperor enjoyed little more than symbolic and ceremonial significance, although formally the shogun remained answerable to him. Ruth Benedict, in her classic study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, makes the interesting observation that ‘Japan’s conception of her Emperor is one that is found over and over among the islands of the Pacific. He is the Sacred Chief who may or may not take part in administration. In some Pacific Islands he did and in some he delegated his authority.


The Simple Living Guide by Janet Luhrs

air freight, Albert Einstein, car-free, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, compound rate of return, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Golden Gate Park, intentional community, job satisfaction, late fees, low interest rates, money market fund, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, telemarketer, the rule of 72, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

Stoddard takes life and shows it for the miracle that it is, explains why our relationship to it has been altered in our modern culture, and provides methods for finding the keys to rediscover the awe. There’s a special focus on grace in our lives: getting it, earning it, relishing it. How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein (New York: New American Library, 1996) Classic study on the perennial nag of balancing time and life. Helpful guide to solving some critical problems related to fatigue, stress, and willpower and opening the flowers of creativity. Private Moments, Secret Selves by Jeffrey Kottler, Ph.D. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990) Solitary time need not be anxious time or time for boredom.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Brian Cartwright, “That Great Derek Jeter Conspiracy,” FanGraphs, January 17, 2009. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/the-great-derek-jeter-conspiracy/. 2. Halley’s Comet was first sited on Christmas Day in 1758. See Peter Lancaster Brown, Halley and His Comet (Suffolk, England: Blandford Press, 1985). 3. Mary Frances Williams, “The Sidus Iulium, the Divinity of Men, and the Golden Age in Virgil’s Aeneid,” Leeds International Classical Studies, vol. 2, issue 1, 2003. http://lics.leeds.ac.uk/2003/200301.pdf 4. The exact date of the invention of the World Wide Web is disputed but in 1990 Berners-Lee established the first successful connection between an HTTP client and the Internet. The set of hypertext documents called the World Wide Web are not to be confused with the Internet, the network by which the World Wide Web is accessed, which as everyone knows was invented by Al Gore. 5.


pages: 416 words: 204,183

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany by Tim Jepson, Jonathan Buckley, Rough Guides

air freight, Bonfire of the Vanities, car-free, classic study, housing crisis, land reform, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Inside are a couple of fine monuments: on the left wall of the single aisle you’ll find Bernardo Rossellino’s worn-down tomb of Gemignano Inghirami, and set into the floor near the high altar is the slab of Francesco di Marco Datini (1335–1410), Prato’s most celebrated citizen. The subject of Iris Origo’s classic study, The Merchant of Prato, 215 Datini became one of Europe’s richest men through his dealings in the cloth trade, and played a crucial role in the rationalization of accounting methods: on his death, his offices were found to contain tens of thousands of scrupulously kept ledgers, all inscribed “To God and profit”.


pages: 537 words: 200,923

City: Urbanism and Its End by Douglas W. Rae

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business climate, City Beautiful movement, classic study, complexity theory, creative destruction, desegregation, edge city, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, open immigration, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Galster, “Polarization, Place, and Race,” North Carolina Law Review 71, no. 5 ( June 1993), or John F. Cain, “The Influence of Race and Income on Racial Segregation and Housing Policy,” in Housing Desegregation and Federal Policy, edited by John M. Goering (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). The classic study of race in New Haven predates the arrival of this family, as well as most other black households. See Warner, New Haven Negroes. 13. I have relied heavily here on one exceptional collection of work on the history and consequences of zoning in the United States, namely, Haar and Kayden, Zoning and the American Dream. 14.


pages: 698 words: 198,203

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

To ensure that these weren’t rare errors from unusual children, the psychologist Jess Gropen and I corroborated the finding in two ways. First, we sifted through online corpora of children’s speech, where we found similar errors.23 Second, we used a method for assessing generalizations called the wug test, after a classic study by the psychologist Jean Berko Gleason.24 Gleason showed children a cartoon of a little bird and said, “Here is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two . . .”—at which point four-year-olds happily filled in the blank with wugs, a form they could not have memorized from adults. In our case we told children that mooping meant to move a sponge to a purple cloth, turning it green.


Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

Marriot, Beyond the Tower, pp. 169–91. 54. V. D. Lipman, ‘Jewish Settlement in the East End – 1840–1940’, in Newman, Jewish East End, pp. 17–40. 55. Caroline Adams, Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life Stories of Pioneer Sylhetti Settlers in Britain (London, 1987). 56. See two of the classic studies of the history of migrant settlement in the USA, which take these two contrasting perspectives: Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration that Made the American Peoples, 2nd edn (Boston, MA, 1973); and John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, IN, 1985). 57.


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

Snell (1919:240) notes that kings while touring their domains would sometimes seize cattle or other goods by right of “preemption” and then pay in tallies, but it was very difficult to get their representatives to later pay up: “Subjects were compelled to sell; and the worst of it was that the King’s purveyors were in the habit of paying not in cash down, but by means of an exchequer tally, or a beating … In practice it was found no easy matter to recover under this system, which lent itself to the worst exactions, and is the subject of numerous complaints in our early popular poetry.” 16. It is also interesting to note, in this regard, that the Bank of England still kept their own internal accounts using tally sticks in Adam Smith’s time, and only abandoned the practice in 1826. 17. See Engels (1978) for a classic study of this sort of problem. 18. Appealing particularly to debtors, who were understandably drawn to the idea that debt is simply a social arrangement that was in no sense immutable but created by government policies that could just as easily be reshuffled—not to mention, who would benefit from inflationary policies. 19.


pages: 807 words: 225,326

Werner Herzog - a Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations With Paul Cronin by Paul Cronin

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, classic study, Dr. Strangelove, Francisco Pizarro, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, out of africa, Pier Paolo Pasolini

The senses are always working the horizon for sustenance, the strategy for the chase being wrought minutely by instinct, the whole being braced for the struggle leading to the kill. Like a predator, he takes his spoils quickly and his rest at whatever hideaway happens to be near by and convenient. The hunt – his creative activity – is everything, and all else (possessions, meals, accommodations, social life) incidental to it. Herbert Golder is Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University, and the Editor-in-Chief of Arion, A Journal of Humanities and the Classics. He has worked with Werner Herzog since 1988 on films such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Wings of Hope, My Best Fiend, Invincible, The White Diamond and The Wild Blue Yonder. He played Rabbi Edelmann in Invincible and co-wrote the script for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.


The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

Moore, Timothy J., The Theatre of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Segal, Erich, Roman Laughter: the Comedy of Plautus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Slater, Niall W., ‘Plautine Negotiations: the Poenulus Prologue Unpacked’, in Yale Classical Studies 29 (1992): 131–46. Wiseman, T. P., Roman drama and Roman history. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998. Concord Astin, A. E., Scipio Aemilianus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Patterson, John R., Political Life in the City of Rome. London: Bristol Classical, 2000. Richardson, Keith, Daggers in the Forum: The Revolutionary Lives and Violent Deaths of the Gracchus Brothers.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

Huxley quickly saw his error and attempted to restore a Darwinian account of culture — by an appeal to the force of group selection! History does have a way of repeating itself. 3. Peter Kivy informed me after the Mandel Lecture that this oft-quoted passage is counterfeit — not Mozart at all. I found it in Jacques Hadamard's classic study, The Psychology of Inventing in the Mathematical Field (1949, p. 16), and first quoted it myself in Dennett 1975, one of my first forays into Darwinian thinking. I persist in quoting it here, in spite of Kivy's correction, because it not only expresses but exemplifies the thesis that memes, once they exist, are independent of authors and critics alike.


pages: 556 words: 46,885

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain by Mark Casson

banking crisis, barriers to entry, Beeching cuts, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, combinatorial explosion, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intermodal, iterative process, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, linear programming, low interest rates, megaproject, Network effects, New Urbanism, performance metric, price elasticity of demand, railway mania, rent-seeking, strikebreaker, the market place, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration

Talented young men preferred to make a career in Church or State rather than ‘trade’—religious zeal and social reform provided them with greater emotional satisfaction than what was perceived as the venal pursuit of personal profit. The most prestigious schools and universities in England taught classical studies rather than science and technology, because a knowledge of the Greek and Roman empires was considered to be more relevant for careers in the army, Church, or colonial service. As private enterprise was drained of talent, entrepreneurship declined, the rate of profit diminished and investment was reduced.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Many observers assume trend growth near 2%, in line with evidence from the past century, but there are stories to justify more optimistic and pessimistic paths. These speed limits obviously differ between advanced (mature) and emerging economies. How do speed limits on economic growth translate to speed limits on long-term asset returns? Diermeier–Ibbotson–Siegel (1984), in a classic study on speed limits, note that the supply of total investment returns equals income returns for all assets, plus growth in the aggregate market value of investable assets, minus new issues. If the aggregate value of investable assets is assumed to be a fixed proportion of social wealth, they should in the long run grow at the same speed.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

If that’s the case, says de Waal, then “[e]mpathy is precisely such a mechanism.”45 In other words, the empathic impulse is the biological means of fostering communication, at least among the more evolved mammalian species. Close observation of other species shows a steady progression of the empathic impulse in biological evolution. For example, in a classic study conducted more than half a century ago, researchers found “that rats that had learned to press a lever to obtain food would stop doing so if their response was paired with the delivery of an electric shock to a visible neighboring rat.”46 Subsequent experiments with rhesus monkeys yielded the same results—except, in the latter case, the emotional response was more long- lasting and had deeper consequences.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. ——— (2007). Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fawcett, Peter (2016). “‘When I Squeeze You with Eisphorai’: Taxes and Tax Policy in Classical Athens.” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 85, no. 1: 153–99. Feinstein, Charles H. (2005). An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination and Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Feng, Li (2013). Early China: A Social and Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fergusson, Leopoldo, Ragnar Torvik, James A.


pages: 1,014 words: 237,531

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Imperial China 900–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Motyl, Alexander J. 2001. Imperial ends: The decay, collapse, and revival of empire. New York: Columbia University Press. Mouritsen, Henrik 1998. Italian unification: A study in ancient and modern historiography. London: Institute of Classical Studies. Mouritsen, Henrik 2001. Plebs and politics in the late Roman republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mouritsen, Henrik. 2007. “The civitas sine suffragio: Ancient concepts and modern ideology.” Historia 56: 141–58. Mouritsen, Henrik. 2017. Politics in the Roman republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

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

Psychologists have long known that the human brain is infected with motivated reasoning (directing an argument toward a favored conclusion, rather than following it where it leads), biased evaluation (finding fault with evidence that disconfirms a favored position and giving a pass to evidence that supports it), and a My-Side bias (self-explanatory).21 In a classic experiment from 1954, the psychologists Al Hastorf and Hadley Cantril quizzed Dartmouth and Princeton students about a film of a recent bone-crushing, penalty-filled football game between the two schools, and found that each set of students saw more infractions by the other team.22 We know today that political partisanship is like sports fandom: testosterone levels rise or fall on election night just as they do on Super Bowl Sunday.23 And so it should not be surprising that political partisans—which include most of us—always see more infractions by the other team. In another classic study, the psychologists Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper presented proponents and opponents of the death penalty with a pair of studies, one suggesting that capital punishment deterred homicide (murder rates went down the year after states adopted it), the other that it failed to do so (murder rates were higher in states that had capital punishment than in neighboring states that didn’t).


pages: 734 words: 244,010

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

It takes air into its lung to supplement its gills in oxygen-poor water. When first discovered in 1870, modern lungfish living in Queensland were united with fossil fish more than 200 million years old under the same name, Ceratodus. This gives an indication of how little they have changed during that time. Let's not get carried away, however. A classic study published in 1949 by the British palaeontologist T. S. Westoll showed that, although the lungfish have indeed stagnated for the last 200 million years or so, they evolved much more rapidly before that. In the Carboniferous Period, from around 350 million years ago, they were really racing along, before they slowed down almost to a stop about 250 million years ago, towards the end of the Permian Period.


