obamacare

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pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

What they were doing at those card tables with the kynectors was not about Barack Obama. In fact, none mentioned Obamacare, except for the one enrollee who said that kynect was “a lot better than Obamacare.” “KENTUCKIANS NOT BUYING OBAMACARE” Nonetheless, for Kentucky’s two leading Republicans, kynect was all about Obamacare and Obama. Perhaps oblivious to what their constituents on the ground were experiencing, Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul went on the attack with an op-ed column in the Louisville Courier-Journal the morning the Browns enrolled. Their piece, entitled “Kentuckians Not Buying Obamacare,” said the new law would lead to layoffs, higher taxes, and people losing their current health plans.

These generous subsidies were never stressed. “Millions of Americans Are Paying Less for Obamacare Than Cable” is how a headline on the Vox news website would read, accurately, when the subsidies were tallied after the initial Obamacare enrollment period in 2014. In 2011, there were no news stories like that. Millions more living below the poverty line would get healthcare, via Medicaid, for free, because under Obamacare the federal government was paying the states to extend it to everyone living in poverty. Before Obamacare, states set their own rules, and many states had especially severe restrictions that limited their programs to people living at a fraction of the poverty level or just to families with children.

THE “DEFUND” CAUCUS In August 2013, a cadre of the most conservative Republicans, led by freshman Texas senator Ted Cruz, began staging a series of “defund” rallies, aimed at encouraging conservatives to demand that Congress stop funding Obamacare. They had the leverage to do it, Cruz argued. Republicans could simply threaten to block any new budget, due October 1, or block any increase in the debt ceiling due soon thereafter, if Obamacare wasn’t defunded as part of a new budget and debt ceiling deal. “We have, I believe … the last good opportunity we will have to defund Obamacare,” Cruz declared at a July 30 meeting of the Heritage Foundation, whose political action committee was organizing the rallies. “If we do not pursue this strategy, we are saying we surrender. Obamacare will be a permanent feature of the American economy.”


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

SAVING SOCIAL SECURITY Essay: After the Khaki Election Social Security Scares Inventing a Crisis Buying into Failure Social Security Lessons Privatization Memories Where Government Excels 2. THE ROAD TO OBAMACARE Essay: Developing a Positive Agenda Ailing Health Care Health Care Confidential Health Care Terror The Waiting Game Health Care Hopes Fear Strikes Out Obamacare Fails to Fail Imaginary Health Care Horrors 3. THE ATTACK ON OBAMACARE Essay: The Cruelty Caucus Three Legs Good, No Legs Bad Obamacare’s Very Stable Genius Get Sick, Go Bankrupt, and Die How Democrats Can Deliver on Health Care 4. BUBBLE AND BUST Essay: The Sum of All Fears Running Out of Bubbles That Hissing Sound Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis The Madoff Economy The Ignoramus Strategy Nobody Understands Debt 5.

As we’ve just seen, Obamacare opponents by and large don’t do math (and they’re sorry when they try). But all they really need are a few sob stories, tales of sympathetic individuals who have been impoverished by some aspect of the law. Remarkably, however, they haven’t been able to find those stories. Early last year, Americans for Prosperity, a Koch brothers–backed group, ran a series of ads featuring alleged Obamacare victims—but not one of those tales of woe stood up to scrutiny. More recently, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State took to Facebook to ask for Obamacare horror stories.

We live in an era in which politicians and the supposed experts who serve them never feel obliged to acknowledge uncomfortable facts, in which no argument is ever dropped, no matter how overwhelming the evidence that it’s wrong. And the result is that imaginary disasters can overshadow real successes. Obamacare isn’t perfect, but it has dramatically improved the lives of millions. Someone should tell the voters. 3 The Attack on Obamacare THE CRUELTY CAUCUS WHERE WERE YOU IN JUNE 2012, WHEN THE SUPREME COURT HANDED down its crucial decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare? If you have no idea, you’re not a health policy nerd. I, on the other hand, am. I was on vacation in England, sitting in a pub with my wife—and with wifi access—hanging on the reports.


pages: 400 words: 108,843

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

“GOP Ready to Make ‘Pledge to America.’ ” Los Angeles Times. September 23, 2010. 118.Werner, Erica; and Fram, Alan. “No Repeal for ‘Obamacare’ in Humiliating Defeat for Trump.” Associated Press. March 24, 2017. 119.Rovner, Julie. “Timeline: Despite GOP’s Failure to Repeal Obamacare, the ACA Has Changed.” Kaiser Health News. April 5, 2018. 120.Scott, Dylan; and Kliff, Sarah. “Why Obamacare Repeal Failed.” Vox. July 31, 2017. 121.Pear, Robert; and Kaplan, Thomas. “Senate Rejects Slimmed-Down Obamacare Repeal as McCain Votes No.” New York Times. July 27, 2017. A1. 122.Cummings, William. “Senate Republicans Resist ‘Knee-Jerk’ Drive to Name Building after McCain.”

Somehow, they wound up in Politico.5 Vitter was not the only one starting to bend the Senate to the superminority’s will. By the fall of 2013, the fight over his amendment had become part of a larger push to defund Obamacare. The fight was led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Congress controls the power of the purse, so all the funding needed to implement Obamacare passed through the Senate. Cruz urged Republicans to block all funding bills related to Obamacare. There was one problem with his strategy: it had no chance of success. Congressional Democrats were not going to defund the most significant accomplishment of the Obama administration.

A13. 32.McConnell, The Long Game. 191. 33.Grunwald, The New New Deal. 19. 34.Alberta, American Carnage. 43. 35.Acosta, Jim. “Romney Once Touted Parts of ‘Romneycare’ as a National Model.” CNN. March 7, 2011. 36.Lane, Thomas. “Obamacare & Romneycare Are ‘the Same Fucking Bill’ Says Former Romney Adviser.” Talking Points Memo. November 16, 2011. 37.Butler, Stuart. “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans.” Heritage Foundation. 6. 38.Ornstein, Norm. “The Real Story of Obamacare’s Birth.” Atlantic. July 6, 2015. 39.Brill, Steven. America’s Bitter Pill. New York: Random House, 2015. 93. 40.Alberta, American Carnage. 69. 41.Nagourney; and Hulse.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Luntz and others did, indeed, produce the arguments, in the form of the pungent turns of phrase that had become a Luntz specialty since he had coined “death tax” to demonize the inheritance tax. Obamacare’s “government takeover of health care” would “put some bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” Republicans said. These messages, along with completely fictional claims that the law would establish “death panels” to decide which elderly people were so hopelessly ill that they should be cut off from Medicare, were seized upon by the Tea Party groups that sprang up in the spring and summer of 2009 and made blocking Obamacare their battle cry. At no time did the Republicans offer an alternative to Obamacare, no doubt because Obamacare had always been their alternative—which foretold the embarrassment they would suffer seven years later when they seized control of Congress and the White House and still could not agree on an alternative.

Therefore, any significant laws that manage to pass with only the votes of one party would be perpetually hobbled by replays of the original fight to pass it and the prospect of repeal when the other party took over. That, of course, is what happened to Obamacare, which became law with only one Republican vote. Because it continued to be so bitterly attacked by Republicans, even the traditionally routine process of cleaning up the most uncontroversial hiccups discovered in a statute after it is passed—such as simple typographical errors—could never be done. Nor would the Republicans consider substantive but incremental steps to improve the law, as both parties had repeatedly done in prior decades to fix major legislation. In fact, long after Obamacare became the law of the land, Republican House Speaker John Boehner often continued referring to it as a “bill,” as if it was still being debated.

THE HEALTHCARE.GOV FIASCO The most vivid demonstration of all of these shortcomings in government procurement was the dramatic crash in 2013 of the website that the Obama administration built to launch the consumer health care insurance exchanges that were central to Obamacare. By the end of the first hour of the launch of the Obamacare e-commerce site on October 1, 2013, the system was down, and no one knew why. Because it had been built so incompetently, without the monitoring metrics that are standard for any e-commerce system, no one even knew how badly it was crippled. No competent manager had actually been put in charge of the implementation by the president.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

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

Nelson was an old-school Democratic centrist, a transactional, silver-haired former insurance executive who held on in a red state through acts of ostentatious moderation and a laser-like focus on Cornhusker interests. But he was in a bind. The choice on Obamacare was yes/no. Democrats needed his vote to pass the law. Nelson wanted the law to pass. But Obamacare was unpopular back home, and Nelson was up for reelection in 2012. He was caught between his career, his party, and his conscience. Nelson’s solution was to split the ideological interests of Nebraska’s Republicans from the financial interests of Nebraskans. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion was built with an unusual structure. Typically, Medicaid is funded by a roughly 60:40 split between the federal government and the states.

In 1965, a Democratic president created a massive, single-payer health-care system for the nation’s elderly. But as liberal as Medicare was in both conception and execution, it received seventy Republican votes in the House as well as thirteen Republican votes in the Senate. Obamacare, by contrast, was modeled off Mitt Romney’s reforms in Massachusetts and built atop many Republican ideas;V it relied on private insurers for the bulk of its coverage expansion and ended up sacrificing its public option. But as compromised as Obamacare was in design, and as desperate as the Obama administration was for bipartisan support—and believe me, I covered that fight, they would’ve traded almost anything for Republican backing—the legislation didn’t receive a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate.

In 1965, most Senate Republicans joined with the Democratic Party to create Medicare, a single-payer health-care system for the elderly. In 2010, not a single congressional Republican voted for Obamacare, a health-care plan based on the system Republican governor Mitt Romney designed in Massachusetts. Under any definition, the 2010 system was more sorted and polarized than the 1965 system—opinions were better aligned by party, and fewer politicians found themselves in the middle. But was the 2010 system more ideologically extreme? I’d argue, under our normal ideological definitions, it wasn’t—Obamacare was a public-private system with Republican roots that paid for itself through a mixture of tax increases and spending cuts, while Medicare was a liberal government takeover of health care for the elderly that created an open-ended entitlement with no dedicated way to pay its full costs.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

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

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

Kushner, largely staying silent during the health care debate, publicly seemed to accept the fact that a Republican administration had to address Obamacare, but he privately suggested that he was personally against both repeal alone and repeal and replace. He and his wife took a conventional Democratic view on Obamacare (it was better than the alternatives; its problems could be fixed in the future) and strategically believed it was best for the new administration to get some easier victories under its belt before entering a hard-to-win or no-win fight. (What’s more, Kushner’s brother Josh ran a health insurance company that depended on Obamacare.) Not for the last time, then, the White House would be divided along the political spectrum, Bannon taking an absolutist base position, Priebus aligned with Ryan in support of the Republican leadership, and Kushner maintaining, and seeing no contradiction in, a moderate Democratic view.

* * * Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion. He would have been able to enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare—other than expressing glee about the silly Obama pledge that everyone could keep his or her doctor—and he certainly could not make any kind of meaningful distinction, positive or negative, between the health care system before Obamacare and the one after.

He would have been able to enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare—other than expressing glee about the silly Obama pledge that everyone could keep his or her doctor—and he certainly could not make any kind of meaningful distinction, positive or negative, between the health care system before Obamacare and the one after. Prior to his presidency, he had likely never had a meaningful discussion in his life about health insurance. “No one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to health insurance than Donald,” said Roger Ailes. Pressed in a campaign interview about the importance of Obamacare repeal and reform, Trump was, to say the least, quite unsure of its place on the agenda: “This is an important subject but there are a lot of important subjects.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

., 165 Murphy, Patrick, 212 National Center for Education Statistics data analysis, 92–93 National Football League union refs lockout (2012), 49n National Home-ownership Strategy (1995), 123 navigator Millennials, 21–23 NEETs (youths “not in employment, education, or training”), 181 Netherlands minimum wage, 184 New Deal/regulations, 52–53, 148–149 Obama, Barack Boomers and, 64 education policy and, 93–94, 97–101 financial crisis/Great Recession and, 129, 131–132, 132n, 137, 162–164, 223–234 Millennials and, 64, 218–219, 224 policies and, 18, 19, 24, 64, 73, 93–94, 97–101 regulation and, 229 unpaid internships and, 73 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria election to Congress, 211 as Millennial, 211, 219 policy positions/views, 211, 222 taxes and, 195, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 130, 214 Ohio Public Employee Retirement Systems (OPERS), 175 Once and Future Worker, The (Cass), 58 Operation Twist, 134 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 61 O’Rourke, Beto, 214 Patel, Suraj, 219 Paul, Ron, 222 Paulson, Hank, 129, 131 peace dividend, 151 Pell Grant program, 97, 99, 100 pension/plans Boomers and, 121, 159, 221 Detroit city government example, 175 European countries, 183, 196, 198, 199, 200 Germany/Millennials and, 199, 200 Japan and, 203, 205, 208n mid-twentieth century, 49 Millennials (US) and, 79–80, 81, 81n, 82 Ohio example, 175 problems with state/local government plans, 150, 158–159, 175 trend in private work, 158 Perot, Ross, 217 politics and Millennials 2018 midterm elections, 213 first nationally-elected officials, 211–212 fixing problems and, 213–214 House Member age statistics, 212 interns and, 213 party support/political views and, 214–216, 217–219, 222–223 political influence and, 213 state offices, 212 stereotypes, 214 trade policy, 217–218 voting and, 213 wants, 220–223, 232–236 working economy, 220–221 Powell, Jerome, 231–232 productivity by the 1970s, 48 investment and, 16, 49 measuring, 48n “qualified mortgage” (QM) standard, 139–140 quantitative easing description, 133 Federal Reserve and, 18–19, 60 housing/global financial crisis, 133, 135, 136, 137 Reagan, Ronald economic policies, 24, 52–54 fixed investment, 53 supply-side economics and, 52, 54–55, 58 support for, 20 taxes and, 52 recession postwar period, 62 See also financial crisis/Great Recession regulation (financial) changes/consequences, 56–57 during Reagan administration, 52, 54 regulations and Trump, 229–230, 234 religion and Millennials, 216–217 Resolution Foundation think tank, 178 retirement finances 401 (k) plans, 80 Millennials as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 Millennials/savings and, 79, 80–81 See also pension/plans; Social Security Revolutionary War/state debts, 147, 147n Romney, Mitt as candidate, 215, 225 manufacturing background, 232n youth vote, 215 Rubin, Robert, 54–55 “Rubinomics” program, 54–55, 124 Ryan, Paul, 231 S&P 500, 10 Sanders, Bernie description/political party and, 219, 222 Millennial support, 195, 214, 219 taxes, 173, 195, 197 savings/Millennials college-educated Millennials and, 78–79 debt and, 81n, 82 defined-contribution plans, 80 description/overview, 77–83 emergency-lending facility use and, 78 job market and, 79 obsession and, 79 parents vs., 77 pension plans and, 79–80 retirement finances and, 79, 80–81 Social Security benefits and, 82–83 statistics on, 78–79, 80–83, 83n Wall Street payback and, 83 worries about, 81–82 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 50n Say’s Law, 50n Schock, Aaron, 211–212 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 41 self-employment trends (since 2000), 71 See also gig economy September 11 terror attacks/consequences, 57, 152 Shapiro, Ben, 215, 224–225 “sheepskin effect,” 90 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 Smith, Brad, 71–72 SNAP (Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program), 164 social capital, 22 social programs/benefits consequences/Mulligan and, 165–166 financial crisis and, 163–165 Social Security beginnings, 149 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 housing and, 114n insurance comparisons, 154, 157–158 Millennial expectations, 82–83 Millennial resources and, 142 taxes and, 150n, 196 See also entitlements for elderly solar panels installation, 28 Spain and financial crisis, 180 steel industry (1970s to 1990s), 50–51 stock market crash (1929), 10 financial crisis, 10 Strauss, William, 6–7 “structural deficits,” 150–151, 151n Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 164 supply-side economics, 52, 54–55, 58 TANF, 164 TARP (Troubled-Asset Relief Program), 59, 130, 130n taxes on capital/consequences, 53 Clinton and, 55, 152 cuts with Great Recession, 163 inflation as, 207 myth on, 195 national consumption tax and, 173–174 politicians in Germany/US and, 197 Reagan and, 52 Republicans and, 174 Sixteenth Amendment, 148 tax wedge, 183 Trump and, 227–228 Tea Party movement, 130, 231 technology labor and (mid-twentieth century), 49 role in economic problems, 234–235 See also computer/information technology Thatcher, Margaret, 189 “total-factor productivity,” 48n total number of hours worked in 1970s, 47 as measure of labor market, 47 trade policy and Millennials, 217–218 training investing less, 17, 69, 88 investing more, 228 Millennials wanting, 29, 72 See also internships/Millennials Troubled-Asset Relief Program (TARP), 59, 130, 130n Trump, Donald Affordable Care Act and, 68 description, 19 entitlements and, 231 immigration and, 225–226 interest rates/Federal Reserve and, 19, 231–232 Japan/foreign competition and, 202, 217–218, 225 Millennials and, 214, 215, 217, 224, 225–232 real estate background and, 232n regulations and, 229–230, 234 taxes, 227–228, 234 traits/character, 224 unemployment rate and, 226 Uber, 70, 70n unemployment Britain/Millennials and, 189 NEETs, 181 unemployment-assistance programs (US) creation, 149 financial crisis and, 164 unemployment rate (US) in 1950s and 1960s, 47 in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 changes post-2008 decade, 30, 33 description, 30 global financial crisis/recovery and, 11, 12, 13 Millennials and, 42 Trump and, 226 See also labor-force participation rate union power other countries and, 186 in US, 49, 49n United Kingdom minimum wage, 184 Urban Institute, 139 US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 28, 30, 37, 47 Vance, J.

In the course of doing so, they would make labor ever more expensive, and investments requiring more labor ever less attractive, at precisely the moment capital investment was becoming cheaper and cheaper—at least for some investors in some industries. To see why that approach was such a disaster, look no further than the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Obamacare was an attempt to solve a glaring problem: in a new economy of constant employment churn (and where there were fewer and fewer mid-paying jobs to support health benefits for large tranches of the working population) it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to tie insurance to employment. It never made sense anyway.