pages: 768 words: 252,874

A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman

British Empire, classic study, deep learning, liberation theology, mass immigration, place-making, spice trade, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, 2003) contains essays on the philosophical approach to Judaism taken by medieval Jews from the ninth to the sixteenth century under the influence of Islam and Christianity. L. Jacobs, A Tree of Life: Diversity, Flexibility, and Creativity in Jewish Law, 2nd edn (London and Portland, Oreg., 2000) is a classic study, packed with erudition and insights, which covers more than just the medieval period. The illuminating presentation of complex medieval and later texts in D. R. Blumenthal, Understanding Jewish Mysticism: A Source Reader, 2 vols. (New York, 1978–82) encourages sympathetic understanding of mystical trends while precluding simple explanations.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

From now on, all serious writings on the internet and society will have to take into account The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” —Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania “In the future, if people still read books, they will view this as the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a masterpiece that stunningly reveals the essence of twenty-first-century society, and offers a dire warning about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril. Shoshana Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we all now live and introduced to us the concept of water.


pages: 1,002 words: 276,865

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

Early types of humans inhabited the lands bordering the Mediterranean 435,000 years before the present, to judge from evidence for a hunters’ camp set up near modern Rome; others built a simple hut out of branches at Terra Amata near Nice, and created a hearth in the middle of their dwelling – their diet included rhinoceros and elephant meat as well as deer, rabbits and wild pigs.1 When early man first ventured out across the sea’s waters is uncertain. In 2010, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced the discovery in Crete of quartz hand-axes dated to before 130,000 BC, indicating that early types of humans found some means to cross the sea, though these people may have been swept there unintentionally on storm debris.2 Discoveries in caves on Gibraltar prove that 24,000 years ago another species of human looked across the sea towards the mountain of Jebel Musa, clearly visible on the facing shore of Africa: the first Neanderthal bones ever discovered, in 1848, were those of a woman who lived in a cave on the side of the Rock of Gibraltar.


Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and The... by Sally Fallon, Pat Connolly, Mary G. Enig, Phd.

British Empire, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur, Mason jar, out of africa, profit motive, the market place, the scientific method

Price Foundation PMB 106-380, 4200 Wisconsin Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20016 (202) 333-HEAL Real Health Breakthroughs Dr. Douglass' Real Health Breakthroughs 819 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 (978) 514-7851 Books: The following recommended books may be ordered from New Trends Publishing (877) 707-1776 or Radiant Life (888) 593-8333. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price, DDS: The classic study of isolated populations on native diets and the disastrous effects of processed foods and commercial farming methods on human health. Published in 1939, Dr. Price's findings have as much relevance today as they did 60 years ago. The book includes Price's unforgettable photographs showing the superb dentition and facial development of peoples living on nutrient-dense foods.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

The Central Pacific wasn’t about to capitulate to the sandlot crowd. Instead, Stanford gathered his family—which now included Leland Jr., born in 1868—and servants and got out of town. Like other prominent robber barons of the day, the Stanfords “sought security in a country estate,” as Kenneth T. Jackson put it in his classic study, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, providing a model for elites looking to dodge racial strife a century later.4 In 1876, they bought a 650-acre farm, called Mayfield Grange, in Santa Clara County off the train tracks south of the city. No fan of the contemporary Grange Movement of organized farmers, Stanford renamed the area for a big tree next to the tracks: Palo Alto.


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

But eighteenth-century politics also depended heavily on rhetoric, the very words and ideas, such as the widespread translation of the manual for drilling infantrymen in massed gunfire written by Prince Maurice of the Netherlands, and the widespread use of Italian plans for cannon-resistant fortifications. And in sweeter ways, too. As Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba put it in their classic study of political attitudes, the good “civic culture” to which they attribute the success of Western liberalism is “based on communication and persuasion.”3 It is a bourgeois rhetoric. “Civic,” after all, is from Latin cives, citizen of a city-state, and “bourgeois” means at root merely such a citizen, standing in the forum or agora to argue his case among the piles of vegetables and amphoras of wine offered there for sale.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The quotation is from McWilliams (1942, p. 301). 37. Atack, Bateman, and Parker (2000, figures 7.13 and 7.14, pp. 316–17). The eight Midwestern states are Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri. The six Deep South states are South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. 38. The classic study of the relations between sharecroppers and merchants is provided by Ransom and Sutch (1977). Green (1986, p. 49) states that only about a quarter of the African American heads of households owned land. 39. Fite (1984, pp. 5–6). 40. Haines (2000, table 4.2, p. 156). 41. Smith (1984, p. 222). 42.


pages: 1,309 words: 300,991

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

After the abolition of serfdom, the speech, the costumes, the music, the legends, the songs and dances and the everyday practices of various regions all became badges of pride for the newly liberated rural class, and were standardized and formalized in new ways. They also attracted the attention of early ethnographers. František Rˇehorˇ (1857–99) was a Czech who was taken in his boyhood to a farm near Lemberg, and who spent a lifetime recording Ruthenian folklore.35 Semyon Ansky (1863–1920) was a Jewish socialist who made a now classic study of Galician Jewry during the First World War.36 Stanisław Vincenz (1888–1971) was a Pole born in Hutsul country who was to spend most of his life in exile. His famous analysis of Hutsul culture, Na Wysokiej Połoninie, ‘On the High Pasture’, was not published until the world of his youth had been destroyed.37 Education, of course, was the key to social advancement.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

During a period when neither the State nor the nation faced any sort of exterior threat, we find that Virginia felt the need to maintain a security force roughly ten percent of the total number of its inhabitants: black and white, male and female, slave and free! Rebellion, though rare, was a constant fear among slaveowners. Ulrich Phillips, a southerner whose American Negro Slavery is a classic study, wrote: A great number of southerners at all times held the firm belief that the negro population was so docile, so little cohesive, and in the main so friendly toward the whites and so contented that a disastrous insurrection by them would be impossible. But on the whole, there was much greater anxiety abroad in the land than historians have told of. . . .


Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, classic study, Corn Laws, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, labour mobility, land tenure, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Red Clydeside, Ronald Reagan, Skype, special economic zone, trade route, urban renewal, WikiLeaks

After the abolition of serfdom, the speech, the costumes, the music, the legends, the songs and dances and the everyday practices of various regions all became badges of pride for the newly liberated rural class, and were standardized and formalized in new ways. They also attracted the attention of early ethnographers. František Řehoř (1857–99) was a Czech who was taken in his boyhood to a farm near Lemberg, and who spent a lifetime recording Ruthenian folklore.35 Semyon Ansky (1863–1920) was a Jewish socialist who made a now classic study of Galician Jewry during the First World War.36 Stanisław Vincenz (1888–1971) was a Pole born in Hutsul country who was to spend most of his life in exile. His famous analysis of Hutsul culture, Na Wysokiej Połoninie, ‘On the High Pasture’, was not published until the world of his youth had been destroyed.37 Education, of course, was the key to social advancement.


In Europe by Geert Mak

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Louis Blériot, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, new economy, New Urbanism, post-war consensus, Prenzlauer Berg, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, the medium is the message, urban renewal

One week later, in Dresden, Victor Klemperer referred to the Auschwitz camp as ‘a fast-moving slaughterhouse’. On 27 February, 1943 he said that it was ‘no longer probable that Jews will return alive from Poland’. So they knew about it. Were they the only ones with eyes and ears? Tens of thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mass executions in Poland. In his classic study of the activities of a typical death squad, Reserve Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning shows that the battalion was in a state of continual flux: respectable fathers from Hamburg reported for duty, took part in mass executions, then went home to carry on life as usual. One of the commanders, newly married, even took his young bride along: in the market square at Miedzyrzec she was a direct witness to the murder of the local Jews.


pages: 1,106 words: 335,322

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

Browning, who created the tiny Browning School with just two classes: one built around Junior, the other around William’s son Percy. A Rockefeller operation from the outset, it was set up in a family-owned brownstone on West Fifty-fifth Street, with John and William paying Browning’s salary and reserving the right to screen applicants. From the beginning, the school emphasized manual crafts as well as classical studies and was animated by an egalitarian spirit. Nettie Fowler McCormick of the Chicago reaper clan sent her two sons, Harold and Stanley, and the student body of twenty-five also included two sons of William’s estate superintendent in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Browning School was yet another attempt by John D. to prevent his children from putting on airs or slipping into idle dissipation.


pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

We will consider specifically how new behaviors, practices, opinions, conventions, and technologies spread from person to person through a social network, as people influence their friends to adopt new ideas. Our understanding of how this process works is built on a long history of empirical work in sociology known as the diffusion of innovations [114, 345, 376]. A number of now-classic studies done in the middle of the 20th century established a basic research strategy for studying the spread of a new technology or idea through a group of people, and analyzing the factors that facilitated or impeded its progress. Some of these early studies focused on cases in which the person-to-person influence was due primarily to informational effects: as people observed the decisions of their network neighbors, it provided indirect information that led them to try the innovation as well.


Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, buttonwood tree, classic study, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Easter island, job satisfaction, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, margin call, New Journalism, oil shock, Silicon Valley, tulip mania, undersea cable

Chavez almost stopped at the rebuke, not from insult, but from surprise. He'd never seen his partner rattled before. As a result, his reply was measured and reasoned. "I think we just saw something important. I think he was playing with them. Last year for one of my courses we saw a Nazi film, a classic study in how demagogues do their thing. A woman directed it, and it reminded me—" "Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl," Clark said. "Yeah, it's a classic, all right. By the way, you need a haircut." "Huh?" The training was really paying off, Major Sato knew without looking. On command, all four of the F-15 Eagles tripped their brakes and surged forward along the runway at Misawa.


pages: 1,242 words: 317,903

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

Even after he embraced econometrics, and even after he became chairman of the Fed, Greenspan never shed his conviction that the quality of an economist’s data mattered more than the sophistication of his modeling. • • • In 2011, during one of our long conversations in his office in Washington, Greenspan plucked a faded green volume from a shelf. It was a copy of Measuring Business Cycles, Arthur Burns’s classic study of the vicissitudes of the American economy, co-written with the father of empiricism, Wesley Mitchell. The text had been lovingly preserved since Greenspan’s time at Columbia six decades earlier. “Open it,” Greenspan invited me. I let the book fall open at random. The page was dominated by tables and charts: pig iron production, railroad stock prices, call money interest rates.


pages: 1,327 words: 360,897

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

There will be no more schools or churches because the entire world will become one church and school. People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon and fuck whenever they want to.7 The counter-culture which erupted in America in the late 1960s has been described, not implausibly, as ‘the new anarchism’.8 Theodore Roszak, in his classic study The Making of a Counter-Culture (1970), specifically listed among its major sources and ingredients anarchist social theory. In his rhapsodic Where the Wasteland Ends (1972), he further recommended anarchism as a politics uniquely swayed by ‘organic sensibility … born of a concern for the health of cellular structure in society and a confidence in spontaneous self-regulation’.


Lonely Planet Ireland by Lonely Planet

bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, G4S, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, land reform, reserve currency, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, young professional

Wolfe Tone attempted to enlist French help in his uprising, but the French failure to land an army of succour in 1796 left the organisation exposed to retribution and the men met their bloody end in the Battle of Vinegar Hill in 1798. Three years later, the British sought to put an end to Irish agitation with the Act of Union, but the nationalist genie was already out of the bottle. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith is the classic study of the Great Famine of 1845–51. The Famine, O'Connell & Parnell The 19th century was marked by repeated efforts to wrest some kind of control from Britain. There were the radical Republicans, who advocated use of force to found a secular, egalitarian republic that tried – and failed – in 1848 and 1867.


Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) by Fionn Davenport

air freight, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, centre right, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, McMansion, new economy, period drama, reserve currency, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Wolfe Tone looked to France for help, and Loyalist Protestants prepared for possible conflict by forming the Protestant Orange Society, which later became known as the Orange Order. The tragic failure of the French to land an army of succour in 1796 left the organisation exposed to retribution and the men met their bloody end in the Battle of Vinegar Hill in 1798. * * * The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith is the classic study of the Great Famine of 1845–51. * * * The Act of Union, passed in 1801, was the British government’s vain attempt to put an end to any aspirations towards Irish independence, but the nationalist genie was well out of the bottle and two distinct forms of nationalist expression began to develop.