See GDP (gross domestic product) Gurner, Tim avocado/coffee and, 1, 2, 3 homebuying and, 116 inheritance, 4 Hamilton, Alexander, 147, 147n, 148 Hammond, Darrell, 153 Harris, Kamala, 214 Hawley, Josh, 212 HCAI (Housing Credit Availability Index), 139, 139n health care electronic medical records, 235 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare; health insurance health insurance economic security and, 65 employer-based insurance/history, 65, 66 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Hillbilly Elegy (Vance), 45 HOLC (Home Owner Loan Corporation), 119–120 Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC), 119–120 housing amortizing mortgage, 120, 120n balloon loans, 119 Boomer ownership, 109, 110, 111 Federal Reserve/mortgage lending and, 61–62 GI Bill and, 120 Great Depression/government response and, 119–121 history, 113–114, 114n, 118–119 Millennial home ownership/education debt and, 94–95 mortgages/taxes and, 120, 126, 127 multigenerational households, 112, 113 ownership value debate, 120n postwar boom and, 121 Housing Credit Availability Index (HCAI), 139, 139n housing/financial crisis bailouts, 130, 130n, 132n bank liquidity and, 129–130 Boomers and, 134, 135 description/consequences, 128–129 foreclosures and, 111, 132, 132n, 135 home equity increase and, 125–128, 126n home equity loss and, 10, 110–111 home ownership decline and, 121, 122 homeowners “lock-in” and, 136 housing debt/policies, 123–127, 125n insolvency crisis and, 129–130 interest rates and, 124–125, 125n, 127–128, 136 managing policies, 129–137 Millennials and, 131, 135–140, 141–143 mobility and, 135–136 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market and, 124, 125n, 128, 129 mortgage security and, 122–124 press release/beginnings, 128 quantitative easing, 133, 135, 136, 137 quantitative easing dollar amount, 137 regulations following/Millennials and, 137–140 subprime/prime borrowers and, 126–127, 126n housing/Millennial issues economics and, 17, 110, 111, 112–113 expectations, 109–110 living with parents/statistics, 111–113, 114 locations/job locations and, 116, 117–118 multigenerational households, 112, 114n ownership/demographics, 115–116 renting/costs and, 113, 113n, 114, 114n, 141–142, 141n starter homes and, 116, 117 supplies and, 116–118 Howe, Neil, 6–7 HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development), 123 Iceland and financial crisis, 180 immigration Millennials views, 218, 225–226 Trump, Donald and, 225–226 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 211 India, 178, 201 Industrial Revolution, 113 information/computer technology rise, 56, 235 inheritances/Millennials beliefs/estimates, 103–104 Boomers life expectancy/health care finances and, 104–105 feudalism/history and, 106 Fidelity surveys, 105 Millennials retirement and, 107–108 timing and, 105–106 interest rates Bush and, 57 Federal Reserve and, 18, 19, 124 housing/financial crisis and, 124–125, 125n, 127–128, 136 Trump and, 19, 231–232 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 182–183 internships/Millennials numbers, 31 Obama and, 73 overview, 31, 72–73 pay and, 31, 72 work descriptions, 32 investment Boomers childhood and, 49 consumption relationship, 50 costs of labor vs. capital, 63–64, 65–66, 229 during Bush administration, 57 during Reagan administration, 53, 54 fixed investment, 49, 51, 53, 56, 57, 60, 127 growth (mid-twentieth century), 49 need to increase and, 15–17, 51 productivity and, 16, 49 technologies replacing labor and, 62–63 investment-and-productivity boom (1950s/1960s), 49–50 decline (1970s/1980s), 50 Ireland and financial crisis, 180 Italy Millennials and, 184, 201 temporary work, 184 Jackson, Alphonso, 123 Jackson, Andrew, 147 Japan consumption tax, 206 corporate scandals, 202, 202n debt, 205–206 demographic boom, 203n economic growth (1960s/1970s), 201–202 population trend, 207 working mothers and, 209 Japan Millennials delayed marriages/children and, 208–209 economy and, 203, 205, 206–207 inflation and, 207–208 interest rates and, 207–208, 208n job/training investments and, 204–205 lifetime employment deal and, 203–204 regular/nonregular work, 202–203, 202n taxes and, 205 Jeffersonians, 147n job hopping, 37–38 “jobless recovery,” 35, 69 jobs/job market and Millennials age of employee/job losses, 35–39 Boomers vs., 27, 46 company size and, 38–39 economists categories of jobs/job losses and, 33–34 experience requirements and, 37 financial crisis/recession losses distribution, 32–37 “fun/fulfilling” work and, 29 goals/dreams, 31 job losses by skill level, 34 job opportunity losses/time effects, 39–40 jobs replaced by robots, 34, 34n lower-skilled/low-paying employment replacements and, 36–37 mentors vs. bosses, 29–30 overqualification and, 42–43 pay/job losses and, 33–34 recovery from financial crisis and, 35, 59 statistics on white/blue collar jobs, 28 transformed jobs and, 27–29, 27n wants description, 29 See also specific components Johnson, Lyndon, 149 Kander, Jason, 212 Keynes, John Maynard/Keynesian economics, 50n, 58, 163n Kotlikoff, Laurence J., 171–172 labor capital vs. labor costs, 63–64, 65–66, 229 costs, 65–66 costs (by 1990s), 55 replacing labor and, 17, 34, 34n, 62–63 See also union power labor-force participation rate in 1970s, 47 in 1980s, 54 description, 30 Millennials/post-2008 decade, 30–31 labor productivity complementary technologies and, 49 definition, 48n labor hours and, 49 output per hour worked and, 48, 48n, 56, 57 labor share in 1950s/1960s, 47, 50 definition/description, 47 during Clinton presidency, 56 during Reagan presidency, 56 economic theories on, 62 trend past 50 years, 62 Lehman Brothers, 11, 129, 133 Libertarian candidates, 219 McAfee, Andrew, 41 McCain, John, 225 McCain, Meghan, 215 Maloney, Carolyn, 219 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 58 ManpowerGroup, 31 manufacturing economy (US) decline, 12, 14 description, 15–16 MBS (mortgage-backed securities) market, 124, 125n, 128, 129 Medicaid Affordable Care Act and, 167 financial problems, 156 role, 149 Medicare for all Americans, 211 financial problems/Millennials and, 153–161 inflation and, 169 insurance comparisons, 154 Millennial resources and, 142 role, 149 See also entitlements for elderly Medicare Part D, 157 Merkel, Angela political party/government and, 197, 200, 200n taxes and, 197 Merrill Lynch, 11, 128–129 Merrill Lynch survey/savings, 78 military spending deficit spending (government) and, 151 generational fairness and, 171 Millennials avocado/coffee debate, 1–3 childhood diseases and, 3–4 definition/description, 5–9, 237 diversity and, 216, 237–238 ethnicity, 9 as immigrants/children of immigrants and, 8–9, 112 material well-being and, 3–5 navigators and, 21–23 numbers, 8 parents/security and, 3–4 as “retirement plans” for parents, 145 second language and, 8 sex and, 217 social questions, 216–217 stereotypes and, 1–3, 29–30, 235 term origins, 6 views of, 1–3, 4–5, 26–27 wars and, 4 minimum wages debates/views on, 185 Europe, 183–184 in US, 183–184 Mondale, Walter, 20 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market, 124, 125n, 128, 129 Mortgage Servicing Assets (MSAs), 138n Mulligan, Casey B., 165 Murphy, Patrick, 212 National Center for Education Statistics data analysis, 92–93 National Football League union refs lockout (2012), 49n National Home-ownership Strategy (1995), 123 navigator Millennials, 21–23 NEETs (youths “not in employment, education, or training”), 181 Netherlands minimum wage, 184 New Deal/regulations, 52–53, 148–149 Obama, Barack Boomers and, 64 education policy and, 93–94, 97–101 financial crisis/Great Recession and, 129, 131–132, 132n, 137, 162–164, 223–234 Millennials and, 64, 218–219, 224 policies and, 18, 19, 24, 64, 73, 93–94, 97–101 regulation and, 229 unpaid internships and, 73 See also Affordable Care Act/Obamacare Obamacare.


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Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Treating workers and owners in these sharply different ways has been the rule of the Obama years, but there have also been exceptions to it—big ones. The one great achievement of Obama’s presidency, the health insurance reform known as “Obamacare,” has many flaws, but it also subsidizes the purchase of coverage by people who otherwise can’t afford it. This detail was an important victory for the poor—and also a measure without which Obamacare could not accomplish the other things it does, such as stopping insurers from cancelling sick people’s insurance. Another triumph was the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, a much-needed regulatory agency that is supposed to keep an eye on predatory practices by payday loan shops, credit card companies, and the like.

Instead we got Obamacare, with its exchanges, its individual and employer mandates, its Cadillac tax, its subsidies to individuals and to the insurance industry, and its thousands of other moving parts, sluicing funding this way and that. Complexity is its most striking characteristic. No one is really certain how it operates, whether it is a tax or a mandate (OK, the Supreme Court has determined that it’s the former), or whether it will truly make health care more affordable. In a video clip accessible on YouTube, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller can be seen describing Obamacare as “the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress”; a former state health-insurance official in Massachusetts, whose health care system was Obama’s model, moaned that “We took the most complex health care system on God’s green earth, and made it 10 times more complex.”1 Why did Team Obama choose to go this route?

Why not here, too? Had fairness and greater equality been the primary goals of either Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, they would no doubt have been far more straightforward. But complexity allowed Obama to square the circle of modern liberalism. It allowed him to achieve the double mandate of making health care more affordable while preserving existing players at the same time. A single-payer system would obviously have done grave damage to the insurance industry, while a public option would have given it unwelcome competition. But Obamacare did the opposite—it made those insurers into a permanent feature of the economic landscape.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

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

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

(The Kochs’ front group seemed to have no such qualms about government intrusion into reproductive health issues.) The organization also sponsored student-oriented protests at which mock Obamacare insurance cards were burned like draft cards during the Vietnam War. The disinformation campaign spread fear and confusion. News reports reflected a widespread belief, particularly in desperately poor areas, that the government was setting up “death panels.” In the summer and fall of 2013, as Meadows was gathering co-sponsors for his open letter, Americans for Prosperity spent an additional $5.5 million on anti-Obamacare television ads. Asked about this later, Tim Phillips stressed that his group merely wanted to repeal rather than defund the health-care law.

After the 2012 election political leaders in both parties had expressed hope that the partisan battles would subside so that the government could finally tend to the serious economic, social, environmental, and international issues demanding urgent attention from the world’s richest and most powerful nation. Speaker of the House Boehner made it clear to the extremists in his party that it was time to back off. “The president was reelected,” he reminded them. “Obamacare is the law of the land.” Yet less than a year later, the country was held hostage in another futile fight over Obamacare. As congressional leaders met with Obama at the White House on October 2, 2013, in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to reach a deal that could avert the disastrous shutdown, Obama pulled the Speaker aside. “John, what happened?”

Yet because of the efforts of a few activists bankrolled by wealthy ideological entrepreneurs, the challenge went from the fringe to one vote short of victory in the Supreme Court. For more, see Blackman, Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare (PublicAffairs, 2013). “It’s David versus Goliath”: Stolberg and McIntire, “Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning.” $235 million was spent: For Kantar Media statistics on ad spending, see Purdum, “Obamacare Sabotage Campaign.” “When else in our history”: Stolberg and McIntire, “Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning.” “The president was reelected”: Boehner, interview with Diane Sawyer, ABC News, Nov. 8, 2012.


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

In fact, it might very well have been the worst bill ever to make its way through both houses of Congress. No, what the near failure of Obamacare represented instead was a colossally depressing truth about the American political system, which is that our government is so dysfunctional that it can no longer even efficiently sell out to the private interests that actually run things in this country. Taylor was wrong about the bill. But he was right, too. Something was long gone. Obamacare had been designed as a coldly cynical political deal: massive giveaways to Big Pharma in the form of monster subsidies, and an equally lucrative handout to big insurance in the form of an individual mandate granting a few already-wealthy companies 25–30 million new customers who would be forced to buy their products at artificially inflated, federally protected prices.

The result was a new law that will radically remake the faces of both the federal government and the private economy and also ratify the worst paranoid fears of both ends of the political spectrum. The right-wing teabagger crowd spent all of 2009 protesting Obamacare as a radical socialist redistribution, and you know what? They weren’t all wrong, although the people who wrote this bill were about as far from being socialists as people can be. Meanwhile the castrated left wing, the constituency that worked so hard to get Barack Obama elected in the first place, suddenly perceived Obamacare as a crypto-fascist fusing of state and private power, an absurdly expensive capitulation of democratically elected officials to concentrated private interests.

Obamacare had been designed as a coldly cynical political deal: massive giveaways to Big Pharma in the form of monster subsidies, and an equally lucrative handout to big insurance in the form of an individual mandate granting a few already-wealthy companies 25–30 million new customers who would be forced to buy their products at artificially inflated, federally protected prices. The essence of Obamacare was two ruthless power plays fused at the hip. It was the federal government seizing control of a sector of America’s private industry worth about 16 percent of GDP. And it was that same sector of private industry in turn seizing permanent control of about 8 percent of America’s taxable income, for converting to private profit.


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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

Favors Healthcare Reform This Year,” Gallup, July 14, 2009, http://www.gallup.com/poll/121664/majority-favors-healthcare-reform-this-year.aspx. 18. Benjamin Zycher, “Obamacare Inhibits Medical Technology,” Washington Times, Jan. 9, 2012, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/9/obamacare-inhibits-medical-technology/. 19. Thomas B. Edsall, “The Obamacare Crisis,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/opinion/edsall-the-obamacare-crisis.htmlpagewanted=1&_r=2&smid=tw-share&&pagewanted=all. 20. Interview with author. 21. Interview with author. Chapter 8: Forever War 1. Sam Stein, “Robert Draper Book: GOP Anti-Obama Campaign Started Night of Inauguration,” Huffington Post, April 25, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html. 2.

The Impulse Society, in effect, will defend itself. In some respects, the opposition Obamacare has provoked seems relatively mild, given the degree to which it is attempting to shake up the status quo. Liberals may complain that the ACA falls far short of the long-dreamed-of European-style single-payer model. But as far as many conservatives are concerned, Obamacare represents the first effort in decades to shift the country back toward the New Deal program of economic management that was supposed to have been killed off in the 1980s. More fundamentally, the reaction to Obamacare may force us to reassess the cherished idea that Americans will make personal sacrifices to address a broad social problem.

Easterbrook, Gregg, “Voting for Unemployment: Why Union Workers Sometimes Choose to Lose Their Jobs Rather Than Accept Cuts in Wages.” Atlantic, May 1983. Accessed September 12, 2013. Doi: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/83may/eastrbrk.htm. Edsall, Thomas B. “The Obamacare Crisis.” New York Times, Nov. 19, 2013. Doi: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/opinion/edsall-the-obamacare-crisis.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&smid=tw-share&&pagewanted=all. Field, Alexander J. “The Impact of the Second World War on U.S. Productivity Growth.” Economic History Review 61, no. 3 (2008): 677. ———. “The Origins of U.S. Total Factor Productivity Growth in the Golden Age.”


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

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

You can still have health insurance, and you’ll probably be able to get it far cheaper than when you were working. Here are all the different ways you can reduce your health insurance costs after you retire. Obamacare (ACA) Obamacare, or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is your first and best line of defense against rising health care costs in retirement. This is because Obamacare ties the amount you pay for insurance to your income. The less you make, the less you pay. And it does this through federal subsidies. Every year the federal government publishes a number it determines as the federal poverty level, or FPL.

So an HSA combines the best of the 401(k) and the Roth IRA, in that it allows tax-deductible contributions, tax-free growth, and tax-free withdrawals, but only for medical expenses. HDHP + HSA plans existed before the ACA, and still exist today under Obamacare. This gives us reasonable certainty that even if the ACA were repealed, the HDHP + HSA solution that early retirees used before Obamacare existed would still be a viable solution. We’re only including this policy in case America reverts to its pre-Obamacare health care system. Expat Insurance But now I’d like to talk about my solution. Meaning, this is what we do for health insurance. It may surprise many readers that we have to do anything at all.

To order to qualify for ACA subsidies, pay special attention to avoid exceeding 400 percent of the FPL while combining the strategies mentioned earlier to minimize taxes. Moving to a Different State One big caveat to Obamacare is that you need to live in the right state. When the ACA became law in 2010, part of it relied on expanding funding to Medicaid, the health insurance program covering low-income families administered by each state. The idea was that the Obamacare-related subsidies would take care of people from 138 percent to 400 percent of the FPL, while Medicaid would take care of the 0 percent to 137 percent range. Under this system, everybody would have access to health insurance regardless of income.


pages: 393 words: 115,263

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

The average employer-sponsored family health plan costs almost $14,000 a year, the highest rate in the nation.33 In short, the likely effect of Obamacare, based on the closest statewide model in existence today, is that public costs will be substantially larger than anticipated while private costs will also grow more rapidly. In short, Obamacare has taken the single worst-controlled area of government (and private) spending and severely exacerbated the problem, in the midst of recession and unrelenting funding pressures. It’s insanity cubed. * The themes explored in this chapter‌—‌the fantasy figures on which the federal budget is based, the too-low taxes, the colossal waste of the Pentagon, the fearsome costs of Obamacare‌—‌these things go a long way to explain why we are currently spending a trillion and a half dollars more per annum than we are raising in tax.

If these things are done right, the result will be a re-energized military. Leaner, stronger, more purposeful, more focused. Better able to carry out the tasks we assign it, less distracted by nonsense. Obamacare The Pentagon, however, is like some kind of budgetary Walmart, some fuel-sipping Japanese mini-car, in comparison with the beast which is health care. Even in those far-off days before Obamacare, the situation was appalling. Over successive administrations, through countless reforms, despite constant legislative attention, health care in the United States failed to deliver. Take, for example, the most basic duty of a healthcare system: that it extends life.

It needed to get a grip on costs first, deal with universal coverage second. What we got was the inverse of that. In Obamacare, we got a plan that aimed to ensure near-universal health coverage for Americans but one in which cost control was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t even part of the design. In frank comments made after he had left Capitol Hill, David Bowen, the former health staff director of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said: ‘This [Obamacare] is a coverage bill, not a cost reduction bill. There is stuff here that will begin to address the issue of cost, but this is not a cost reduction bill with a bit of coverage on it‌—‌it is really trying to get coverage first.’29 Increasing the scope of health care before tackling the critical question of cost was always bound to be expensive, yet the CBO estimated that the reform would reduce the budget deficit by $119 billion over ten years.30 Now that makes no sense.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

., chapter 5. 47. Devon Herrick, “FDA Slow to Approve Medical Devices,” National Center for Policy Analysis, December 1, 2010, http://healthblog.ncpa.org/fda-slow-to-approve-medical-devices/ (accessed May 12, 2015). 48. Michael Tennant, “ObamaCare: Stifling Innovation,” National Center for Policy Analysis, April 9, 2015, http://www.ncpa.org/media/obamacare-stifling-innovation (accessed May 26, 2015). 49. Cato Handbook for Policymakers, 7th Edition (Cato Institute, January 16, 2009), http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-handbook-policymakers/2009/9/hb111-16.pdf (accessed May 26, 2015).

The lower your pay, the more you have to work to achieve a given standard of living. But other regulations can make it harder for you to get the hours you want. Government-mandated overtime pay may make it too expensive for an employer to let you work more than a certain number of hours a week. And now Obamacare, by forcing certain employers to offer health insurance to employees who work more than 30 hours a week, has created an incentive for limiting hours even further. Even if you manage to overcome these barriers, you face more obstacles, including a substantial tax burden. Low-income Americans don’t generally pay income taxes, but they do pay sales taxes, gas taxes, and “sin taxes” on goods like cigarettes and alcohol.

Although there are some areas in which entrepreneurs and visionaries have the opportunity to change and improve things, overall the story is one of bureaucracy and roadblocks. The U.S. health care system is usually characterized as a free-market system (and all of its problems are inevitably blamed on this freedom), but the truth is that it is dominated by government. Even before Obamacare, about half of U.S. health care spending was government spending.43 Starting with Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the government has sought to guarantee us health care regardless of our ability to pay. But it turns out that allowing people to consume health care that they don’t have to pay for (or don’t have to pay full price for) is incredibly expensive, and shortly after the launch of these medical welfare state programs, the government started imposing rigid controls on doctors, hospitals, and insurers to keep expenses down.


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

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

The Republican-led House passed the ACA repeal despite the intense local resistance, but it set the stage for a showdown in the Senate. After Trump celebrated the House passage of Obamacare repeal, Indivisible groups kept up the pressure. They coordinated protests at the offices of Maine senator Susan Collins, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, and Arizona senator John McCain—the three votes they would need to prevent Obamacare repeal in the Senate. The 62 Indivisible groups in Maine, 16 in Alaska, and 141 in Arizona coordinated with disability rights groups like National ADAPT and women’s health groups like Planned Parenthood to relentlessly pressure their senators to vote against the bill.

Rep. Justin Amash votes against Paul Rand’s budget plan,” MLive.com, March 22, 2012, mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/2012/03/us_rep_justin_amash_votes_agai.html. “eliminate the ACA completely”: Maureen Groppe, “Republicans modify Obamacare repeal bill to win more GOP votes,” USA Today, March 20, 2017, usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/03/20/republicans-modify-obamacare-repeal-bill-appease-conservatives/99427432/. opposed pretty much all environmental regulations: National Environmental Scorecard: Representative Justin Amash (R), LCV.org, n.d., scorecard.lcv.org/moc/justin-amash. dismantle the Department of Education: “Rep.

But she remembered the advice her mentor Paul Ryan had given her and scores of others trying to cut it in a profession where anything you say can and will be used against you: “You have one mouth and two ears; use them in that ratio.” She started to rack up big endorsements: first Ryan, then Mitt Romney endorsed her in the primary. The incumbent Democrat retired, making it a race for an open seat. She was running a fairly typical Republican campaign, focusing on ending Obamacare, reforming the tax code, and creating jobs—but she was a young woman up against a self-funded millionaire who had already run twice for the seat. Republican donors flocked to her cause. She got funding from the Koch brothers and significant backing from the free-spending libertarian Paul Singer, and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC spent $800,000 pummeling her primary opponent as a “perennial loser” on TV.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In addition to causing higher prices, this makes it harder to go elsewhere if you are frustrated by the quality of hospital service, as many Americans are.6 These developments, to me, are the single greatest market concentration issue in the United States today, and I think the critics are on the right track there. I would suggest, however, that to some extent this market concentration is the result of heavy regulation rather than a natural development from the nature of business. Observers differ on whether we should blame Obamacare or blame Republicans for not supporting Obamacare properly (or a bit of both), but still there is no market-based reason health insurance should have become so concentrated in this fashion. Insurance companies have consolidated to deal with costly regulations, which is easier for large companies to do, and because of economies of scale in lobbying government, an increasingly important activity in America’s politicized health care sector.

I’m not saying that bundling all of those services into companies is necessarily a bad idea, and in any case it may be too late to undo each and every part of what the American system already has wrought. Many commentators, from both left and right, expected that Obamacare would bring a large-scale shedding of health insurance coverage away from companies and toward the Obamacare exchanges, but that hasn’t happened, and it suggests that employer-provided health insurance in America may be quite robust, for better or worse. In any case, looking to companies to provide these social welfare functions reflects yet another way we think of corporations as people or as like people in some emotionally resonant manner.

On the macro side, if the American government really, truly wants something done, very often it turns to business. Corporations produce most of the American military’s weapons systems and most of the country’s roads and infrastructure, and it was the tech companies that helped the government fix the initially malfunctioning Obamacare website. On top of that, if it weren’t for business, how easily could you get your Unicorn Frappuccino or whatever else has become the sweet caffeinated beverage du jour? In fact, business is just getting started. In the not too distant future, we can expect business to drive our cars for us, to manage more of our lives for us through online personal assistants, and to run our homes through sophisticated appliances that connect to the internet and talk to each other.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

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

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

Jones, Katharine W. V. Bradley, and Jonathan Oberlander, “Pascal’s Wager: Health Insurance Exchanges, Obamacare, and the Republican Dilemma,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law vol. 39, no. 1 (2014): 97–137. 75. James Tobin, “The Case for an Income Guarantee.” The Public Interest vol. 4 (1966): 31–41, at 40. 76. Jones, Bradley, and Oberlander, “Pascal’s Wager,” 127; Deirdre Walsh, “House Sends Obamacare Repeal Bill to White House,” available online at http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/06/politics/house-obamacare-repeal-planned-parenthood/, accessed February 1, 2016. 77. Ron Haskins, “Moynihan Was Right: Now What?”

Then, as soon as the ACA became law, Republicans turned against it. Some states refused to create the competitive insurance exchanges, hoping instead that the Supreme Court would find Obamacare unconstitutional. States with Republican governments refused to expand Medicaid as the ACA intended, thus leaving some of their poorest residents with no health care. Many people who could have benefited from the availability of health insurance under Obamacare, or from subsidies based on income, made the economically irrational decision to reject it rather than to embrace a conflict with economic individualism. The rise of the Tea Party, with its polarizing rhetoric about federal overreach, transformed what should have been a popular policy initiative into a nonstarter.