The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, classic study, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francisco Pizarro, Google Earth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Julian Assange, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, two and twenty, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, éminence grise

The most persuasive interpretation of the sometimes conflicting evidence on the journée des dupes is Petitfils, Louis XIII, ch. 15. 91. Hugon, Au service du roi catholique, p. 595. 92. Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, loc. 5017. 93. There is, for example, no reference to Rossignol (though a number to Père Joseph) in the classic study by J. H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares, or in the most recent British biography of Richelieu, by Anthony Levi. Petitfils, Louis XIII, contains numerous references to Père Joseph but mentions Rossignol only in passing as one of those whose company Richelieu enjoyed and esteemed (pp. 590, 605). 94.


pages: 1,744 words: 458,385

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

The growing priority given to the Islamist threat was, however, marked by the appointment of Jonathan Evans, one of the leading high-fliers of his generation, as G9 (Middle Eastern counter-terrorism) in the autumn of 1998. Evans had joined the Service in 1980 immediately after graduating from Bristol University in classical studies. On his first day in Gower Street, he was greeted by an older Service officer from a military background with the words: ‘Ah, one of the young intellectuals!’ ‘The nicest thing anyone ever said about me,’ Evans recalls.49 Nine years after his appointment as G9, he became DG. Like all other Western security and intelligence agencies, the Security Service had no prior warning of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.


pages: 623 words: 448,848

Food Allergy: Adverse Reactions to Foods and Food Additives by Dean D. Metcalfe

active measures, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, classic study, confounding variable, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, two and twenty

. • All patients at risk for a food-induced anaphylactic reaction should be provided with an emergency plan and appropriate medications, for example epinephrine autoinjector, to initiate therapy in case of an accidental allergen ingestion. Introduction Although fatal allergic reactions have been recognized for over 4500 years [1], it was not until the 20th century that the syndrome of anaphylaxis was fully characterized. In their classic studies, Portier and Richet described the rapid death of several dogs that they were attempting to immunize against the toxic sting of the sea anemone [2]. Since this reaction represented the opposite of their intended “prophylaxis,” they coined the term “anaphylaxis,” or “without or against protection.”


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Even if they were true, it would be better to stow them. * S a v i n g s r a t e s o f 5 p e r c e n t a n d u n d e r , c o m p a r e d t o t h r e e times as m u c h in C a n a d a and Australia—Taylor, "Three Phases," p. 2 8 , Table 4. 329 T H E S O U T H A M E R I C A N WAY The Portuguese-Brazilian Way Gilberto Freyre, in his classic study of Brazilian civilization, The Masters and the Slaves, distinguishes between Spanish and Portuguese policies of colonial settlement. Where the Spanish introduced national as well as religious restrictions, the Portuguese cared only for religion. The immigrant could come from anywhere, so long as he was Roman Catholic.


Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, colonial rule, flag carrier, gentrification, Global Witness, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, large denomination, low cost airline, Mason jar, megacity, period drama, restrictive zoning, retail therapy, Skype, South China Sea, spice trade, superstar cities, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce

From the low-lying coastal areas, the country rises through no fewer than 129 active volcanoes – more than any country in the world – to the snow-covered summit of Puncak Jaya (4884m) in Papua. Despite the incredible diversity of its landscapes, it is worth remembering that Indonesia is predominantly water; Indonesians refer to the country as Tanah Air Kita (literally ‘Our Earth and Water’). Wildlife In his classic study, The Malay Archipelago, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace divided Indonesia into two zones. To the west of the so-called Wallace Line (which runs between Kalimantan and Sulawesi and south through the straits between Bali and Lombok) the flora and fauna resemble that of the rest of Asia, while the species and environments to the east become increasingly like those of Australia.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

He then matched these signs to Linear B on the basis of resemblances in form and in frequency, and announced the identification of 14 signs. With these as a start, he began work to recover the Minoan language. The most valuable of the limited studies was a series of articles by Dr. Alice B. Kober, assistant professor of classical studies at Brooklyn College. In 1944 she presented a close textual analysis of tablets with an adze ideogram, and in 1945 pointed out that the final signs in words on ten “chariot” tablets varied. As Evans had suggested ten years earlier, she concluded that “it is highly probable that the language of the Linear Class B documents was inflected.”