In 2009, people living in the poorest counties in the United States had life expectancies that were, on average, six years less than those of their counterparts in the nation’s wealthiest counties; life expectances in the former were similar to those in Mexico, while those in the latter were comparable with Japan.73 Instead of favoring a single-payer program like Britain’s National Health Service or Medicare, President Barack Obama embraced a Republican-designed plan (one which Governor Mitt Romney had actually implemented in Massachusetts). Insurance exchanges would enable insurers to compete for participants in a national market, and participants (individuals without employer-provided insurance, and small businesses) would gain the advantages offered by a larger insurance market.74 The basic plan for Obamacare had been mooted by the economist James Tobin as early as 1966: to make sure that adequate insurance coverage, either from government or from private insurers, is universally available for purchase; b) to require of everyone evidence of such coverage, or of equivalent financial protection for medical contingencies (just as automobile owners must prove financial responsibility) and c) to provide sufficient income to the indigent to enable them to pursue the required insurance coverage …75 But what started as a Republican idea barely became law, passing the House and Senate without a single Republican vote.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Many contemporary social welfare programs have this result—voters want both low taxes and expensive benefits that from their point of view are free or nearly so, resulting in voters showing anger toward government even as life gets better. During the Barack Obama presidency, the Affordable Care Act sought to expand health insurance support to the working class and lower middle class; like Medicare and Medicaid, functionally ObamaCare was an income-transfer program in which the wealthy are taxed so working-class and lower-middle-class persons can avoid an expense. Little commentary took into consideration that the economic role of ObamaCare was to increase the buying power of the working- and lower middle classes by covering a cost they previously paid. Under Obama, eligibility for food stamps and disability subsidies was broadened, transferring more income; a 1994 requirement that welfare recipients make a bona fide attempt to find work was suspended; federal subsidies for unemployment compensation were increased, while the benefit period was extended from half a year to two years, a major act of assistance to the working class that many Americans don’t even know occurred.

See specific topics Nike, 253, 256 Nixon, Richard, 54–55, 179, 256–257 nuclear power, 226–227 nuclear weapons, 125–126, 160–161, 277–280 Obama, Barack, 62, 109, 131 anecdotes of, 219 declinism and, 200–201, 221 Dodd-Frank Act and, 92–93 on drone aircrafts, 159 fuel-economy regulatory regime and, 147–148 on infrastructure, 94 national debt and, 97, 100 ObamaCare and, 29, 220, 249 on tax, 254 ObamaCare, 29, 220, 249 obesity, 5, 26, 35 optimism, 283–285 ozone, 48, 49–50, 62 Paine, Lincoln, 80 Paine, Thomas, 256 Panasonic, 68–69 Paris Agreement, 239, 243 The Passing of the Great Race (Grant), 197, 198 Piketty, Thomas, 84–85 Pinker, Steven, 120, 137, 138–139 Plank, Terry Ann, 278 Plato, 202–203 pollution, 26, 30, 59 See also air pollution Prince William Sound, 43 The Promised Land (Lemann), 71 public health, 27 ability to pay and, 29 carbon dioxide and, 62 deindustrialization and, 29 flu pandemics and, 28 health care and, 29, 40, 101–102, 220, 247–248, 249 inequality and healthcare, 247–248 longevity and, 30–31 mosquitoes and, 39 ObamaCare and, 29, 220, 249 pollution reduction and, 30 sanitation infrastructure and, 29–30 racism, 223, 259–260, 266 law enforcement and, 113–114 refugees and, 197 slavery and, 174–175, 191 Radelet, Steven, 20 Reagan, Ronald, 206–207, 209, 273 Reilly, Bill, 45–46 religion, 222, 282 resource consumption, 280 resource depletion fossil fuels and, 52–53, 54, 55–57 immensity of geology and, 54 market forces and, 51–52 price controls and, 54–55 uninterrupted trends and, 51 in US and European Union, 51–52 Resources for the Future, 45, 46 Ricardo, David, 134 Rose, Reginald, 197–199 Rubenstein, David, 271 Russia.

High-quality hospitals and health clinics, once mainly for the privileged, increasingly are open to everyone: in most of the European Union and in Japan, sick people are admitted to hospitals regardless of ability to pay, while in the United States, emergency rooms accept patients regardless of ability to pay. During the US debate about the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as ObamaCare, commentators on both sides referred to the legislation as providing health care. What it provides is insurance coverage; health care is already provided, at least to anyone in medical distress. That anyone can get high-quality health care, rather than the rich being in teaching hospitals while the poor are in dingy charity institutions, has been a boon to public health.


pages: 267 words: 70,250

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert A. Sirico

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, corporate governance, creative destruction, delayed gratification, demographic winter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, informal economy, Internet Archive, liberation theology, means of production, moral hazard, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, profit motive, road to serfdom, Tragedy of the Commons, zero-sum game

Consider the mandate issued by the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in early 2012, requiring religious institutions to provide abortifacient drugs, sterilization, and contraception coverage as part of their health insurance programs even if those religious groups are morally opposed to doing so. The fact that a seventh of the nation’s economy had already been placed under the control of the federal government by Obamacare—the fact that so many in our culture were comfortable with such a massive government intervention in the private sector—made it much easier for HHS to issue such a mandate. It is very instructive to review the progress of the passage of Obamacare. It was initially supported by the American Bishops’ conference, but eventually lost their support out of fear that it lacked a sufficient “conscience clause” exempting Church institutions from covering services deemed immoral by the Church.

See also freedom economic personal Lima loans Los Angeles Lutherans M Mackinac Island, Michigan Maimonides, Moses Manichaeism Mao Zedong Marcuse, Herbert market, the Marx, Karl Marxism materialism Matthew, Gospel of Medicaid Medicare mercy Methodists Michelin Company, The Michelin, Francois Middle East, the missionaries Missionary Earthkeeping Model T, the Monopoly Moore, Michael morality mortgages Mother Teresa Muraya, Eva Mystery of Capital, The N National Institutes of Health Nazism New England New Testament, the New York City Nicaragua Nobel Prize, the North Korea North Vietnamese Communism O Obama, Barack Obamacare Occupy Wall Street Olasky, Marvin Opitz, Reverend Edmund P paganism Parris, Matthew Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. See Obamacare Paul (apostle) pension plan Peru Peter (apostle) philanthropy PICO National Network Pilgrims, the Pinckaers, Servais-Théodore Plague of Cyprian, the Plato Pol Pot Pope Benedict XVI Pope John Paul II (the Great) population poverty PovertyCure profit property prosperity Protestantism Proudhon, Pierre Pyongyang Q Qwest R Rand, Ayn Rachmaninoff reason (intellectual sense) Reeves, Thomas redistribution refugees regulations relativism resources Revelation, book of rights to health care human rights personal rights vs. privileges to property Rise of Christianity, The Risse, Guenter B.

The government attempts to distribute scarce health care resources without allowing a free market to set prices—and ends up creating more scarcity as it drives a physician’s career into an early grave! If this is what compassion looks like, heaven save us from it. In 2009, when health care reform was in the air but before the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (what became known as Obamacare), business executive David Goldhill wrote a provocative article in the Atlantic magazine.5 Goldhill had lost his father to an infection acquired at a hospital in New York City. Goldhill’s experience and subsequent investigation alerted him to major problems in American health care, problems that persisted amidst enormous financial and technological riches.


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

Congress’s repeated attempts to repeal Obamacare are a case in point. The House bill, passed in March 2017, was actually a tax cut disguised as a health care measure. It offered a $600 billion tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, which it paid for by removing some of Obamacare’s insurance protections and gradually eliminating its Medicaid expansion.8 Moreover, by locking in tax cuts in a health care bill, Republicans hoped to make it easier to achieve still other tax reforms that would please their donors. The Senate attempted to pass multiple versions of an Obamacare repeal without success; the basic strategy in these bills was either cutting the taxes supporting Obamacare or cutting its entitlements, particularly Medicaid.

The Senate attempted to pass multiple versions of an Obamacare repeal without success; the basic strategy in these bills was either cutting the taxes supporting Obamacare or cutting its entitlements, particularly Medicaid. Cutting entitlements, in turn, reduces budgetary obligations, thus making it easier to—you guessed it—cut taxes for wealthy donors. From the standpoint of populism, the Republicans’ proposed health care bills have been an utter travesty; they withdraw important benefits and protections from working-class Americans to benefit the very wealthiest. Commentators repeatedly pointed out that the bills made no sense if the goal was actually to improve health care. But the bills made perfect sense from the standpoint of oligarchy.

But if even a few other countries use the US withdrawal as an excuse to withdraw themselves, then Trump’s action could trigger a cascade of defections leading to the complete unraveling of the pact. Likewise, the stability of the health insurance marketplaces under the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as ACA or Obamacare) depends on essentially the same dynamics. If, say, Congress takes away subsidies and the individual mandate, the cost of health insurance will rise, leading healthier people to drop their insurance. The costs of covering the remaining, sicker, people will then also rise, causing some companies to raise prices or to drop out of the market, thereby reducing competition and raising prices even further.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The elimination of the mandate, in combination with rules forbidding discrimination against preexisting conditions, creates a death spiral for private insurance: healthy individuals drop out until they need insurance, forcing premiums to increase as only those who are sick or about to need health insurance buy; but this induces more relatively healthy people to drop out, leading to further increases in premiums.7 If one wants to have an insurance system covering everybody—and there are good economic and social reasons for that—then one has to have public provision of insurance, along the lines of the European single-payer systems, or one has to have a mandate requiring individuals to purchase insurance privately, along the lines of Obamacare, or one has to give large public subsidies to insurance firms.8 In a society in which there is little social solidarity—each person for him- or herself—the notion that the healthy are subsidizing the unhealthy might seem objectionable, until we remember: eventually almost all individuals are going to be “unhealthy.” Even among the very healthy, as we march toward death, only those who die suddenly, without warning, never draw upon the health care system. The reason that Trump and the Republicans didn’t come up with an alternative to Obamacare (“Repeal and Replace”) is that there aren’t other solutions.

The latter, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, is mostly remembered for upholding most provisions of Obamacare in 2012. However, the decision also allowed states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion that the Affordable Care Act originally mandated. Nineteen states did that, resulting in some 2.2 million people winding up without health insurance, disproportionately African Americans. In the 2018 election, voters in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah reversed those decisions. See, for example, Scott Lemieux, “How the Supreme Court Screwed Obamacare,” The New Republic, June 26, 2017. In June 2013, the Supreme Court (in a five-to-four decision) ruled that a central piece of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional—a provision which had played a key role in restoring voting rights to African Americans; the decision was reminiscent of the 1883 decision of the Supreme Court that struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

Yet, in American politics and economics, there seemed to be even more pressing issues—the recovery from the Great Recession was going more slowly than Obama and his economic team had expected, and the Republicans in Congress had taken a recalcitrant stance that made passing any legislation beyond simply keeping the government open almost impossible. During his presidency, Obama did not, perhaps could not, deal with the issue of inequality, even as he recognized its importance. He deserves credit, however, for the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), which helped deal with one of the cruelest manifestations of inequality, the lack of access to decent health care. Not surprisingly, the problem of inequality did not heal itself on its own—and could not have. Quite the contrary. Matters got worse. Inequalities in race, ethnicity, and gender The inequalities just described do not fully describe the deep divides in the country, for it is riven too by those based on race, ethnicity, and gender, no small part of which arises from brutal discrimination.


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

In 1958, when the first primitive computers were being deployed, it cost the UK tax authorities about £1.16 to collect £100 of tax. Today, with computing power cheap and ubiquitous, it costs £1.14.21 Many of the worst technological foul-ups have involved health care: The rollout of Obamacare turned into a debacle because the Web site was plagued by glitches. Only six people succeeded in signing up for Obamacare on the site’s first day in operation. For the past twenty years, health departments have spent fortunes on PCs, without fundamentally changing the way they work: Most of the new gadgets were in effect slightly faster typewriters or virtual filing cabinets.

It cannot make sense for people who believe in the benevolence of government to prevent government from hiring the best people (or firing the worst), or to allow the government machine to be run by vested interests. Consider a startling fact that emerged during America’s fevered national discussion over the botched rollout of Obamacare: 94 percent of federal IT projects over the past ten years have failed—more than half were delayed or over budget and 41.4 percent failed completely. The Pentagon spent over $3 billion on two health-care systems that never worked properly. They failed partly because the government’s rigid employment rules prevent it from hiring IT experts and partly because its even more rigid rules about contracting out mean that it is a captive of the few suppliers who have the resources to navigate the eighteen hundred pages of legalese in the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century it expanded by an ­average of 73,000 pages a year. From 2009 to 2011 the Obama administration produced 106 major regulations, with “major” defined as having an expected economic impact of at least $100 million a year, and thousands of minor regulations. The Obamacare health bill was over 2,000 pages long; the Dodd-Frank law on finance is 800 pages long and has 400 subsidiary regulations. The federal government requires hospitals to use 140,000 codes for the ailments they treat, including one for injuries from being hit by a turtle.19 Much of this is just Olson’s law at work—industries lobby for ­exceptions or regulations that, once created, justify jobs.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

After winning control of the House amid the Tea Party wave, Republicans had united to combat anything then President Barack Obama tried to do. Atop the kill list was the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s defining legislation, passed the year before when the Democrats controlled Congress. The ACA, or Obamacare, sought to bring healthcare benefits to millions of Americans through an expansion of federal health insurance programs and a subsidized private exchange. Even though Obamacare was projected to lower the nation’s overall healthcare costs and decrease the national deficit, Republicans opposed it, citing a philosophical devotion to small government and minimal taxes. They resolved to use the power of the purse to thwart the Obama administration, especially at the agency that would administer the expensive and unwieldy program: the U.S.

They resolved to use the power of the purse to thwart the Obama administration, especially at the agency that would administer the expensive and unwieldy program: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). With control of just one chamber, Republicans couldn’t directly dismantle Obamacare. They could, however, hold the entire government hostage. Led by House Speaker John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, Republicans tipped the scale by leveraging the debt ceiling. In years prior, raising the debt ceiling—a limit on the amount of debt the U.S. Treasury can take on—was perfunctory.

This ticking time bomb was conceived to force some sort of compromise, because no one in their right mind wanted sequestration. This assumed right minds prevailed in Washington. The Republicans’ top target, HHS, is a sprawling umbrella agency presiding over not just social welfare programs and Obamacare but less-contested functions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. And nestled deep down in this budget, where discretionary spending for countless government functions are delineated, are many programs that most Americans don’t know about, don’t care about, and if all goes well, don’t need to learn about.


pages: 238 words: 68,914

Where Does It Hurt?: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Fixing Health Care by Jonathan Bush, Stephen Baker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, informal economy, inventory management, job automation, knowledge economy, lifelogging, obamacare, personalized medicine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, web application, women in the workforce, working poor

Athenahealth thrives because we fulfill the mission we laid out at the very beginning: We handle the busywork that doctors absolutely hate—the stuff they suck at. Through this on-the-job education, I have developed ideas about how to remake health care in America—or at least how to start. The Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—is widely referred to as health care “reform.” But it has focused the nation’s attention largely on the demand side of the issue: providing health care for another 30 million or 40 million people. Most of the reforms, however, were watered down by lobbyists protecting the incumbents. So we’re still left with fundamental questions around the supply side, namely how we can ensure affordable, quality care at something less than ruinous cost.

I think each one of us has a different answer and would thrive in a system that offers loads of options, along with plentiful data to make informed choices. This in turn would give birth to a market that would provide even more choices, including many we haven’t even dreamed of. Yet laws, even well-intentioned ones like the three thousand pages in the Obamacare bill, tend to reduce choices and bolster the bloated incumbents, from hospitals to pharmaceutical giants, that created this mess in the first place. What about the people’s “right” to health care? I agree with a very limited version of that premise. I would say that everyone should be covered for the kinds of treatments and therapies that the vast majority of Americans cannot afford.

Maybe a technology company buys access to millions of patient records and develops a system to deliver the information, with security and speed, at a fraction of the cost, a nickel or even a penny. This would provide immense benefits for all of us. Quickly, new business models would emerge in a vibrant medical data economy. But it won’t happen as long as payment for information remains illegal. Now many of the people who sat down in 2009 to draft the behemoth that became known as Obamacare wanted to strip these inefficiencies from the health care economy. They understood that the promise of universal care hinged upon making the system work better and cheaper, and many of them believed that introducing transparency and competition was key. They wanted to reduce geographic and political fiefdoms.


pages: 323 words: 95,492

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

In the same month his National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign over contacts with Russia made before Trump’s term had begun. Trump was adamant that Flynn had done nothing wrong, but was compelled to accept his resignation. The following month, in March 2017, Trump was forced to drop his plans to scrap Obamacare – Barack Obama’s attempt to make healthcare more freely available to those on lower incomes. Before his election victory, and in the immediate aftermath, Trump had proclaimed confidently that the scrapping of Obamacare would be ‘easy’ and ‘immediate’. That was when he was an outsider, free to say what he wanted when he wanted. By the spring of 2017 Trump was an insider discovering the powerlessness of power.

In addition, proclaiming an aspiration is much easier than putting together a detailed policy that will work, when implemented. Democratic politics is demanding. As The New York Times columnist David Brooks noted in the aftermath of Trump’s failure to secure support from Congress for scrapping Obamacare: ‘The new elite is worse than the old elite – and certainly more vapid.’1 Brooks was not a supporter of Obamacare, but in suggesting that Trump and his entourage were part of the Washington ‘elite’, he has wounded Obama’s successor with a near-fatal blow. Trump the outsider is condemned as being part of an elite that he views with an anti-politics disdain.

That was before he knew who the next president was going to be.5 Here was Obama still having to plead, after the law had been passed, following agonizing, sleepless acts of compromise: The law has ended the insurance industry’s most pernicious practices, fostered improvements in the way doctors and hospitals deliver care and brought the number of Americans without coverage to a historic low. Some state markets appear to be working just fine, and at least a few insurers are making money. The law’s achievements don’t make the problems any less real. But they do put those problems into perspective – and suggest that fixing them is worthwhile.6 The battles over Obamacare and other items of presidential legislation were straightforward, compared with Obama’s attempts to pass budgets with relatively modest levels of spending. Obama was facing the small-state Republicans, the ones who believed their ideological purity was electorally popular, until their spending cuts had a direct impact on voters’ lives, paving the way for Trump to pledge spending at levels that Obama would never have dared.


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Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Indeed, among the states that benefited most from the extension of health coverage under Obamacare were Kentucky and West Virginia, diehard Trump country.55 As Trump took office, support for the ACA among the most important group of voters, Independents, had risen from 36 percent in 2010 to 53 percent.56 By the summer, when the desperate Republican congressional leadership made a last bid simply to repeal Obamacare without replacement, they had the support of only 13 percent of Americans.57 Not surprisingly, sufficient Republican moderates refused to go along. If they couldn’t repeal and replace Obamacare, what could they do? By the summer of 2017 it seemed that the incoherence of the Republicans, when faced with the complex reality of modern government, might prevent them from taking any effective action.58 The ACA fight had left little room on the legislative agenda.

If the Tea Party would turn the Republican Party into a vehicle for an attack on the creditworthiness of US government, what was safe? So far the Tea Party had made Obamacare its main target. What would be next? By 2014 the Republican Right would block immigration reform and refuse to fund the Export-Import Bank, both priorities of American business. At the G20 the Americans were embarrassed to report that funding for the IMF was being held hostage by Republican opponents of abortion who wanted contraception excluded from Obamacare.63 What if the Republican zealots targeted Fed independence or trade policy next? Of course, there were business interests aligned with the Tea Party on tax and welfare issues.

Bush administration, Brad DeLong had wondered what was the right strategic and tactical course for the Democrats, “when there is no guarantee that any Republican successors will ever be ‘normal’ again.”54 Nine years on the question was more pressing than ever. Since 2009 the congressional Republicans had been waging relentless political war, first against the stimulus, then the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Twice in 2011 and 2013 they had taken the debt ceiling hostage. Now, with control of both the presidency and Congress, what would they do? Obamacare was the scalp they wanted most and it ought to have been easy. As it had emerged from its congressional ordeal in March 2010, the Affordable Care Act was mangled and flawed. But for all their grim determination, in the critical first six months of the Trump presidency the Republicans could neither replace nor repeal it.


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Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

Likely voters across New York who are upset with high taxes, poor business and economic climate, and the price tag associated with Medicaid expansion/Obamacare are open to real solutions and a job-creating governor with business leadership experience. Conway noted that while Cuomo’s favorability ratings were high, the percentage of New Yorkers who wanted to see him reelected was “at a dangerous low.” She highlighted his vulnerability on Obamacare and taxes, adding, in bold, underlined text: Cuomo’s re-elect score is positive in New York City (47%) and in the areas surrounding the city (45%), but a hypothetical “new person” wins the rest of the state by twenty points or more.

He can be toppled through a frontal assault that pierces his bravado and exposes the shortcomings of his tenure, as well as his lack of leadership. He presides over the corruption and lack of progress that is Albany. While there is plenty of good news here for Cuomo, there is little guarantee that he will escape the misfortunes of 2014 that may be visited on Democrats (thanks to Obamacare), and his own man-made problems plaguing New York (including high taxes and a poor business climate, and a “lack of frack”). Rather than kill off the idea of Trump running for governor, Conway’s memo had the opposite effect. “She thought that it was possible for him to win New York,” said Caputo.

It was a move that expressed the profound anger and frustration that had been building up in the party since at least the Tea Party wave of 2009. Republican leaders had repeatedly promised voters that if handed power they would unwind the major Obama achievements, from the Affordable Care Act to the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. And although they had gone so far as to shut down the government in 2013 in a failed bid to defund Obamacare, Republicans had controlled the House for almost five years and Obama’s programs remained intact. Republican voters had cynically been promised fast, easy solutions—so when Boehner couldn’t deliver, they were primed to chalk it up to betrayal. As the Summer of Trump carried into the fall, and Republican fascination with the norm-smashing front-runner kept growing, taking down a major party leader came to seem like a measure of the new populist strength.


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The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

These patterns explain why even government programs that seem to work well enough when they are first implemented tend over time—over say, the eighty years from FDR’s heroic age of liberalism to Obama’s age of liberal frustration—to devolve into what Jonathan Rauch, in his Clinton-era book Government’s End, described as a “large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform.” The Obamacare case study is useful here, not least because it’s a rare example where a meaningful reform, as opposed to just a deficit-funded tax cut or spending boost, did ultimately pass—unlike Clinton’s health care fiasco, or Bush’s doomed Social Security reform effort, or the Trump administration’s Obamacare repeal-and-replace effort, or every attempted immigration reform deal. The opposition to the Obama health care bill was obviously ideological, reflecting a clash between libertarian and social democratic principles.

The opposition to the Obama health care bill was obviously ideological, reflecting a clash between libertarian and social democratic principles. But most Americans aren’t thoroughgoing libertarians; indeed, even most Tea Partiers weren’t thoroughgoing libertarians. The real reason that Obamacare opposition became so fierce, and the debate so toxic, was that the health care system as it exists is as Rauch described government as a whole: a huge sprawl of client populations and powerful interest groups, all of which have a strong financial stake in the existing system, and all of which have spent decades building up the lobbying shops and inner-ring knowledge required to either frustrate or redirect reform.

The last American president really did expand health insurance coverage, however inefficiently and at however much political cost, and if the health care law has not lived up to the administration’s projections, it also hasn’t had the budget-busting effects that its critics feared. But the fact that a law as messy in its design and modest in its effects as Obamacare might be the best-case scenario for reform in an advanced and complex welfare state is an illustration of the larger point. At a certain size and scale of state spending and administrative complexity, and after a sufficient period of time has elapsed from the initial founding of the system (whether you date it to the progressive era, or the New Deal era, or the Great Society), sclerosis becomes the default state, interest-group conspiracies the default mode of governance, regulatory capture the default fate of attempted reforms, and any attempt to sweep the money changers from the temple will last, at best, a year or three before they find a way to rush back in.


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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

It is a liability made larger by the Boomers’ lack of antitrust enforcement, which permitted huge consolidation in drug, insurance, and hospital companies. As for Obamacare, which barely squeaked through, it is too soon to tell. Certainly, Obamacare’s implementation has been rocky, and it appears that the law could be significantly less effective than anticipated, though it does seem to be improving matters meaningfully. Despite its compromises, Obamacare may be the one truly significant social accomplishment of the Boomers, and perhaps their only substantial gift to young people, as it allows those under twenty-six to remain on parental policies. At least for now, Obamacare should not be discounted in the moral calculus, whatever its practical results and likely gutting post-2016.

Since the period 1982–1984, health-care costs have more than quadrupled in gross terms and have been rising faster than inflation overall.23 Medical inflation has slowed over the past few years because of involuntary sequestration and Obamacare’s mandated prices, which over the long term will be roughly as effective as ordering the earth to stand still. The Medicare Trustees accordingly believe Obamacare’s price fiats “are uncertain,” will “probably not be viable indefinitely,” with their actuaries being blunter, saying the price limits have a “strong possibility” of “not be[ing] viable in the long range,” and the government’s overall auditor says the same thing.24 Why?

Nixon helped regulate the environment through legislation and by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. He supported safer working conditions by creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He proposed health-care reform, suggesting expansion of state-administered programs to offer insurance to all Americans, which—Obamacare notwithstanding—remains a dream unfulfilled. With the Fair Labor Standards Act, he increased the minimum wage, and he supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have helped ensure wage parity between men and women. Even the arts, the habitat of pinko intellectuals Nixon so detested, received enormous increases in federal funding.


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How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy by Michael Barber

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Checklist Manifesto, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, deep learning, deliberate practice, facts on the ground, failed state, fear of failure, full employment, G4S, illegal immigration, invisible hand, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, North Sea oil, obamacare, performance metric, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, school choice, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

It has to be one of the classic tales of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. In the autumn of 2013, President Obama faced down the Republicans who had forced him to close government. He refused to buckle to their blackmail; he would not concede on his vaunted health reform, popularly known as Obamacare. After all, he pointed out, Congress had passed Obamacare into law; to allow a congressional minority to overturn it through a blackmail threat would undermine American democracy and future administrations of whatever party. Polls showed that the American people were behind the president, leaving the Tea Party no option but to beat a shame-faced retreat.

As the story unfolded in a blaze of talk shows, the president’s political victory disintegrated. Trust in Obamacare unravelled as his personal promises turned out to be unfulfilled. Jeffrey D. Zients, an extremely competent operator whom I had met previously and come to admire, made good progress, but the president suffered excruciating months of delay and took a blow to his credibility from which he may never recover. And in spite of Zients’s excellent efforts, the website remains, shall we say, suboptimal, and the timetable has slipped. Not just Obamacare, but the Obama presidency had been damaged, perhaps irreparably, by what in this book we would call a ‘delivery failure’.

There may be something close to gridlock in modern Washington, but that is no excuse. As Governor Martin O’Malley put it at a seminar in London in 2014, ‘Failure to drive delivery contributes to gridlock, not the other way round.’ Profound, generational reforms such as Obamacare are too important to be left to government by spasm. They depend on government by routine. If the Obama administration had put the routines in place, not just on Obamacare but across, say, four or five priorities of personal importance to the president, they would also have developed the capacity to learn from delivery in one sphere lessons applicable in others. Arne Duncan, for example, has been the most successful education secretary in US history, a point acknowledged across the political divide in Washington.


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Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

The Speaker and his staff kept insisting they needed a scalp for the right; at one point, he proposed we scrap Obamacare’s individual mandate for health insurance, an obvious nonstarter. We were getting a bit nervous about our side, too. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had told the President they could support a grand bargain, but the outlines of the deal made the Democratic leaders uncomfortable. It would raise substantially less revenue than Simpson-Bowles or a draft proposal by a bipartisan Senate group known as the Gang of Six. And the entitlement reforms were going to be a tough vote for Democrats, especially with Republicans still insisting on some kind of Obamacare scalp. I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit.

(Data as of June 30, 2008; Government Sponsored Enterprises include only Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks, and do not include other GSEs or Ginnie Mae.) I sometimes wondered where this newfound right-wing enthusiasm for fiscal discipline had been during the Bush years, when unfunded wars, tax cuts, and a new Medicare prescription drug benefit had helped turn the Clinton surpluses into deficits. By contrast, Obamacare included reforms aimed at reining in the rising medical costs that threatened our fiscal future, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would reduce future deficits overall despite its subsidies to extend care to the uninsured. Then again, the original Tea Party protested an unelected king who raised taxes, while Obama was an elected president who had lowered taxes, so consistency wasn’t really the point.

This was especially true in the Senate, where Republicans were using the filibuster with unprecedented regularity, blocking just about anything that didn’t have the sixty votes needed to overcome it. For the second half of 2009, the Democrats had exactly sixty senators, which led to side deals like the “Cornhusker Kickback” that clinched Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson’s vote on Obamacare. But as the President’s policies became less popular, many Democratic senators began keeping their distance. Moderates from Republican states didn’t want to look like big spenders. Liberals thought we were too restrained in our spending and too close to Wall Street. With lockstep opposition from Republicans, it became increasingly difficult to get anything through Congress.


On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

I visited a couple who lived just south of the Ohio River, with Cincinnati just over the state line. Bobby Alexander, in his early sixties, had recently retired from the army, and was helping to organise the Northern Kentucky Tea Party, appalled by Obama and all his works, especially the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare! – which had been passed six months earlier, a significant extension of healthcare benefits to millions of Americans who had no insurance, though a long way from the universal cover many reformers wanted. To Bobby it was socialism, pure and simple. We had a friendly conversation in which I asked him in passing why he thought Margaret Thatcher – a hero, of course – had made a point in her three winning election campaigns of pledging faith in the National Health Service.

We had a friendly conversation in which I asked him in passing why he thought Margaret Thatcher – a hero, of course – had made a point in her three winning election campaigns of pledging faith in the National Health Service. This proved to be a conundrum that he couldn’t fathom. It troubled him, but certainly didn’t change his view of Obamacare, which, alongside infringements of gun rights, any liberalisation of abortion, gay marriage and increased federal spending on anything, was for him an assault on the freedoms in defence of which he’d worn his uniform. He and his wife Gloria made my producer Jasper Corbett and me most welcome in their home.

He didn’t provide any evidence, but was believed. ‘We’re only one justice away,’ he told them. ‘One justice away!’ Apocalyptic stuff. Coming back to earth, one questioner who told a story, tentatively, of a family member facing critical illness who had been able to have medical treatment that he couldn’t have afforded without Obamacare, was firmly put down. It was a revivalist meeting, and that was all. A few days afterwards, at Cruz headquarters as the votes came in, they celebrated victory over Trump (‘To God be the glory!’ were the first words of the candidate when he appeared for the crowd). But the euphoria didn’t last. In New Hampshire, where economic concerns were more important to most Republican voters than moral renewal, Trump crushed his opponents with a promise to breathe fire into the economy.


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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

In fact, 85 percent of those who signed up for health coverage under Obamacare in 2015 were eligible for subsidies. Second, despite the high deductibles, an extensive set of preventive screening tests is offered free of any copays, including blood-pressure and cholesterol tests, immunizations, mammograms, and colonoscopies, as well as one annual health checkup. Any further medical procedures found to be necessary as a result of preventive screening would be paid for by the patient up to the limit of the deductible.126 The problems with Obamacare begin with its complexity. An inquiry in February 2015 to the Obamacare website healthcare.gov for my state of Illinois lists 142 different plans, each offering a different menu of premiums, deductibles, and copays.

Other complaints include ever-changing lists of drugs that are covered, that require high copays, or that are not covered at all.127 The complexity and restrictions of Obamacare contrast notably with the simplicity of Medicare and its single-payer system, from which most doctors and hospitals accept payments. In its effort to obtain passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the Obama administration did not attempt to base the plan on the single-payer model or even to provide a public payer option, apparently fearing an onslaught of opposition from lobbyists for the private insurance industry. Although it is much too soon to gauge the effects of Obamacare on health wellness indicators such as life expectancy, it is encouraging that, as shown in figure 14–7, the long-term increase in the share of medical care spending in GDP appears to have stopped, at least temporarily, during 2010–13, even before Obamacare enrollments began in 2014.

Research assessments of managed care did not uncover any systematic decline in quality compared to the traditional fee-for-service system, although the distinction between in-network and out-of-network providers made managed care quite unpopular. The problem of limited networks was exacerbated by Obamacare, which suffered from the complexity of hundreds of different plans, each offering narrow provider networks that were plagued with relatively high provider turnover. At least Obamacare helped to bridge the coverage gap with medical insurance that was subsidized along a sliding scale depending on income, that was available without denial for pre-existing conditions, and that required all providers to offer preventive screening tests free of charge to patients.


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The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The reason for such residential sorting is that parents want the best learning environment for their children, given the technology-induced premium accorded to capabilities. In turn, residential sorting ensures that the emerging technology-induced meritocracy becomes a hereditary one. Popular resentment, already at a high pitch after the Global Financial Crisis, has boiled over with Obamacare in the United States and the immigration crisis in Europe. Society has become imbalanced once again, and radicals of all kinds are pushing for change. Before moving to reform proposals in Part III, we will turn to the two largest emerging markets, China and India. After outlining the reasons for their extraordinary growth, we will see that each one has a different kind of imbalance to deal with.

Instead of an electorate hopeful that beneficial change was around the corner, it created one that feared change and did not trust the ruling upper-middle-class elite to look beyond their own interests. Populist politicians only needed an issue to fan the smoldering rage into flames. In the United States, it was the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. In Europe, it was immigration. We will look at all this more closely in this chapter. THE MANY FACES OF POPULISM A populist movement, as we have seen, is one that believes the ruling elite are corrupt and undemocratic, that the masses have been treated poorly, and that the system ought to be changed because the general will of the people demands it.

Indeed, the financial crisis triggered two essential factors that researchers find explains increased votes for populism across developed countries—economic distress as measured by an increase in unemployment and distrust in the political institutions of the country.40 All that was needed was a spark. THE AMERICAN TRIGGER In the United States, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was an important catalyst in the organizing of the Tea Party movement, a forerunner of the populist nationalist movement. Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who studied blue-collar workers in Louisiana, offers an account of Tea Party supporters’ views. As she surmises through her interviews, the white Southern male believed he had been trudging steadily in line toward the American dream, respecting the rules of the game.41 The line moved more slowly than it had in his father’s days, as economic opportunity dwindled.


pages: 600 words: 72,502

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

The two political parties fight hard to put through legislation and are opposed as vigorously as possible to each other’s efforts in that vein, because once legislation is in place, it is hard to change. Think about the Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare. For six years after its passage, the Republican party ran against Obamacare, promising to “repeal and replace.” Despite achieving the triple win of the presidency, the Senate, and the House in the 2016 election, the Republican party was incapable of either repealing or replacing Obamacare. All gamers who invested in making profits off of Obamacare will have decades to ply their profitable trade. Similarly, it takes years for stock-market operations or regulations to change, even after it is clear that the system is being gamed, partly because the hugely wealthy gamers often end up capturing the exchanges, as we saw with the NYSE and its Mahwah trading operation.

See No Child Left Behind Act neoclassical Keynesian economics, 23–24, 25 Nestlé, 192 Net Promoter Score (NPS), 28, 29, 48 network effects, 191–192 New Deal, 12, 107, 159 new-economy companies, 71 New England Complex Systems Institute, 177 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 64, 88–91, 92, 93 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 183 1970s, 5–12, 24 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), 29–30, 45, 49 nonreductionist thinking, 118–119 normal distributions, 33–38 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 66, 150 Norton, David, 129 NYSE. See New York Stock Exchange Obamacare, 92 Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OFSI), 139–141 off-shoring, 155 oligopolies, 63 optimal financial structure, 173 options trading, 55 outsourcing, 155 Pareto, Vilfredo, 59 Pareto distribution, 46, 57, 59–76, 100 challenge of, 75–76 in companies, 71–73 of income, 161–162 monocultures and, 73–75 Parker, Jeffrey, 86 Parkland shooting, 197 participatory budgeting, 199–200 Penner, Elliot, 188 perfection, 103–106, 113, 126 performance management, 173 Pershing Square, 158 Persona Project, 2, 4, 14–16, 206 Phillips curve, 24 pitch-count restrictions, 102 platform businesses, 71 policy making long-term thinking and, 155–159 mental proximity and, 145–149 revision and, 142–145 political economy, 38 political leaders, 113–114 agenda for, 137–163 political parties, 92, 201–205 political relationships, 197–200 politicians, 197–205 politics, disengagement from, 3, 198 Porter, Michael, 17, 67, 128 power, abuse of, 152–153 power blackouts, 106–107 Power Law distribution.


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

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

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

Clearly, the current American system is a mess, a hodgepodge of private profits and public expenditures, with excellent care for those who can afford it and vast swaths of people who are either completely uncovered or whose nominal coverage is of such poor quality that it does little to provide tangible benefits. I supported the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) when it was being debated, and I still think on balance we’re better off with it than before. But as others have noted, it is precisely the aspects of the law that are not market based—protection of those with preexisting conditions and expansion of Medicaid—that have succeeded. Meanwhile the ballyhooed market mechanisms, the exchanges on which one can purchase private insurance, have largely failed, and the law has not bent the cost curve (that is, reduced the absurd expense of health care in the overall American economy).

Most importantly, it would eliminate one of the central constraints on young people as they work to figure out which life to lead. Most students in college enjoy access to at least basic care at a school clinic. And while many students remain under their parents’ coverage until they turn 26 (thanks in part to an age expansion under Obamacare), many do not enjoy this luxury, particularly poorer students. These people emerge from college needing to work not only to pay rent but to stay in physical therapy, to maintain access to essential medications, to see a doctor when they are sick. As a culture, we are likely to mock the time young people take to “find themselves.”


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Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The QV results are thus much more plausible as a representation of population preferences than is the artificial W shape from Likert.44 Second, while Likert conceals the range of intensity of preferences by grouping all, or nearly all, of the responses at the extremes, QV reveals these gradations. QV shows, for example, the greater intensity of preferences for repealing Obamacare, compared to those for retaining it, which helped fuel the success of Republicans in the 2016 election. FIGURE 2.4: Participant opinions on Obamacare under a standard Likert (left) and QV (right) survey. “Vote strength” in both graphs represents degree of support (on left) or opposition (on right) for Obamacare. Source: Adapted from David Quarfoot, Douglas von Kohorn, Kevin Slavin, Rory Sutherland, David Goldstein, & Ellen Konar, Quadratic Voting in the Wild: Real People, Real Votes, 172 Pub.

If she cares about many issues, she must decide how to allocate her votes across them. She may discover, for example, that while she cares a lot about abortion rights, she doesn’t want to use up so many credits to vote in favor of them that she can’t even buy one vote in order to take a position on Obamacare or the minimum wage. Typically, respondents (especially those with less formal training in mathematics) quickly run into a constraint, running out of credits, and then returning to correct course. Economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir have shown in their 2013 book that running into this type of “scarcity” quickly focuses the minds of participants so that they complete the survey carefully.42 In practice, it also seems to deeply engage users: they typically spend a third longer working on QV surveys than a standard Likert survey, even though the same fraction in both cases completed the survey.

To test whether QV manages to solve the problems with Likert, in 2016 Decide’s chief data scientist and now professor of mathematics education David Quarfoot, along with several co-authors, ran a nationally representative survey with thousands of participants that took versions of the same poll using Likert, QV, or both depending on which group they were assigned to.43 Figure 2.4 pictures a representative set of responses, on the question of repealing Obamacare, with the Likert survey on the left (with its signature W-shape) and the results from QV on the right. Two things are noteworthy. First, QV produces a roughly bell-shaped distribution, the sort of distribution of responses that characterizes most individual preferences. The QV results are thus much more plausible as a representation of population preferences than is the artificial W shape from Likert.44 Second, while Likert conceals the range of intensity of preferences by grouping all, or nearly all, of the responses at the extremes, QV reveals these gradations.


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The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

And right now, those are the people—who’ve done things the right way—that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.” 44 The congressman’s case against Obamacare reiterates the harsh meritocratic logic that runs from the Puritans to the prosperity gospel: If prosperity is a sign of salvation, suffering is a sign of sin. This logic is not necessarily tied to religious assumptions. It is a feature of any ethic that conceives human freedom as the unfettered exercise of will and attributes to human beings a thoroughgoing responsibility for their fate. In 2009, as Obamacare was first being debated, John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing against a right to health care.

“If a believer gets sick and dies,” Bowler writes, “shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that—those who have lost the test of faith.” 42 The harsh face of prosperity gospel thinking can be seen in the debate about health care. 43 When Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress attempted to repeal and replace Obamacare, most argued that their market-friendly alternative would increase competition and reduce costs, while protecting people with pre-existing conditions. But Mo Brooks, a conservative Republican congressman from Alabama, made a different argument. He acknowledged that the Republican plan would require those with greater health needs to pay more.

Newkirk II, “The American Health Care Act’s Prosperity Gospel,” The Atlantic , May 5, 2017. 44. Brooks quoted in Newkirk, ibid., and in Jonathan Chait, “Republican Blurts Out That Sick People Don’t Deserve Affordable Care,” New York , May 1, 2017. 45. John Mackey, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,” The Wall Street Journal , August 11, 2009. See also Chait, ibid. 46. Mackey, ibid. 47. Hillary Clinton, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” July 28, 2016, at presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-democratic-national-convention . 48.


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The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

America’s major entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are unsustainably expensive. The longer we go without addressing the problem, the more dangerously indebted the nation will become. The only way to preserve America’s important safety net is to fix it. Our health-care system is inefficient and expensive—with or without Obamacare. We spend significantly more on medical care than all other developing countries, but we get significantly less in terms of good health. Life expectancy in the United States is lower than the average for all other developed countries—and the gap is growing, not shrinking.3 Our infrastructure is crumbling.

The Obama health-care reforms did not do this. Although there are many potentially sensible ideas tucked in the details of the law, the thrust of the reform was to make an unaffordable system bigger. Meanwhile, the Republicans have no meaningful plan for cost containment at all. Mitt Romney repeatedly vowed to repeal Obamacare on “Day One” of his administration. We never heard much about what would happen on “Day Two”—when he would still have faced an inefficient and unaffordable system, albeit one that no longer promised insurance to all Americans. The idea that competition among private insurers can be used to drive down public health expenditures is completely untested, has not worked in the private sector, and has not been embraced by any serious health economist.

Worse still, the Republicans have strenuously opposed any efforts to use cost-effectiveness as a criterion for public health expenditures because this would be the first step toward “death panels” (Sarah Palin’s one enduring contribution to our national health-care discussion). To get our budget back in order, we have to reform Medicare and Medicaid. And to do that, we need to reform health care in general, which would have enormous benefits for the private sector as well. The nasty debate around Obamacare has proved how hard this will be. Health-care reform is a policy area where Centrist voices can add great value. It is also one of the few places where—with sensible policy changes—we might actually spend less and get more. Rebuild our international institutions. We need a revamped set of international institutions to handle all of the modern issues that transcend national borders.


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Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed by Laurie Kilmartin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, call centre, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, Uber for X

Your entire to-do list can be postponed until your next life. YOUR UNENDING RAGE WTF—My Dad Is Dead and [fill in the blank, I like Dick Cheney] Is Still Alive? When Dad was alive and healthy, he railed against Obamacare. He believed Sarah Palin, who said a death panel would come for him. In reality, Medicare covered his entire treatment, and his caretakers tried to keep him alive for as long as possible. I think Dad would have loved actual Obamacare—the health care that President Obama (and every modern president) receives. Do these people ever die? In 2016, Jimmy Carter was cured from brain cancer at age 92. And 76-year-old Dick Cheney, who was probably the president, has had five heart attacks and a heart transplant.

Bush celebrated his 90th birthday by skydiving. That’s right, someone pushed a president out of an airplane, and he still lived. Both Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford were 93 when they died and I’m sure their doctors were fired for incompetence. If Dad had been given Obama’s actual care, he’d be alive today, complaining about Obamacare. Sometime after your loved one dies, you’ll hear the name of a famous person who is alive and older than your dead person, and you will be struck with envy and bitterness. Thank God. Any emotion that’s not sadness is a gift. Enjoy it, use it. Go for a run, clean out a closet. But keep it aimed at a faraway target—a celebrity or a Nazi.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 163; Terry Flew, “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Contemporary Neo-liberalism Debates,” Thesis Eleven 108.1 (2012), p. 60. 2. Jack Jackson notes that this is not an even or consistent process. Obamacare, he argues, was a significant challenge to neoliberalization. Jack Jackson, “Not Yet an End: Neoliberalism and the Jurisprudence of Obamacare,” unpublished paper presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Certainly, Jackson has a point, but the neoliberal form of Obamacare as a national health plan can be lost on no one. There is also a question of whether it will survive. 3. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 130 S.

Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Australian Institute of Directors Lunch,” September 15, 1976, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/103099. 45. While its critique is supremely important, contemporary prescriptive posthumanism expresses this historical conjuncture and colludes with it. 280 notes Index adjunct teaching, 194, 197–98. Adorno, Theodor, 119–20. Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), 168, 254 n. 2. Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 232 n. 45. Alienation, 38, 65, 77, 96, 209. Allende, Salvadore, 20, 151. Arendt, Hannah, 32, 43, 92, 233 n. 45. See also good life, the; “mere life.” AT&T Mobility LLC v Conception, 152. Austerity politics: as contemporary era of neoliberalism, 49, 71–72, 210, 213, 219; connection to sacrifice, 71–72, 134, 210, 212–13, 216, 232 n. 44, 276 n. 21; in Southern Europe, 38, 212; responsibilization and, 232 n. 44.

Newfield, Christopher, 188, 192, 261 n. 6, 264 n. 20. Nietzsche, Friedrich, 133. Normative order of reason, 117–18. See also political rationality. obama, barack, 49; 2013 State of the Union address, 24–27, 40, 226 n. 13, 226 n. 23; college rating scheme, 178, 225 n. 11; on sacrifice, 276 n. 21. See also sacrifice; austerity. Obamacare, see Affordable Care Act. Occupy Wall Street, 24, 30, 203, 217, 219, 232 n. 40; UC Berkeley and, 250 n. 43. Offe, Claus, 68. “Omnes et singulatim,” 71, 130. See also governmentality; Foucault, Michel. Ordoliberalism, 49, 59, 60, 64, 66; diferences from Chicago School, 59–60; Hayek and, 59; historical inf luences on, 59–60, 213.


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

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

.; Perry, Romney, Cain Close on GOP Side,” WWL-TV, October 13, 2011, http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/politics/2014/08/29/14408560. WWL-TV polled 602 likely Louisiana voters. 57and voted for the Keystone pipeline Ibid. 57“If it ain’t good for y’all, I ain’t voting for it” Scott Lewis, “Boustany and Landry Fight over Obamacare, Medicare, Negative Campaigns and Oilfield Jobs [Audio],” Cajun Radio, October 31, 2012, http://cajunradio.com/boustany-and-landry-fight-over-obamacare-medicare-negative-campaigns-and-oilfield-jobs-audio/?trackback=tsmclip. 59the EPA listed eight as “impaired” and the ninth as “unassessed” A January 24, 2015, search for Lafayette, LA, using the EPA’s “MyEnvironment” tool yielded these findings.

Lester, James, James Franke, Ann Bowman, and Kenneth Kramer. “Hazardous Wastes, Politics, and Public Policy: A Comparative State Analysis.” Western Political Quarterly 36 (1983): 255–85. Lewis, Scott. “Boustany and Landry Fight Over Obamacare, Medicare, Negative Campaigns and Oilfield Jobs [Audio].” Cajun Radio (October 31, 2012). http://cajunradio.com/boustany-and-landry-fight-over-obamacare-medicare-negative-campaigns-and-oilfield-jobs-audio/?trackback=tsmclip. Little, Amanda. “Will Conservatives Finally Embrace Clean Energy? New Yorker (October 29, 2015). Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970.

He agreed with them that Louisiana “gave out drilling permits like candy.” He agreed with them on fracking, and on getting industry to repair the coast their actions had destroyed. He agreed on alternative energy. Louisiana was 42nd out of 50 states on that one. He didn’t agree with liberals on funding Head Start, Pell college grants, Obamacare, or Social Security. And that was fine. But in the back of his mind, Mike wanted to add the environment to the agenda of the Tea Party. How tough a sell would that be? He wanted to find out. The Disaster Before the Sinkhole Disasters could occur, get forgotten, and occur again. Like Harold and Annette Areno, Mike was now a rememberer.


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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

It has become a country with great divides in access to health care, life expectancy, and health status. In the relief that many felt when the Supreme Court did not overturn the Affordable Care Act, the implications of the decision for Medicaid were not fully appreciated. Obamacare’s objective—to ensure that all Americans have access to health care—has been stymied: 24 states have not implemented the expanded Medicaid program, which was the means by which Obamacare was supposed to deliver on its promise to some of the poorest. We need not just a new war on poverty but a war to protect the middle class. Solutions to these problems do not have to be newfangled. Far from it.

Two of the reasons for our dismal health statistics are related to inequalities at the top and the bottom of our society—monopoly profits reaped by drug companies, medical device makers, health insurers, and highly concentrated provider networks drive prices, and inequality, up while the lack of access to timely care for the poor, including preventive medicine, makes the population sicker and more costly to treat. The ACA is helping on both accounts. The health insurance exchanges are designed to promote competition. And the whole act is designed to increase access. The numbers suggest it’s working. As for costs, the widespread predictions that Obamacare would cause massive health care inflation have proven false, as the rate of increase in health care prices has remained comparatively moderate over the last several years, showing once again that there is no necessary trade-off between fairness and efficiency. The first year of the ACA showed significant increases in coverage—far more significant in those states that implemented the Medicaid expansion than in those that refused to do so.

For starters, access to medicine matters. With the U.S. among the few advanced countries that does not recognize access as a basic human right, and more reliant than others on the private sector, it is no surprise that many Americans do not get the medicines they need. Though the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has improved matters, health-insurance coverage remains weak, with almost half of the 50 U.S. states refusing to expand Medicaid, the health care financing program for America’s poor. Moreover, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of childhood poverty among the advanced countries (which was especially true before austerity policies dramatically increased poverty in several European countries), and lack of nutrition and health care in childhood has lifelong effects.


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Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Doctors try not to prescribe to such people, but it is unclear how they are supposed to know, particularly given the time pressure that they face, and even people who are at risk and have a previous history of abuse can be in real pain. Doctors were being asked to police and prevent abuse in a way that was beyond their ability under the circumstances in which they work. Some commentators have argued that the rollout of Obamacare was in part responsible for the epidemic, that the expansion of Medicaid made opioids more widely available. But the timing on this is wrong, because the epidemic was in full swing before any Medicaid expansion. By contrast, Medicaid has played an important role in making available affordable treatment for people with opioid abuse disorder, with levels of therapy much higher in states that expanded Medicaid after 2014.31 The producers, directly and through prescription benefit managers, did everything possible to increase sales and profits, even when it was clear that the drugs were being abused.

The truth is that these horrors are happening not in spite of the American healthcare system but because of it. The next chapter makes the argument. It is not an argument about poor healthcare or lack of coverage, though there is much that could be said about both; the deaths from prescription opioids were caused by the healthcare system, and even after Obamacare twenty-seven million Americans have no health insurance.1 But a far worse problem is the enormous cost. The vast sums that are being spent on healthcare are an unsustainable drag on the economy, pushing down wages, reducing the number of good jobs, and undermining financing for education, infrastructure, and the provision of public goods and services that are (or might be) provided by federal and state governments.

Lobbyists oppose one another, but there are no effective lobbyists, or lobbyists of comparable power and size, who are arguing the case for the people who are paying for the enrichment of the healthcare industry or who can act as a countervailing power against it. During periods of legislative activity, the healthcare lobbyists have sometimes been singularly effective. Obamacare was passed without consideration of a single-payer system or a public option, and the US has nothing like the British system of evaluation. Hospitals, doctors, and pharma companies were effectively paid off in order to support the passage of the Affordable Care Act.54 This was necessary to get more uninsured people into the system, but it prevented any cost saving, a trade-off that was almost certainly necessary then given the power of the lobbies.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Gaby Galvin, “87M Adults Were Uninsured or Underinsured in 2018, Survey Says,” U.S. News & World Report, February 7, 2019, www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2019-02-07/lack-of-health-insurance-coverage-leads-people-to-avoid-seeking-care. 22. Tami Luhby, “Is Obamacare Really Affordable? Not for the Middle Class,” CNN, November 2016, money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/news/economy/obamacare-affordable/index.html. 23. Boesler, “Almost 40% of Americans Would Struggle to Cover a $400 Emergency.” 24. Bob Herman, “Medical Costs Are Driving Millions of People into Poverty,” Axios, September 2019, www.axios.com/medical-expenses-poverty-deductibles-540e2c09-417a-4936-97aa-c241fd5396d2.html. 25.

Lori Konish, “137 Million Americans Are Struggling with Medical Debt. Here’s What to Know if You Need Some Relief,” CNBC, November 12, 2019, ww.cnbc.com/2019/11/10/americans-are-drowning-in-medical-debt-what-to-know-if-you-need-help.html. 26. Matt Bruenig, “How Many People will Obamacare and AHCA Kill?” (blog), MattBruenig Politics, mattbruenig.com/2017/06/22/how-many-people-will-obamacare-and-ahca-kill/. 27. Catherine Rampell, “It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk,” New York Times, February 19, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/college-degree-required-by-increasing-number-of-companies.html. 28. Leslie Brody, “New York City Plans to Give More 3-Year-Olds Free Early Childhood Education,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2019, www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-plans-to-give-more-3-year-olds-free-early-childhood-education-11547165926?

His findings show that if the Republicans had succeeded in annulling the Affordable Care Act in 2017, 540,000 people would have died over the next decade because they would have lacked health-care coverage—but an additional 320,000 would die from lack of coverage even if the Republican effort was unsuccessful. That’s an important point: even under Obamacare, millions of Americans are still uninsured.26 Add it all up, and it shouldn’t be surprising the US still lags well behind similar developed countries in access to care, even after passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Our health-care deficit leads to lost time for work and for play, but also to the worst lost time of all: the years with friends and loved ones that so many people lose because they die too soon.


pages: 177 words: 50,167

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

Judis, “America the Liberal,” The New Republic, Nov. 19, 2008. 55prepare the nation for a new age: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/01/21/president-barack-obamas-inaugural-address. 55did not prosecute: http://www.g-a-i.org/u/2012/08/DOJ-Report-8-61.pdf. 55shake business confidence: See Noam Scheiber, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, Simon & Schuster, 2011, pp. 170–8. 55growth of Medicare spending: See Thomas B. Edsall, “The Obamacare Crisis,” The New York Times, November 19, 2013 and “Is Obamacare Destroying the Democratic Party,” The New York Times, December 2, 2014. 56“Chicago Tea Party”: See John B. Judis, “Tea Minus Zero,” The New Republic, May 10, 2010. 56160,000 members: Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 22. 57“You are not entitled to what I have earned”: Skocpol and Williamson, p. 66. 57ACA as a redistributive transfer program: Emily Elisabeth Ekins, “Tea Party Fairness: How the Idea of Proportional Justice Explains the Right-Wing Populism of the Obama Era,” UCLA diss., 2015, pp. 74–75. 57services by illegal immigrants: Skocpol and Williamson, p. 71. 57took jobs from native-born Americans: See Kazin, pp. 35–36. 58sending him big checks: John B.

Bankers, land speculators, and gamblers were typically numbered among the unproductive—as were, for the populists, recent immigrants who took jobs from native-born Americans. The Tea Partiers initially singled out Obama for coddling the “takers,” but after Republicans won the Congress in 2010 but failed to deliver on the Tea Party’s non-negotiable demands to repeal Obamacare, the Tea Party focused their ire on the Republican establishment. Tea Party candidates ran against both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—and in the latter case, won. McConnell and Cantor’s sin lay in refusing to go all the way in repudiating even the bare rudiments of the neoliberal consensus between the parties and in failing to block even discussion of immigration reform.


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

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

Concern in the United States is notably less than in comparable countries. And the drop that Klein is describing is exactly what they report. It’s very hard to doubt that that’s connected with the propaganda campaign that has been quite openly conducted. In fact, a couple of years ago, right after the insurance company victories on the health reform bill, so-called Obamacare, there was a report in the New York Times about leaders of the American Petroleum Institute and other business groups looking to the victory in the health care campaign as a model to undermine concern about global warming.34 In the Republican presidential debates, for example, even to mention global warming would be to commit political suicide.

., 72, 85, 174–75 consumerism, 36, 37, 80 corporations, 10, 24, 26, 27, 31–32, 38, 41, 76–77, 81, 103, 119, 152, 174 piracy issue, 107–8 Cuba, 4, 160, 161 culture, and language, 138–40 deaf-blind, 134–35 debt, 8, 87, 152, 168 student, 152 decolonization, 5, 46 democracy, 47, 54, 62, 79–81, 84–85, 109, 112, 143–44, 150, 151, 158–59, 172 Democratic Party, 32, 41–42 demonstrations, 29–33, 35, 40–43, 73–77 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67, 112–13, 168 civil rights, 24, 30–31, 45, 65–66, 72, 150, 167, 176 Occupy, 47, 65–69, 74–77, 118–21, 146, 168, 177 student, 73–74 Depression, 23, 27, 28 deregulation, 48, 173–74 Dewey, John, 147, 148, 149 Dink, Hrant, 89, 91 dissidents, 144–45 doctrinal system, 8, 10, 36, 38, 158, 159 Dönitz, Karl, 116 Draghi, Mario, 169 drugs, 160–62 Durand Line, 99 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 17 Economic Policy Institute, 168 economy, 4, 32, 76–78, 97, 121, 168, 171 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67 Chinese, 7–10 financial crisis, 23, 48, 86–89, 168–69 global shift of power, 5–13, 58, 76–77 Indian, 7, 10–11, 20–23 stimulus, 33 U.S. decline, 4–10, 56, 59–60 education, 37, 82, 147–56, 165–68 battle over, 147–56 higher, 150–53, 165–68 K-to-12, 153–56 privatization of, 38–39, 156, 167–68 public, 37–39, 147–48, 153–56, 166–68 science, 154–55 Egypt, 35, 51, 53, 61, 67 Arab Spring, 44–49, 54, 60–64, 67, 168 Einstein, Albert, 143 Eisenhower, Dwight, 125 electoral politics, 102–13, 117–19 electronic books, 104 Ellsberg, Daniel, 15, 113 El Salvador, 145 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148, 156 Enlightenment, 116, 147, 148 environment, 12, 75, 121–25, 158–59, 163–65, 176 climate change, 75, 121–25, 159 fracking, 164–65 Erdoan, Recep Tayyip, 89, 90, 93 Europe, 5, 6, 9, 47, 51, 58, 161 economic crisis, 47, 86–89, 168–69 European Central Bank (ECB), 86–87, 169 European Union, 87, 89, 92 evolution, 128, 129, 137–38 Facebook, 145, 146 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 15, 71, 73 Federal Reserve, 86–87 financial crisis, 23, 48, 86–89, 168–69 Financial Times, 66, 76, 78, 123 Finland, 153, 154 Foreign Affairs, 59, 61 fossil fuels, 21, 22, 49–55, 122–24, 164, 165 fracking, 123, 164–65 France, 46, 50, 52, 68, 112–13, 170 Fraser, Doug, 25 Freedom of Information Act, 110 Gadhafi, Mu’ammar, 50, 53 Galileo, 143, 144 Gates, Bill, 11 Gaza, 93 General Motors, 33, 80 genetics, 126–27, 129, 140 Germany, 15, 27, 51, 58, 118, 153 economic policy, 88 Nazism, 28–29, 115–16 Weimar Republic, 25, 27–29 World War II, 115–16 GI bill, 152 Ginsberg, Benjamin, The Fall of the Faculty, 168 globalization, 5, 20–22, 170 financial crisis, 86–89, 168–69 labor, 9–12, 76–77, 169–70 shift of power, 5–13, 58, 76–77 Goldman Sachs, 42 Google, 107 government, 78–85, 150, 158 big, 81, 82 security, 107–13 “Grand Area” planning, 57 Great Britain, 5, 8–9, 16, 17, 21, 35, 50, 52, 61, 79, 107, 139, 172 colonialism, 9, 20 government, 79 slavery, 36 World War II, 115, 116 Greece, 87 Guantánamo, 72–73 Guatemala, 21 gun culture, 162–63 Gwadar, 22 Haiti, 11, 13–14, 17 Hale, Kenneth, 136, 139–41 Hanif, Mohammed, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 106 Haq, Abdul, 16 Harvard University, Institute of Politics, 158 Havel, Václav, 145 health care, 24, 76, 82, 157 Obamacare, 124 Heilbrunn, Jacob, 111 Hindenburg, Paul von, 27–28 historical amnesia, 97–98 Hitler, Adolf, 28–29, 32, 88 Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 70–71 Honduras, 7, 110–11 House of Representatives, U.S., 85 Human Development Index, 13 “Human Intelligence and the Environment” (Chomsky), 42 Humanitarian Law Project, 70–71 human rights, 109, 113 violations, 89–92, 95–96, 145 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 149 Hume, David, 79, 81 Hussein, Saddam, 17, 71, 95 imperialism, 1–33 saltwater fallacy, 3–4 terminology, 3 India, 7, 9, 10–11, 17–23, 38, 50, 51, 107, 164 Bhopal explosion, 174 British rule, 20 -China relations, 20–22 economic growth, 7, 10–11, 20–23 -Israel relations, 20, 21 natural resources, 17–20 neoliberalism and, 19–22 TAPI pipeline and, 17–18 -U.S. relations, 20–22 war, 20 indignados, 47 Indonesia, 17 intellectual culture, 79, 81, 104–6, 141 intellectual property rights, 107–8 International Energy Association (IEA), 121–22 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 47 International Organization for a Participatory Society, 171 international relations (IR) theory, 8, 63 Internet, 105–13 security, 107–13 iPhone, 145–46 Iran, 18, 60, 62, 63, 90–91, 93, 95–98, 111, 112, 114 nuclear threat, 112 TAPI pipeline and, 18 Iran-Iraq War, 97 Iraq, 16–17, 21, 60, 61 Kurds, 95–96 nationalism, 55–56 U.S. war in, 16–17, 55–56, 62–63, 114–16 Islam, 60 political, 49, 61 radical, 61, 100 Israel, 20, 21, 96, 112 -India relations, 20, 21 -Lebanon relations, 63 Palestinian conflict, 46 -Turkey relations, 92–94 -U.S. relations, 21 Jacob, François, 129 James, William, 130 Japan, 5, 8, 58, 131, 139 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 172 job creation, 76, 87 Kagan, Elena, 70 Karachi, 22 Keller, Bill, 144 Keller, Helen, 134, 135 Kennan, George, 57 Kennedy, John F., 2–3 Vietnam policy, 2–3, 97 Khadr, Omar, 72–73 King, Martin Luther, 30–31, 66, 105 Klein, Naomi, 123, 124 Kurds, 21, 89–92, 95–96 labor, 38, 81, 87, 169 anti-labor movements, 40 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67 Chinese, 9–10, 11–12 collective bargaining, 40–41 demonstrations and strikes, 29, 33, 35, 40–43, 68, 120, 146 Depression-era, 23, 40, 67–68 global, 9–12, 76–77, 169–70 organized, 23–25, 39–41, 67–68, 147, 171 rustbelt, 11–12 solidarity, 39–41 unemployment, 22–23, 38, 66, 76 unions, 24–26, 33, 39–41, 68, 79, 147, 171 language, 126–42 biological acquisition of, 129–36 culture and, 138–40 sensory deprivation and, 134–35 similarity of, 140–41 study of, 137–38, 142 universal grammar, 126–59 Latin America, 4–7, 22, 61, 160–62, 164 drugs, 160–62 integration of, 6–7, 47, 161 U.S. military bases in, 6–7 Laxness, Halldór, 106 Lebanon, 63 Lee, Ching Kwan, 11 Left, 23, 25, 32–33, 59, 117, 147, 149, 150, 151 student, 73–74 Left Forum, 25, 27, 33 libertarianism, 157, 158, 163 Libya, 50–54, 91 no-fly zone, 50–52 Lippmann, Walter, 81 Madison, James, 84, 85 Magna Carta, 59, 72, 116 Mandela, Nelson, 71 Manning, Bradley, 113, 114 Marcos, Ferdinand, 17 market system, 80–81 Marx, Karl, 173, 175 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 13, 37, 105, 122, 134, 136, 149 mathematics, 137, 138 McCain, John, 103 McCarthyism, 24 McKiernan, Kevin, 95 media, 32, 66, 150, 151 mental slavery, 34–35, 101–25 Mexico, 11, 152–53, 162, 175 Middle East, 17, 44–64, 89–100, 111 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64, 67, 112–13, 168 oil, 21, 49–55 Turkish-Israeli relations, 92–94 uprisings, 44–64 military, 5, 98 Arab Spring, 44–55, 60–64 detention, 70–73 police, 119–20 U.S. bases in Latin America, 6–7 Mobutu Sese Seko, 17 Mondragon, 171 Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor, 23 Morgenthau, Hans, 63–64 The Purpose of American Politics, 64 Morocco, 46 Mubarak, Hosni, 45, 47, 62 Nader, Ralph, 150 NAFTA, 163, 175 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 61 National Defense Authorization Act, 70 Native Americans, 22 natural gas, 17–18, 164–65 natural resources, 17–22, 164–65 Navy, U.S., 6–7, 14, 52, 116 Nazism, 28–29, 115–16 New Deal, 23, 82 New York, 67, 100, 166 New York Times, 60, 81, 89–91, 124, 144–45, 160 Ngo Dinh Diem, 2, 3 Ngo Dinh Nhu, 2, 3 Nicaragua, 7 9/11 attacks, 14, 15–16, 139 Nixon, Richard, 125, 150 No Child Left Behind, 153 Non-Proliferation Treaty, 18 North Africa, 46–48, 57, 60 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 50, 51, 91, 92 Norway, 115 nuclear weapons, 97, 98, 100, 110, 112, 176 Nuremberg Trials, 115–16 Nystrom, Paul, 36 Obama, Barack, 7, 33, 63, 90–91, 93, 110, 111, 114, 153, 162, 164 Afghanistan War and, 14–15 civil liberties and, 70–73 Libya and, 51–52 organized labor and, 41–42 2008 election, 102–3 Obamacare, 124 Occupy movements, 47, 65–69, 74–77, 118–21, 146, 168, 177 oil, 21, 22, 49–55, 124 Orwell, George, 19, 97 Pakistan, 16, 17, 22, 61, 98–100, 110 drone attacks on, 18–19, 98–99 nuclear industry, 98–100, 110 TAPI pipeline and, 18 Palestine, 46, 72 -Israel conflict, 46 Palmer raids, 68 Pamuk, Orhan, 91 Panama, 7 Panetta, Leon, 114 Pashtuns, 99 Patterson, Anne W., 99, 110 Paul, Rand, 157, 162, 163 Paul, Ron, 75, 124–25, 157, 163 pensions, 12, 22, 24, 26 Peres, Shimon, 93 Peshawar, 16 pharmaceutical companies, 107–8 Philippines, 4, 17 Pinochet, Augusto, 61 piracy, 107–8 political Islam, 49, 61 Political Science Quarterly, 82 police repression, 119–20 politics, 32, 41, 57, 59, 121, 142–45, 171 electoral, 102–3, 117–19 labor demonstrations and, 41–43 poverty, 6, 66, 82, 84 Powell, Colin, 115 Powell, Lewis, 150–51 Powell memorandum, 150–51 power systems, 34–35, 69 aristocrats and democrats, 160–78 chains of submission and subservience, 34–43 global shift, 5–13, 58, 76–77 language and education, 126–59 mental slavery, 101–25 new American imperialism, 1–33 uprisings, 44–64 privatization, 11, 38, 39, 40, 156–57, 167 Progressive Labor (PL), 73 propaganda system, 35–40, 66, 80, 82, 102, 119, 122–24 property rights, 84, 85 public, power of the, 78–81 public education, 37–39, 147–48, 153–56, 166–68 public relations, 35, 79–81, 102–3 Qasim, Abd al-Karim, 61 Race to the Top, 153 racism, 3, 31, 92 Ravitch, Diane, 154 Reagan, Ronald, 62, 71, 82, 95, 99 recession, 23, 48, 86–89 Red Scare, 23, 68, 120 Reich, Robert, 170, 172 Reilly, John, 122 Republican Party, 41, 57, 75, 76, 124, 125 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 72 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 115 Right, 23, 32, 150–51 Riyadh, 52 Romney, Mitt, 57–58, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 14, 23, 54 Roy, Arundhati, 22, 29, 31 Russia, 17–18, 20, 50, 61, 98, 102, 145 rustbelt, 11–12 Saharawi movement, 46 saltwater fallacy, 3–4 Saudi Arabia, 21, 49, 52, 61, 99, 111, 144 science, 142–43, 144 education, 154–55 modern, 143 sectarianism, 73–74 Seib, Gerald, 54 self-destruction, 42–43 Senate, U.S., 63, 85 sensory deprivation, 134–35 Shiites, 52–53 Singh, Manmohan, 19 Sino-Indian War, 20 slavery, 3, 34, 36, 51 end of, 34, 35, 36 mental, 34–35, 101–25 Slim, Carlos, 11 Smith, Adam, 8–9 social Darwinism, 157 social media, 105, 107, 145–47 Social Security, 39, 156–57 solidarity, 38–41, 146–47, 159 South Africa, 21, 50–51 apartheid, 71 South America, 6, 7, 57, 60, 161 Southeast Asia, 4, 60 South Korea, 9, 17 Spain, 4, 6, 33, 87 sports, college, 154–55 Stack, Joseph, 25–26, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 61 Stohl, Bev, 105 Stop Online Piracy Act, 107 strategic hamlets, 2 student activism, 73–74 submission and subservience, chains of, 34–43 Summit of the Americas (2012), 160–61 sunbelt, 11, 12 Sunnis, 52–53 Supreme Court, U.S., 70, 150 Buckley v.

., 6–7, 14, 52, 116 Nazism, 28–29, 115–16 New Deal, 23, 82 New York, 67, 100, 166 New York Times, 60, 81, 89–91, 124, 144–45, 160 Ngo Dinh Diem, 2, 3 Ngo Dinh Nhu, 2, 3 Nicaragua, 7 9/11 attacks, 14, 15–16, 139 Nixon, Richard, 125, 150 No Child Left Behind, 153 Non-Proliferation Treaty, 18 North Africa, 46–48, 57, 60 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 50, 51, 91, 92 Norway, 115 nuclear weapons, 97, 98, 100, 110, 112, 176 Nuremberg Trials, 115–16 Nystrom, Paul, 36 Obama, Barack, 7, 33, 63, 90–91, 93, 110, 111, 114, 153, 162, 164 Afghanistan War and, 14–15 civil liberties and, 70–73 Libya and, 51–52 organized labor and, 41–42 2008 election, 102–3 Obamacare, 124 Occupy movements, 47, 65–69, 74–77, 118–21, 146, 168, 177 oil, 21, 22, 49–55, 124 Orwell, George, 19, 97 Pakistan, 16, 17, 22, 61, 98–100, 110 drone attacks on, 18–19, 98–99 nuclear industry, 98–100, 110 TAPI pipeline and, 18 Palestine, 46, 72 -Israel conflict, 46 Palmer raids, 68 Pamuk, Orhan, 91 Panama, 7 Panetta, Leon, 114 Pashtuns, 99 Patterson, Anne W., 99, 110 Paul, Rand, 157, 162, 163 Paul, Ron, 75, 124–25, 157, 163 pensions, 12, 22, 24, 26 Peres, Shimon, 93 Peshawar, 16 pharmaceutical companies, 107–8 Philippines, 4, 17 Pinochet, Augusto, 61 piracy, 107–8 political Islam, 49, 61 Political Science Quarterly, 82 police repression, 119–20 politics, 32, 41, 57, 59, 121, 142–45, 171 electoral, 102–3, 117–19 labor demonstrations and, 41–43 poverty, 6, 66, 82, 84 Powell, Colin, 115 Powell, Lewis, 150–51 Powell memorandum, 150–51 power systems, 34–35, 69 aristocrats and democrats, 160–78 chains of submission and subservience, 34–43 global shift, 5–13, 58, 76–77 language and education, 126–59 mental slavery, 101–25 new American imperialism, 1–33 uprisings, 44–64 privatization, 11, 38, 39, 40, 156–57, 167 Progressive Labor (PL), 73 propaganda system, 35–40, 66, 80, 82, 102, 119, 122–24 property rights, 84, 85 public, power of the, 78–81 public education, 37–39, 147–48, 153–56, 166–68 public relations, 35, 79–81, 102–3 Qasim, Abd al-Karim, 61 Race to the Top, 153 racism, 3, 31, 92 Ravitch, Diane, 154 Reagan, Ronald, 62, 71, 82, 95, 99 recession, 23, 48, 86–89 Red Scare, 23, 68, 120 Reich, Robert, 170, 172 Reilly, John, 122 Republican Party, 41, 57, 75, 76, 124, 125 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 72 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 115 Right, 23, 32, 150–51 Riyadh, 52 Romney, Mitt, 57–58, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 14, 23, 54 Roy, Arundhati, 22, 29, 31 Russia, 17–18, 20, 50, 61, 98, 102, 145 rustbelt, 11–12 Saharawi movement, 46 saltwater fallacy, 3–4 Saudi Arabia, 21, 49, 52, 61, 99, 111, 144 science, 142–43, 144 education, 154–55 modern, 143 sectarianism, 73–74 Seib, Gerald, 54 self-destruction, 42–43 Senate, U.S., 63, 85 sensory deprivation, 134–35 Shiites, 52–53 Singh, Manmohan, 19 Sino-Indian War, 20 slavery, 3, 34, 36, 51 end of, 34, 35, 36 mental, 34–35, 101–25 Slim, Carlos, 11 Smith, Adam, 8–9 social Darwinism, 157 social media, 105, 107, 145–47 Social Security, 39, 156–57 solidarity, 38–41, 146–47, 159 South Africa, 21, 50–51 apartheid, 71 South America, 6, 7, 57, 60, 161 Southeast Asia, 4, 60 South Korea, 9, 17 Spain, 4, 6, 33, 87 sports, college, 154–55 Stack, Joseph, 25–26, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 61 Stohl, Bev, 105 Stop Online Piracy Act, 107 strategic hamlets, 2 student activism, 73–74 submission and subservience, chains of, 34–43 Summit of the Americas (2012), 160–61 sunbelt, 11, 12 Sunnis, 52–53 Supreme Court, U.S., 70, 150 Buckley v.


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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

I don’t, by the way, count Obamacare on this list of grand projects. No matter what you think of it as policy, it provided health insurance to about 10 to 15 million of America’s previously uninsured 40 million–plus population, with the exact number for new coverage still evolving. That helps many of those individuals, but it is hardly a game-changer in terms of a broader social trajectory, especially since many of those people already were receiving partial health care coverage and, furthermore, the Obamacare exchanges are experiencing some serious problems. If anything, Obamacare has locked in the basic features of the previous U.S. health care system rather than revolutionizing them.

See also internet dating matching assortative mating and book sellers and choice and class and crime and dating and eBay effects of influence of and jobs and living standards and marketing and music industry and pets and segregation and strivers Medicaid Medicare Mellander, Charlotta Melville, Herman Merkel, Angela Mexico and migration and outsourcing middle class and the Complacent Class and democracy income and wages and mobility Middle East migration African American and education history of interstate as investment and matching and Mexico and Millennial Generation and regional specialization and Texas See also immigration; mobility Millennial Generation and car culture and entrepreneurialism and grand projects and matching Million Man March Minsky, Hyman mobility and African Americans and American South and childrenn cross-generational cross-state and dynamic society and education effects of mobility decline history of American mobility income and innovation labor in media and the arts and politics reasons for migration reasons for mobility decline and segregation symbolism of Tocqueville on See also migration Moby-Dick (Melville) monopolies Moretti, Enrico Morrison, Van Mortensen, Dale multiculturalism Murray, Charles A. music industry Musk, Elon neo-Nazi movement Newton, Huey P. Nigeria NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) mentality North Africa Obama, Barack Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act Occupy Wall Street movement oil industry oil price shock (1973) On the Road (Kerouac) outsourcing pantheism Pareto, Vilfredo patents Patriot Act pets philanthropy Pinker, Steven Pissarides, Christopher play, outdoor polarization policing political science poverty and mobility and segregation Princeton University prison riots productivity and cities diffusion problem firm-specific productivity and innovation and the internet and matching and mobility productivity per worker hour total factor productivity (TFP) worker productivity profiling progress and the Complacent Class and democracy and innovation and mobility model of history and segregation progressivism protests.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

The states that opted out of the free extension of Medicaid were clustered in the South, reflecting again the racecraft involved in such decisions on compensation of care. Part of the anger against the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as “Obamacare,” is because its benefits are seen in racist terms by some critics as gifts from one black man—who happens to be the president—to the black population. This factor may be most important to less educated whites. Another reason for the anger is that Obamacare raised taxes on the very rich. In fact, the Obama administration raised taxes in two ways: by letting some tax breaks for people earning over half a million dollars to expire, and by the Affordable Care Act provisions raising taxes on the rich to support healthcare for the poor.

“The Long-Run Effect of Public Housing Demolition on Labor Market Outcomes of Children.” Economics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, March 27. Clotfelter, Charles T. 2004. After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Segregation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CNN. DATE. “Poll: ‘Obamacare’ vs. ‘Affordable Care Act.’” CCN Political Unit. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/27/poll-obamacare-vs-affordable-care-act/. Accessed September 22, 2016. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015. Cohen, Patricia. 2015a. “Gasoline-Tax Increase Finds Little Support.” New York Times, January 2. Cohen, Patricia. 2015b.


pages: 627 words: 89,295

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

Greg Orman, A Declaration of Independents: How We Can Break the Two-Party Stranglehold and Restore the American Dream (Austin, TX: Greenleaf Group Book Press, 2016), 61. 28. Lee Drutman, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 31. 29. Russell Berman, “Cruz: Political ‘Tsunami’ Needed to Win Fight to Defund Obamacare,” The Hill, August 25, 2013, https://thehill.com/video/sunday-shows/318647-cruz-tsunami-needed-to-defund-obamacare. 30. For overview of the shutdown, see Walter J. Oleszek, “The Government Shutdown of 2013: A Perspective,” in Party and Procedure in the United States Congress, 2nd Edition, ed. Jacob Straus and Matthew Glassman (2017). 31. Leigh Ann Caldwell, “Architect of the Brink: Meet the Man behind the Government Shutdown,” CNN, updated October 1, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/house-tea-party/index.html. 32.

With the exception of Republican Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who did not vote. United States Senate. “Roll Call Vote 11th Congress – 1st Session,” https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&session=1&vote=00396. 34. Tessa Berenson, “Reminder: The House Voted to Repeal Obamacare More Than 50 Times,” Time, March 24, 2017, http://time.com/4712725/ahca-house-repeal-votes-obamacare/. 35. For a great analysis of show votes, see Frances Lee, Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). 36. Former Republican Senator Olympia Snowe put it best when she said, “Much of what occurs in Congress today is what is often called ‘political messaging.’


pages: 367 words: 117,340

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, Columbine, fear of failure, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, white picket fence

They live in a comfortable but creaky townhouse on the south side of London, and every summer they come to the States to summer at an old beach house her family has had since the thirties. I’m curious to hear about the British National Health Service, a single-payer system, which has become a bogeyman here in the United States. The Republicans routinely point to Canada and England as examples of the path on which Obamacare is leading us, and never in a complimentary fashion. They never say, for example, “Obamacare will make our health care system like England’s! And it will be great! Cucumber sandwiches for everybody!” Whether or not we are ultimately headed for a single-payer system I have no idea, but I am curious to hear what Jessica’s experience with it is like, since she’s dealt with both the American and British systems.

Depending on which civic organization you choose to believe, the world’s first rodeo was either in Payson, Arizona, in 1884, Pecos, Texas, in 1883, or Deer Trail, Colorado, in 1869. But I’m not going to quibble with the residents of Prescott because I am a guest in their town and because they all have guns. While we’re cleaning up after lunch, the conversation turns to health care, or specifically “Obamacare,” which Jackie hates. Jackie hates Obama generally and his new health care law specifically. Even Jackie, hard ass Jackie, is willing to concede that there are parts of the Obama health care plan she likes. The preexisting condition stuff, for example. But she worries that our health care system, “the finest in the world,” will become like Mexico’s.

I’m in no mood, so of course the minute my butt hits the cushiony blue seats, Michael starts spewing some nonsense about health care and we begin the morning by bickering like an old married couple. By now he must be fully aware that health care and national defense are possibly the two issues that I am most conservative and he is most liberal about. Well, even though I’m pretty sure there’s a big brick wall in my future, we start discussing Obamacare on the bus on the way to the swamp tour. Michael’s argument starts with Republicans being heartless, and that we all need “to give a little more for the common good,” and that “health care should be free to every American.” I naturally feel like Uncle Scrooge when I say that universal health care would bankrupt this country if enacted into law.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Smith’s pessimism is proving to be warranted: under the HITECH Act, on top of the $30 billion in implementation incentives, the federal government has spent nearly $600 million promoting health information exchanges, but there isn’t terribly much to show for it. There are a few successful exchanges, such as ones in Indianapolis and upstate New York, but they remain distinct outliers. What kind of incentives might actually succeed in creating a viable information exchange system? Under Obamacare, the federal government and private insurers are actively pushing new payment models that promote the formation of large organizations that will share the responsibility for populations of patients and be accountable for the quality and efficiency of care. The hope is that these new models, called accountable care organizations (ACOs), will create markets in which hospitals and clinics will want—strike that, need—to move information around.

You just can’t ask people to make multibillion-dollar investments in things that have no short-term return on investment.” Blumenthal is particularly proud of the major bump in IT adoption that began during his tenure at ONC. The penetration of electronic health records in American clinics and hospitals went from about 10 percent the year before he took office to about 70 percent in 2014. While Obamacare itself, with its shift toward payment for results rather than visits and procedures, might have inspired a modest uptick, few people question that the bulk of the increase can be chalked up to Blumenthal’s initiatives.29 If Job One was to digitize the American healthcare system, then Blumenthal’s plan and his tenure at ONC were overwhelmingly successful.

Before he left Atlanta, Gross had created a Google Calendar–based scheduling system, an improved paging system, and a new way of accessing the medical literature for his Emory classmates and faculty. In 2008, just as David Blumenthal, Bob Kocher, and Zeke Emanuel were beginning to hammer out the details of HITECH and Obamacare in Washington’s corridors of power, Gross was still a medical student, studying anatomy and biochemistry, but transfixed by the excitement of the presidential campaign, particularly the debate over healthcare. He decided to take a break from medical school to obtain an MBA at Harvard, so that he could better understand healthcare economics and policy and make some contribution to them.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

The Dodd-Frank Act is an invitation to nationalize the large banks as too big to fail and to marginalize the small ones as too little to succeed. Free of all legislative constraint, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is regulating all consumer finance, from investment advisors to pawn shops. Obamacare (also known as the Affordable Care Act) is extending its web of taxation and control over all healthcare, requiring sixteen thousand new Internal Revenue Service agents to make it all work. Redressing the crisis of inequality will be expanded taxation of capital and savings capped by a progressive wealth tax—a program that may begin with Hillary Clinton’s proposed hike in the tax on capital gains.

Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy (New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2015), epilogue. 4.Maurice McTigue, “Rolling Back Government, Lessons from New Zealand,” Hillsdale College Imprimis 33, no. 4 (April 2004). 5.George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World’s Most Besieged State Is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2012). 6.Steve Forbes with Elizabeth Ames, Reviving America: How Repealing Obamacare, Replacing the Tax Code, and Reforming the Fed will Restore Hope and Prosperity (New York, NY: McGraw Hill Education, 2016), 124 and passim. 7.Metcalfe’s Law ordains that the power and value of a network rises roughly by the square of the number of compatible devices linked to it. 8.Judy Shelton, Fixing the Dollar Now: Why U.S.

See Hayek money hedge funds, 4, 11, 102, 104, 129, 170 Heritage Foundation, xiv Hezbollah, 46 high-powered money, 32, 36, 53 Holdren, John, 3 Homo economicus, xvii–xx Hong Kong, 30, 36, 42, 49, 106 Huawei, 158 hypertrophy of finance, 13, 57, 87–89, 95, 97–111, 125, 132, 167–68, 170–71 I Iceland, 94, 117 Iger, Robert, 122 Immelt, Jeffrey, 130 income taxes, 91, 152 index funds, 131, 171 India, 45, 106, 118, 158 Indonesia, 110 Industrial Revolution, xx, 100, 158 second industrial revolution, 8 inequality, 3–6, 11, 23, 43, 53, 59, 87–92, 95–96, 106, 125 inflation, xi, 36–37, 62, 78–80, 85, 92, 138, 142, 146–47, 149, 153, 155–57, 159, 162 China and, 29–30 correctives to, 81–82, 92, 152, 157 debtors and, 80, 116 departure from gold standard and, 11 gold and, 22, 111–12, 158 Japan and, 108 monetarism and, 30, 33, 35, 53, 61, 79 recovery from Great Recession and, xvi, 56, 58 Volcker and, xv, 110 information age, 106 information economy, 1, 9, 93, 100, 149, 172 information theory, xviii, 20, 24, 31, 59, 62, 64, 71–72, 77, 84, 93, 95, 133, 138, 140, 143–44, 163, 168–69, 171, 174 initial public offerings (IPOs), 49–50, 115, 119–22, 154 injustice, 25–26 Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), 88–89 Intel, 8, 119, 121, 169 interest rates, 19–20, 22, 35, 66, 109 Fed control of, 15, 24, 80, 114, 123, 132 financial recoveries and, xv high rates, xi, xv–xvi immorality of, 141–42 index of time, 14, 21, 24, 61, 113, 124–25, 141–42, 170 instability of, 11, 13–14, 155 low rates, xvii, 155 zero interest rates, 15, 24, 26, 54, 61, 92–94, 108, 110, 114, 123–25, 132, 142 Internal Revenue Service, 6 International System of Units (SI), 144–46 Internet, the, xviii, 13, 50, 53, 63–64, 73, 78, 80–81, 103, 113, 139, 144, 153, 170, 174 China and, 46–48 digital currencies and, 44, 67, 69–70, 72, 158–61, 163, 172 economy of, 13, 160–61 “internet of things,” 70 Internet Protocols, 8, 71 regulation of, xxii, 5 software stack, xxi, 170 spam, 70 iPhones, 18, 84, 153 Iran, 46 Ireland, 55, 57 Islam, 47, 141 Ivy League, xiv, 26 J Jackson Hole, WY, xvii Janszen, Eric, 107 Japan, 30, 36, 40, 88, 94, 99, 108 Jiang Mianheng, 43 Jiang Zemin, 42–43, 48–49, 51 JPMorgan Chase, 127 K Kahneman, Daniel, xx Keynes, John Maynard, 10, 49, 98 Keynesians, Keynesianism, xviii, xx, 34, 59, 147, 150, 154, 171–72 Kling, Arnold, 150 knowledge, xvii, 17, 93, 129, 131 learning and, 9 source of growth, 9, 14 suppression of, 15 wealth as knowledge, 17–18, 23–24, 31, 64, 100, 106, 108, 117, 124, 132–34, 140, 161, 163, 167–69, 172 Knowledge and Power (Gilder), 17 Koch brothers, xiv Krugman, Paul, xiv–xvii, 35, 54–56, 89, 98–99, 150 Kurzweil, Ray, 18, 169 Kwarteng, Kwasi, 10, 66 L Las Vegas, NV, xiv Laughlin, Robert, 133–34 learning, 127, 129 crucial to knowledge and wealth, 1, 9, 17–18, 23, 32, 64, 108, 124, 145, 163, 169 source of growth, 17, 22, 24, 26, 84–85, 100, 108, 117, 131, 134, 138, 140, 158, 169, 172 suppression of, 21, 24, 62, 67, 128–29, 131, 133, 144, 155 learning curves, xix, 18–19, 22, 37, 63, 75, 84–85, 95, 130, 155–56, 160–61, 169 Left, the, xx, 4, 86–87, 89 Lehrman, Lewis, 37 Lenovo, 158 libertarians, xiv–xvii, 30–31, 51, 53, 81 Likud Party, 153 Linear Technology, 119 Lipsky, Seth, 13 London, 8, 105, 134–35 M Mach, Ernst, 144 Main Street, xvii, xxii, 56, 87, 113–25, 127–29, 132, 149, 164, 170–71 Malpass, David, 58 Malthusianism, 3–4 Maoism, 30 Mao Zedong, 42, 47, 154 Marxism, Marxists, xviii, 3–4, 6 Mauldin, John, 40 McAdam, Lowell, 122 McKinnon, Ronald, 31, 97 McTigue, Maurice, 152 Medicaid, 15, 123 Medicare, 15 mergers and acquisitions (M&As), 121 Microsoft, 8, 119–20, 122, 160 middle class, the, 4, 118 anxieties in, xiii Chinese members of, 116 economic well-being of, xxii, 115, 120 harmed by economic policies, xxii, 15, 58–59, 66, 91–92, 95, 113–14, 119–20, 128 Mises, Ludwig von, xx, 102, 139–40 monetarism, monetarists Chinese rejection of, 38, 43–44, 51, 154 Milton Friedman and, 29, 32 tenets of theory, 32–38, 59, 92, 156, 171–72 versus information theory of money, 31, 61, 155 Monetary History of the United States (Friedman), 99 money connection to time, 9, 14, 17, 21–24, 61–68, 70–72, 74, 85–86, 93–96, 113, 134, 137–47, 150, 154–55, 157–58, 160–61, 163, 170–73 as measuring stick, 9, 21, 24, 49, 59, 63–64, 67, 73, 75, 78, 96, 108–9, 144–46, 157, 160, 173 money supply, 20, 29–37, 58, 80, 92–93, 98–99, 158 monopoly money, xxii, 1, 34, 53, 58, 81, 92, 124, 149, 155, 157, 163–64, 167, 170–72 Moore, Gordon, 169 Moore, Steve, xiv–xv, xvii Moore’s Law, 18, 64, 160, 169 Morgan Stanley, 127 Mundell, Robert, 43–44, 51 Mundell International University of Entrepreneurship, 44 mutual funds, 130 N Nadella, Satya, 122 NASDAQ exchange, 49, 121 National Bureau of Economic Research, 56 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, xxii National Review, 35 Netflix, 122 Netscape, 115 Nevada, 55 New Deal, 87 New Hampshire, 2, 41 Newton, Isaac, xx, 63, 136 New York, NY, 74, 95 New York Times, xiv, 54, 122 New Zealand, 152–53 Nixon, Richard, 9–10, 12, 41, 98–99 Nobel Prize, xx, 29, 31, 36, 43, 89, 133, 150 Nordhaus, William, 19 North America, 118 North Dakota, 55 North Korea, 46 O Obama, Barack, xi–xii, xv–xvi, xxi, 4 economy under, xi–xiii, xvi presidential administration of, 3, 40, 99 Obamacare, 6 Office of Price Administration, 150 oil, 11–12, 81, 83, 116, 158, 168 One Percent, xvii, 3 Oracle, 119 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 82 P Page, Larry, 122 Palantir, 121 Palo Alto, CA, 118, 171 Parks, Larry, 157 People’s Bank of China, 48 People’s Liberation Army, 42 Piketty, Thomas, 3–6, 9, 15, 19, 87–96, 110, 141–42, 150 polymerase chain reaction (PCR), xxi, 8 Ponnuru, Ramesh, 35 Popper, Karl, 89, 169 Popular Economics (Tamny), 11 Portugal, 55 principal trading funds (PTFs), 102, 104 producer price index (PPI), 81 Progress and Poverty (George), 90 Q Qualcomm, 115, 119, 160 quantitative easing, 14, 54, 80, 114, 123, 147, 157 R Rand, Ayn, xviii, 137 Reagan, Ronald, xi, xiv–xvii, 12, 40–41, 51, 115 real estate, xvi–xvii, 11, 13, 26, 37, 55, 66, 88, 90, 92–95, 117, 168, 173 Reason, 63 regulation, xiii–xiv, xvi, xix, xxii, 6, 26, 29, 31, 35, 39, 50, 57, 80, 88, 91, 93–94, 96, 122, 128, 130, 151, 154, 167 Reich, Robert, xxi Republican Party, Republicans, xii–xiv, xvii, 25, 35, 150 Right, the, 40, 89 Robinson, Arthur, 48 Romer, Christina, 99–100 Rueff, Jacques, 36–37 S Samsung, 158 Samuelson, Paul, 10, 150 Sanders, Bernie, xxii San Francisco, CA, 95 Sarbanes-Oxley, 49, 122 Satoshi Nakamoto, 64, 72–73, 172 Schacht, Hjalmar, 110 Schiff, Peter, 53 Schumpeter, Joseph, 83 science of information, 17 second industrial revolution, 8 second law of thermodynamics, 62, 142 secular stagnation, 3, 26, 56, 89, 91–92, 150–51.


pages: 87 words: 25,823

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Reflecting on some surprising alliances between today’s technology giants and the lobbying groups and of the world’s major extractive resource companies, Ames (2015) writes that even if we still give Google and Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and allow that their investments in the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute weren’t directly motivated by killing Obamacare and throwing millions of struggling Americans back into the ranks of the uninsured and prematurely dying—nevertheless, they are accessories, and very consciously so. Big Tech’s larger political goals are in alignment with the old extraction industry’s: undermining the countervailing power of government and public politics to weaken its ability to impede their growing dominance over their portions of the economy, and to tax their obscene stores of cash.

Bibliography Abel, Andrew B., Ben S. Bernanke, and Dean Croushore. 2008. Macroeconomics. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson. Allen, Katie. 2013. “Gold Price Volatility Hits Pawnbroker’s Profits.” The Guardian (September). http://www.theguardian.com/. Ames, Mark. 2015. “Google Is Helping to Fund the Group That’s Trying to Kill Obamacare in the Supreme Court.” Pando Daily (March 18). http://pando.com/. Andolfatto, David. 2013. “Why Gold and Bitcoin Make Lousy Money.” Economist’s View (April). http://economistsview.typepad.com. Andreessen, Marc. 2014. “Why Bitcoin Matters.” New York Times (January). http://dealbook.nytimes.com/.


pages: 90 words: 27,452

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bear Stearns, business cycle, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, do what you love, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, Internet of things, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, obamacare, post-work, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, warehouse automation, working poor

Here is how Edsall, the New York Times columnist, summarized the progressive political morality of full employment in December 2013: The economics of survival have forced millions of men, women, and children to rely on “pity-charity liberal capitalism” [Edsall is here quoting Konczal]. The state has now become the resource of last resort, consigning just the people progressives would like to turn into a powerful force for reform to a condition of subjugation—living out their lives on government subsidies like Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and now Obamacare.1 The only alternative to this vaguely, benignly fascistic version of liberalism, according to Edsall and Konczal, is a “bold” public policy commitment to full employment, presumably because more jobs mean less dependence on the state for income supplements, aka transfer payments, entitlements, and government subsidies.

Then notice how a potential “force for reform” is made pliant, docile, and inert because it doesn’t just receive, it relies on government subsidies. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think a Tea Party enthusiast wrote this paragraph after finishing Atlas Shrugged, particularly in view of the reference to Obamacare as a government subsidy that will subjugate the poor, to be sure, but also create a permanent constituency for the Democrats, the party of “pity-charity liberal capitalism.” From this standpoint, there’s no middle ground between work, on the one hand, and dependence on the other—between having a job and being subjugated by the state (or the party).


pages: 128 words: 28,129

Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit (Even If You Hate Working Out) by S.J. Scott

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, fear of failure, Inbox Zero, Kickstarter, Mr. Money Mustache, obamacare, Skype

While I do recommend joining a gym to have an alternative solution for when the weather is inclement, you should always be budget-conscious. When the cost of shoes or exercise equipment makes you balk, compare it to the medical costs people incur because they have neglected their bodies and avoided exercise for a lifetime. Even in the days of Obamacare (or specifically in the days of Obamacare, depending upon your financial situation), healthcare can be really, really, really expensive. How much better is it to invest in your health and well-being now than to pay for painful and expensive medical care in the years to come? HOW TO IMPLEMENT Step One: Use sites like eBay and Craigslist to search for lightly used equipment or check with family and friends to see if they happen to have stuff in their basement you could borrow or purchase on the cheap.


pages: 250 words: 64,011

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, Black Swan, business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, obamacare, p-value, PageRank, pattern recognition, publication bias, QR code, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, statistical model, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons, Yogi Berra

,” CNBC, accessed August 16, 2015, http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/13/are-red-or-blue-states-better-job-creators.html; “Climate Battle Will Likely Divide Red States and Blue States Down a Green Line,” National Journal, accessed August 15, 2016, http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-america/newsdesk/climate-epa-regulation-obama-states-20150803; Steve Benen, “‘Obamacare’ Thrives in Nation’s Largest Blue State,” the Maddow Blog, accessed August 16, 2015, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/obamacare-thrives-nations-largest-blue-state. 4. All maps are from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/. Mark Newman, “Maps of the 2012 US Presidential Election Results,” from the personal page associated with the University of Michigan website, updated November 8, 2012, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2012/.

The Electoral College is an example of aggregated data—a type of summary statistic that can often be misleading because it can mask variation in the data. You’ve probably seen media reports that analyze all of the supposed differences between red states and blue states, with stories highlighting differences in everything from job creation to environmental regulations to Obamacare.3 But is there really that much of a divide in terms of the way we think, act, and vote? Or will we see a different story as we go deeper into the data? Let’s take a closer look at the voting data, starting with a map of the 2012 election results (figure 3-1) from Mark Newman at the University of Michigan (note that red is light gray and blue is dark gray in this map).4 When you look at red states versus blue states, you see lots of divisions.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

His successor immediately set out to dismantle most of what comprised his legacy. Whether motivated by principle, petulance, or ill-disguised racism, Republican efforts to undo all that Obama had accomplished require us to reinterpret his presidency—even before the initial interpretation has fully formed. If Obamacare, the Paris accord on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and restoring U.S. diplomatic ties with Havana don’t define his legacy, what does? Allow me to suggest one possibility: Our forty-fourth president’s signature achievement was to briefly prolong the life of the Emerald City consensus. He did this by temporarily propping up elements of that consensus already showing signs of impending failure and pivoting toward a domestic freedom agenda to which his immediate predecessors had given only intermittent attention.

He promised to reauthorize torture and “load up” the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo “with some bad dudes.”23 He vowed to quit NATO, abandon the Iran nuclear deal, move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and jettison every trade deal that did not demonstrably benefit the U.S. economy. He would terminate Obamacare on “day one,” appoint pro-life judges, and revive “Merry Christmas” as a holiday greeting. By unfurling the black banner of “America First,” he implicitly subverted the foundational myth of contemporary history—World War II as a “Good War” that gave credence to America’s providentially assigned liberating mission.

See globalized neoliberalism neo-populism Neptune Spear, Operation New Deal New Hampshire primary New Orleans, Battle of New Republic new world order Bill Clinton and Buchanan and Bush Jr. and Bush Sr. and globalization and Wilson and New York Daily News New York Times Niebuhr, Reinhold Nixon, Richard Nobel Peace Prize Noriega, Manuel North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea Novak, Robert nuclear arms Iran and North Korea and Nuremberg tribunal Obama, Barack accomplishments of Afghanistan and bin Laden and economy and election of 2008 and freedom and Hillary Clinton and Iraq and Nobel Prize and primaries of 2016 and ranking of RMA and Trump and Obamacare Obergefell v. Hodges Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Occupy Movement opioid crisis Oslo Peace Accords Paine, Thomas Pakistan Panama Paris Accord on climate change Partisan Review Pataki, George patriarchy Paul, Rand Pax Americana globalized capitalism and policing of peace dividend peace-through-dominion Pearl Harbor attacks pensions People Perot, H.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

In Mindful Work, David Gelles hails Aetna’s supposedly benevolent CEO, Mark Bertolini, for offering mindfulness training to a third of its fifty thousand employees.30 The program produced annual per capita productivity gains of $3000, while cutting employee healthcare costs by $2000, saving $6.3 million in total. Mindful employees are good for big business. Meanwhile, the supposedly mindful Aetna lied about its reasons for withdrawing from Obamacare, which had expanded access to medical insurance. While the company said that mounting losses had required it to pull out of Obamacare exchanges in eleven states, the real reason, according to US District Judge John Bates, was “to evade judicial scrutiny over its merger with Humana,” a $34 billion deal which had been blocked by the Department of Justice for antitrust reasons one month earlier.31 Corporate mindfulness programs don’t train their participants to challenge business practices — that would require a search outside oneself, something modern mindfulness has studiously avoided.

Vision Books, 1982. 27 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1006978911496 28 Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. Oxford University Press, 2001. 29 http://nomosjournal.org/2013/08/searching-for-integrity/ 30 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. 31 https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/24/investing/aetna-obamacare-humana-merger/ 32 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/opinion/sunday/Meditation-productivity-work-mindfulness.html chapter Nine: Mindful Merchants 1 https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/industry-research/2018-global-wellness-economy-monitor/ 2 https://www.mindful.org/its-not-mcmindfulness/ 3 https://www.awakenedworldpilgrimage.com/ 4 https://www.whil.com/companies 5 Edward L.


pages: 504 words: 147,722

Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick by Maya Dusenbery

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, gender pay gap, Helicobacter pylori, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Joan Didion, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microaggression, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, phenotype, pre–internet, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk, women in the workforce

Kaiser Family Foundation, Women’s Health Insurance Coverage, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, October 21, 2016, http://kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/womens-health-insurance-coverage-fact-sheet/. Health care reform also corrected . . . Jessica Arons and Lucy Panza, “Top 10 Obamacare Benefits at Stake for Women,” ThinkProgress, May 24, 2012, https://thinkprogress.org/top-10-obamacare-benefits-at-stake-for-women-5ff541dfdf53#.36n0gciws. Insurers are now required . . . “Preventive Services Covered Under the Affordable Care Act,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, September 23, 2010, www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts-and-features/fact-sheets/preventive-services-covered-under-aca/.

Insurers are now required to cover basic preventive care that’s critical to women’s health, like contraception, annual well-woman visits, testing for sexually transmitted infections, breastfeeding support and supplies, and domestic violence screenings, without any co-pays or deductibles. They’re no longer allowed to charge women higher premiums than men for the same coverage simply because they’re women, a practice known as “gender rating” common in the pre-Obamacare days. They can’t deny women coverage for “preexisting conditions,” like having had a Cesarean section, being pregnant, or experiencing domestic violence. And they can no longer refuse to offer maternity-care coverage, as the vast majority of plans on the individual market previously did. Still, 11.2 million women, many of them low-income women of color, particularly immigrant and Latina women, remain uninsured in the United States.

One of the unfortunate consequences of having to constantly safeguard reproductive health care from threats originating outside of the medical system is that problems within it tend to get overshadowed. For example, in recent years, women’s health advocates have found themselves in the ridiculous position of having to defend Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover contraception—which is used by 99 percent of sexually active women at some point—without a co-pay. Were we not stuck having such 1960s-era debates over our right to birth control, we might spend more time demanding better birth control. More than half a century after the pill was invented, the range of birth control options remains remarkably limited, dominated by varying types of hormonal contraceptives that can cause significant side effects.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

$3 trillion per year: Chad Terhune, “U.S. Health Spending Hits $3 Trillion as Obamacare and Rising Drug Costs Kick In,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2015, www.​latimes.​com/​business/​healthcare/​la-​fi-​health-​spending-​increase-​20151202-​story.​html. Nearly one dollar of every five: Scott Thomas, “Nation’s Total Personal Income Approaches $13 Trillion,” Business Journals, December 4, 2012, www.​bizjournals.​com/​bizjournals/​on-​numbers/​scott-​thomas/​2012/​12/​nations-​total-​personal-​income.​html. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare: US Department of Labor, “The Affordable Care Act and Wellness Programs,” fact sheet, accessed January 9, 2016, www.​dol.​gov/​ebsa/​newsroom/​fswellnessprogram.​html.

It involves growing surveillance, including lots of data pouring in from the Internet of Things—the Fitbits, Apple Watches, and other sensors that relay updates on how our bodies are functioning. The idea, as we’ve seen so many times, springs from good intentions. In fact, it is encouraged by the government. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, invites companies to engage workers in wellness programs, and even to “incentivize” health. By law, employers can now offer rewards and assess penalties reaching as high as 50 percent of the cost of coverage. Now, according to a study by the Rand Corporation, more than half of all organizations employing fifty people or more have wellness programs up and running, and more are joining the trend every week.


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

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

People close to the system can witness the abuses being carried out right in front of them. Yet it is all but impossible to muster political mandates for action to squeeze the abuses out of the system. Why do Americans find it so uniquely difficult to act effectively in the public interest? We saw an answer during the Obamacare debate of 2010. Obamacare was attacked as “socialism.” Yet the people most responsive to these attacks—older voters—were themselves already enrolled (or looking forward soon to enrolling) in Medicare, a system much more socialistic than anything contemplated by the Affordable Care Act. In fact, a lot of the anger against the Affordable Care Act flowed from seniors’ and soon-to-be-seniors’ anxiety lest the Affordable Care Act cut into the funding for their socialized medicine.

Index The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools. Abadi, Haider al-, 40 abortion, 43, 123 abuse of power, 127 Adenauer, Konrad, 178 Affordable Care Act (ACA, 2010; “Obamacare”), 129–30, 134–36, 138, 140 Afghanistan, 41, 43, 45, 172 Africa, 108, 157, 166, 174 African Americans, 16, 80, 107, 117–18, 123, 150, 182 agriculture, 13, 122, 161, 163 AIVD (Dutch intelligence), 45 Alabama, 80, 123, 184 Alaska, 122, 123 Alfa Bank, 126 Alinsky, Saul, 19 allies, 127, 171, 177, 180 al-Qaeda, 96 Al Smith dinner, 100–101 Alternative for Germany, 66 Amazon rain forest, 161 America First, 47, 49–50 America First Action SuperPAC, 64 American Conservative, 59 American Enterprise Institute, 147–48 American exceptionalism, 175–76 American Spectator, 176 Americans with Disability Act (1990), 130 Anderson, John, 105 Angola, 108 animal rights movement, 61 Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 57 Antifa, 60, 69 anti-majoritarianism, 71–86 anti-Semitism, 56–57, 61, 197 anti-vaxxers, 66, 196–97 Appalachia, 138 Applebaum, Anne, 174 AR-15 rifles, 106 Arab Barometer, 172–73 Arendt, Hannah, 147 Arizona, 81–82, 99, 118, 123, 185 Assad, Bashar al-, 88–89 Assange, Julian, 196 Associated Press, 55 asylum seekers, 22, 108, 145 Atatürk, Kemal, 88 Atlantic, 20, 33 Australia, 41, 44–45, 162, 177 authoritarianism, 44–45, 48–49, 61–62, 70, 145, 176–77, 189, 193, 199 Axios, 40 baby boomers, 14, 77, 135–36, 142, 150 Baghdad, embassy attacks, 172 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al-, 95–97 Bahrain, 26 Baier, Bret, 48 Baker, Howard, 85 banking and finance, 25–26, 174 Bannon, Steve, 88–89, 113 Barr, Bill, 36, 125 Baton Rouge, 80 Beck, Glenn, 75, 83, 149–50 Benczkowski, Brian, 126 Bennet, Michael, 107 Bevin Matt, 138 Biden, Hunter, 89 Biden, Joe, 88, 107, 113, 126 bigotry, 6, 111–12, 118 birth rates, 147–48, 167–68 Black Panthers, 61 Blasey Ford, Christine, 109 Bolsonaro, Jair, 64–65, 162 Bolton, John, 189 Boston Globe, 43 Bowers, Robert, 56–57 Brazil, 65, 161–62, 179 Breitbart, 58, 59, 63, 149 Brexit, 41, 45, 63, 143, 173 Bridgeland, John, 151 Britain (United Kingdom), 36, 40–42, 44–45, 64, 97, 143, 156, 160, 162, 177 British Crown Prosecution Service, 36 British National Health Service, 135, 137, 140 British Parliament, 98 British Royal Society, 151 Bruce Mansfield plant, 118 bubonic plague, 156 Buchanan, James, 198 Burisma company, 89 Bush, George H.W.


pages: 160 words: 6,876

Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants by Bethany McLean

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, crony capitalism, housing crisis, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, negative equity, obamacare, Pershing Square Capital Management, race to the bottom, Savings and loan crisis

Quarter after quarter, they posted stunning multibillion-dollar losses, which required huge draws from Treasury. In early 2009, the Treasury amended its agreement to increase the total amount of funding available for Fannie and Freddie from $200 billion to $400 billion—half the 10-year estimated cost of Obamacare. On Christmas Eve, 2009, the Treasury amended the agreement again to remove any cap on the funding for the next three years. In addition, the Federal Reserve began to buy Fannie and Freddie securities to help the perception that they were safe. According to Paul Willen, a senior economist at the Boston Federal Reserve, between 2008 and 2014 the Fed would purchase $2.8 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities.

Fannie and Freddie provide services that are absolutely essential to the American way of life,” he wrote in the fund’s annual report. “They help make the popular 30-year fixed-rate mortgage available and affordable. They provide liquidity and stability to the nation’s housing finance system—during good and, especially, in bad times. No one does it better.” He compares housing reform to Obamacare. “Obama can get a do-over when he says, ‘You can keep your insurance!’ ‘Oops, you can’t keep your insurance!’” he says. “But you cannot mess up the plumbing of housing finance. If you do, within two weeks, credit will totally dry up. No one will be able to get a mortgage.” There is disagreement among investors on many details of how a plan would work.


pages: 457 words: 125,329

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, clean tech, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, Growth in a Time of Debt, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software patent, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two and twenty, two-sided market, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, Works Progress Administration, you are the product, zero-sum game

., ‘Patient choice and private provision decreased public provision and increased inequalities in Scotland: A case study of elective hip arthroplasty', Journal of Public Health, 39(3) (2017), pp. 593-60. Kliff, S., ‘Meet Serco, the private firm getting $1.2 billion to process your Obamacare application', Washington Post, 16 July 2013: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/16/meet-serco-the-private-firm-getting-1-2-billion-to-process-your-obamacare-application/?utm_term=.33eeeadf4a01 Kokalitcheva, K., ‘Uber now has 40 million monthly riders worldwide', Fortune, 20 October 2016: http://fortune.com/2016/10/20/uber-app- riders/ Krueger, A. O., ‘The political economy of the rent-seeking society', American Economic Review, 64(3) (1974), pp. 291-303.

Other cases include failure to lock doors, poor hygiene and a reduction in staffing levels.'61 The fines, however, are minuscule in proportion to the profits made by both Serco and G4S - and such companies, rather than being penalized for carelessness and reckless cost-cutting, are being rewarded with more contracts. The applications procedures for Obamacare were outsourced in 2013 to Serco in a $1.2 billion contract.62 Indeed, US Federal government outsourcing contracts to such companies are rapidly rising. A recent GAO report shows that in 2000 contract spending was $200 billion, while in 2015 it was $438 billion.63 This amount represented almost 40 per cent of government's discretionary spending.

Crouch, The Knowledge Corrupters: Hidden Consequences of the Financial Takeover of Public Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). 61. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/15/g4s-fined-100-times-since-2010-prison-contracts 62. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/07/16/meet-serco-the-private-firm-getting-1-2-billion-to-process-your-obamacare-application/?utm_term=.0ffc214237a8 63. United States Government Accountability Office, ‘Contracting data analysis; Assessment of government-wide trends', March 2017: https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683273.pdf. 64. As reported in J. A. Sekera, The Public Economy in Crisis: A Call for a New Public Economics (Springer International Publishing, 2016); J.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

Annual borrowing costs for the United States since 2008 have hovered around 1.8 percent, thanks to an overly accommodating Fed, which allowed a dysfunctional Congress and the administration of former President Barack Obama to kick the responsibility down the road. Massive spending programs, however ill conceived, got funded with little opposition. Obamacare, anyone? According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), since 2008 federal debt held by the public has nearly doubled and now stands at 75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). If this lunacy doesn’t end, debt will be 110 percent of GDP by 2036, exceeding the post–World War II peak of 106 percent.

Fisher credited state and local governments whose tax, spending, and regulatory policies were oriented toward job creation. But the Fed continued to look at the nation’s unemployment metrics as a whole without examining what was working at the state level. In addition to businesses not knowing what the Fed was going to do, Obamacare, signed into law by the president on March 23, 2010, added another level of uncertainty, encouraging businesses to wait until the dust settled. Even before the August 2012 FOMC meeting, Bernanke began making dozens of phone calls to FOMC members to gather support for a proposal he planned to present at the September meeting.

Why, then, had the Texas economy surpassed: FRBD: Richard Fisher, “The Limits of the Powers of Central Banks (With Metaphoric References to Edvard Munch’s Scream and Sir Henry Raeburn’s The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch (speech, St. Andrews University, June 5, 2012), www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2012/fs120605.cfm. In addition to businesses: Obamacare bill: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, obamacarefacts.com/obamacarebill/. Even before the August 2012: Jon Hilsenrath, “How Bernanke Pulled the Fed His Way,” Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2012. “They have gone about their usual”: Mamta Badkar, “Stephen Roach: WSJ Report Jon Hilsenrath Is the Chairman of the Fed,” BusinessInsider.com, July 25, 2012.


pages: 138 words: 43,748

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

It was Nixon who made the mistake of hiking the capital gains tax, which had a stultifying effect on the economy, only to be corrected, interestingly enough, when Jimmy Carter signed into law a massive capital gains tax cut, which resulted in an explosion of venture capital in the late 1970s. Politics, then, is highly paradoxical. Any honest appraisal of history shows us that it is not at all a zero-sum exercise and that the battle lines are seldom drawn straight. Some of the ideas in what became known as Obamacare were conceived by scholars at the Heritage Foundation as “conservative” ideas, and even Hayek was in favor of some form of what might be called universal health care. All of which is proof that conservatives can have honest differences of opinion on policy matters, among themselves and with others—or be open to entirely new ideas—without being thought heretical.

That is the way the system once worked and is how it has worked when we are at our best. But if those might be considered examples of how the legislative process works when it works best, there are many more examples of the system at its abysmal worst. For instance, just because the deliberations over Obamacare in 2009 were a thoroughly partisan affair—and they were—does not mean that Republicans should compound the mistake by planning its repeal behind closed doors. Legislation executed without hearings and written by only one side is always a bad idea, regardless of who does it. It is, simply put, no way to do important work.


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

This is reflected by increasing alienation not only from the Republicans, who remain enormously unpopular, but increasingly from President Obama and the Democrats as well.108 According to generational chronicler and long-time Democratic activist Morley Winograd, this alienation stems in part from millennials’ experience with government, which often seems clunky and ineffective. “Millennials,” he notes, “have come to expect the speed and responsiveness from any organization they interact with that today’s high tech makes possible.” Experiences from the NSA scandal to long lines at the DMV to the botched website rollout for Obamacare, he suggests, cause “millennials to be suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, government bureaucracies.”109 Ultimately, most Americans, not only millennials, express concern about the evolving class structure, but they remain skeptical about the government’s ability to do much about it. Less than one in five Americans trusts the federal government.

Pew Charitable Trusts, Economic Mobility Project, http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-328061. 45. Richard Henderson, “Industry Employment and Output Projections to 2020,” Monthly Labor Review, vol. 135, no. 1 (January 2012): 65–83. 46. Phillip Longman and Paul S. Hewitt, “After Obamacare,” Washington Monthly, January/February 2014, p. 39. Dan Mangan, “Medical Bills Are the Biggest Cause of U.S. Bankruptcies: Study,” CNBC.com, June 25, 2013, http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148; Christina LaMontagne, “NerdWallet Health finds Medical Bankruptcy Accounts for Majority of Personal Bankruptcies,” NerdWallet, March 26, 2014, http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/2014/03/26/medical-bankruptcy. 47.

Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books,1984), pp. 14, 25. 27. Harrington, Towards a Democratic Left. 28. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, pp. 32–33, 288–89; Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 41. 29. Callahan, Fortunes of Change, p. 13; Kathy Robertson, “Obamacare Means Big Business for Lawyers,” Sacramento Business Journal, February 15, 2013; Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, “Will Law School Students Have Jobs after They Graduate?” Washington Post, October 31, 2012. 30. Chris Moody, “Washington, D.C. Area Now the Richest in the Nation,” Yahoo News, October 19, 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/washington-d-c-area-now-richest-nation-191806412.html; Chris Edwards, “Overpaid Federal Workers,” Downsizing the Federal Government (Cato Institute), August 2013, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/overpaid-federal-workers; Charles Lane, “Federal Washington Cashes in on Connections,” Washington Post, January 6, 2014. 31.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Well, it could be anything from 2.5 metres to 3.49 metres (or maybe something like 2.500 metres to 3.499 metres, depending on rounding conventions). It seems some politicians are as smart as a kid in Year 7. In the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, his White House was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, as it had been branded. When doing this through legislation proved harder than they seem to have expected, they turned to rounding. For while the ACA laid down the official guidelines for the healthcare market, the Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for writing the regulations based on the ACA.

But with money, these size units cause problems. This was the basis of a meme passed around in 2015 when Obama’s Affordable Care Act was up and running, but not without teething problems (and the ACA Marketplace insurance plans don’t all cover dental work). An easy target for criticism was the cost of setting up Obamacare. A figure of $360 million was passed around as the cost of introducing the program, which is a large amount of money: over a third of a billion dollars. So people on the right of the political spectrum looked for ways to highlight just how much money it was. And this meme was born: It is easy enough to see what is wrong here. $360 million between 317 million people is not $1 million each, it’s roughly $1 each.

I appreciate that people are far less critical when it comes to evidence which supports their political beliefs, but I’d like to believe that even the most self-affirming pieces of evidence must at least pass some rudimentary sense-check filter before being promulgated. I cling to the theory that at least the threat of public embarrassment will stop people from endorsing patently implausible claims. Part of me cannot be convinced that anyone arguing for this Obamacare meme is not a troll and in it for the lulz. But to give them the benefit of the doubt, let’s try to work out why this false assertion was so tenacious. My favourite version of this argument online has the protagonist back up the claim that $360 million divided by 317 million people is a million dollars each (with cash to spare) by breaking it down like this: There are 317 people and you have 360 chairs.


pages: 441 words: 124,798

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

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

“It was like we had a Dementor from Harry Potter”: Author interview, Jamie Waldrop, Nov. 6, 2017. a former pro baseball player who’d progressed: Author interviews, Terrence Engles, Jan. 4, 2016, and subsequent interviews. “RomneyCare”: Kenneth Rapoza, “If ObamaCare Is So Bad, How Does RomneyCare Survive?,” Forbes, Jan. 20, 2012. sacrificing $6.6 million a day in federal funds: “McAuliffe Pushes Virginia Medicaid expansion After GOP’s Failure to Repeal Obamacare,” CNN Wire, March 27, 2017. Republican House of Delegates speaker William Howell claimed an expansion would take state resources from education, transportation, and public safety, even though 90 percent of the bill would be footed by the federal government.

Tess and Joey compared notes about dopesickness and black-market Subs (Suboxone or Subutex). They’d arranged to meet once to trade Xanax for crystal meth. Joey had had earlier success with the monthly naltrexone shot, Vivitrol, which is expensive but also impossible to abuse or to divert. Among the thirty-one states that had then expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, some improved access to naltrexone, even giving Vivitrol shots to people before they left prisons and jails, since they understood that addicted users were most vulnerable to overdose death just following a period of nonuse, when tolerance is low. But Joey lost access to the shot when she turned twenty-six and was no longer on her father’s insurance.

Republican House of Delegates speaker William Howell claimed an expansion would take state resources from education, transportation, and public safety, even though 90 percent of the bill would be footed by the federal government. In states where Medicaid expansions were passed: Noam N. Levey, “Tens of Thousands Died Due to an Opioid Addiction Last Year. With an Obamacare Repeal, Some Fear the Number Will Rise,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2017. It gave coverage to an additional 1.3 million: Sally Satel, “Taking On the Scourge of Opioids,” National Affairs, Summer 2017: 21. political plot that seemed lifted from: Laura Vozzella, “Virginia Democratic Senator Puckett to Resign, Possibly Dooming Push to Expand Medicaid,” Washington Post, June 8, 2014. Political wrangling for favors: Jeff Schapiro, “McAuliffe, Others Pressed Puckett to Stay,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 10, 2014.


Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, altcoin, anti-fragile, bank run, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, driverless car, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, informal economy, invisible hand, Kickstarter, litecoin, Lyft, Money creation, obamacare, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, public intellectual, QR code, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, the payments system, uber lyft

Entrepreneurs are already experimenting with an Uber model of delivering some form of healthcare online. In some areas, they will bring a nurse to you to give you a flu shot. Other health services are on the way, causing some to speculate on the return to at-home medical visits paid out of pocket (rather than via insurance). 7 What does this innovation do for centralist solutions like Obamacare? It changes the entire dynamic of service provision. The medical establishment is already protesting that this consumer-based, one-off service approach runs contrary to primary and preventive care—a critique that fails to consider that there is no reason why P2P technology can’t provide such care.

The producer-consumer relationship is direct, or, at least, much more so than in the past. Anyone can be a news broadcaster. If you don’t like what that news broadcaster is saying, you can make a response news broadcast and post it right where it can be seen by the same people. We can safely predict that under Obamacare, P2P relationships in health-care provision are going to become more common. With insurers under ridiculous amounts of pressure to provide every conceivable service at controlled prices, service is going to decline, giving rise to direct fiduciary relationships between patients and caregivers. We are going to be cooperating directly.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Popular culture and contemporary politics have more or less institutionalized an ascendant model of citizenship quite unlike that once seen as based on the autonomous family—at least in terms of the middle-class college educated. Take the example of a popular political ad of 2010 designed to sell the Affordable Care Act to the general public. The poster boy for the campaign was not analogous to the American Gothic married couple. The iconic advocate became known as “Pajama Boy.” As the Obamacare promoter, a young man in thick, black retro-rimmed glasses was supposed to win our empathy. He appeared confident and self-aware. Yet he was wearing black-and-red-plaid children’s-style pajamas, sipping from a mug, with an all-knowing expression of seasoned certainty on his face. The visual was accompanied by text urging, “Wear pajamas.

The ad was an inadvertent confirmation of philosophical warnings from Juvenal to Tocqueville about the connection between government subsidies and the creation of perpetual puerility and dependency. His snark “get talking” suggested a strained adult confidence betrayed by the pajamas of his prolonged adolescence. The point, then, is that our elites who sought to sell Obamacare apparently think they best do just that by focusing on a new sort of young ascendant American. They envision the novel American archetype now as a single, urban youth. He is a new hip postcitizen who in truth is an age-old precitizen. He is presumably well educated and glib but dependent on government subsidies and suffering arrested development.

There is no mention that at the time of the ad, students were collectively well over $1 trillion in debt and often without marketable college degrees.24 In 2012, we are additionally advised, the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (and certainly not a booming private sector short of labor) mostly enabled Julia to find work. Though unmarried, Julia has one child—but no health care worries thanks to the Obamacare effort to collectivize medicine. There is no mention that the absence of a two-parent household puts enormous strain on child raising, not to mention child development itself. Did the father of her child contribute to the latter’s livelihood? In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow Julia to find security, comfort, and the time and wherewithal to volunteer for a communal urban garden—apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

It is Congress that writes the tax laws. It’s Congress that adds hundreds of new exemptions, allowances, credits, and calculations to the tax code every year. It was Congress that decided to give the IRS responsibility for managing the health insurance subsidies flowing to millions of Americans under the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare)—and then cut the agency’s staff after assigning it this major new task. It was Congress that assigned to the IRS the management of the earned income tax credit (EITC), which has become one of the nation’s largest support programs for low-income Americans. It was Congress that crafted the much-hated alternative minimum tax, which spawned whole new dimensions of complexity, and hours of additional work, for millions of families.

The whole thing is so complicated that the error rate is 27%, which means one out of four filers, and the IRS, have to spend even more time trying to get it right. This has prompted a mini-industry of tax fraud, with shysters going door-to-door in low-rent neighborhoods offering to fill out the EITC forms (for a fee, of course) whether the client actually qualifies or not. Similarly, the tax credits for people buying health insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges are generally aimed at low-income taxpayers and are also ridiculously complicated. There’s another significant cost as well to all this complexity. A tax code so byzantine that people can’t understand how much they have to pay badly undermines the spirit of voluntary payment that is essential to a successful tax regime.

The most fully developed was a classic value-added tax put forth by the Texas senator Ted Cruz, who offered himself as the most conservative of all the sixteen Republican hopefuls. Cruz, of course, did not use the tainted words “value-added tax.” He called his plan, alternately, the “simple flat tax” or the “16% business flat tax” (BFT). He promised that his new tax would eliminate the corporate income tax, the estate and gift tax, the ObamaCare taxes, and the payroll taxes that pay for Social Security and Medicare (“while maintaining full funding for Social Security and Medicare”). He insisted that his plan would allow Washington to set everybody’s personal income tax rate at 10%—a major tax cut for most Americans—while maintaining the tax deductions Americans like best.


The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers (Wiley Finance) by Feng Gu

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, carbon tax, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Great Moderation, value at risk

MITIGATE ACCOUNTING COMPLEXITY Here is the Lev-Gu law of the dynamics of regulation: Regulatory systems strive to be even more complex than the structures or institutions they were charged to regulate. A race to the bottom, so to speak. If you doubt the universality of our law, think of the 1,990 pages of the original 2009 Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare), ballooning to about 20,000 pages four years later,31 or the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, originally at 848 pages, and mushrooming to 13,789 pages as of July 2013 (and still going strong—the length, we mean).32 And not only in America: No regulatory agency rivals the European Union in scope, intrusion, and complexity of regulation.

He proposed providing a triple-column income statement: a column informing on fact-based revenues and expenses, a second to summarize the estimates in revenues and expenses, and a “totals” column, identical to today’s income statement (see Yuji Ijiri, Cash Is a Fact, but Income Is a Forecast, working paper (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, 2002)). No doubt, such a clear separation of facts from estimates will be highly informative to investors. 31. The 1,990-page number is from Computational Legal Studies, November 8, 2009. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC.) speaking on “Fox and Friends” on May 13, 2013, said: “Implementation [of Obamacare] has also become a bureaucratic nightmare, with some 159 new government agencies, boards, and programs busily enforcing the 20,000 pages of rules and regulations already associated with this law.” 32. Joe Mont, “Three Years in, Dodd-Frank Deadlines Missed as Page Count Rises,” Compliance Week (July 22, 2013). 33.

AARP members, impact 149 Acceleration (operations) 7 Accounting 31–32 advocacy 240 bottom line 116–117 complexity 61 fighting 223–224 mitigation 221–222 reasons 222 complication 61–62 contribution, trivialization 46–47 decline 81 defense 70 estimates domination 95–96 impact 98–100 increase 100–101 problems 79 proliferation, reversal 219–221 reliability, enhancement 98 events 105–107 expenses, breakdown (usage) 175–176 facts 94 absence 79 fairness 35–36 fault 50 fiction 94 graveyards 86 impact, intention 17–18 information (usefulness loss), investor interest 68–70 link, absence 104–105 losses 57–58 procedures, structure (impact) 35 recognition, delay 105–106 records, triggers 79–80 reform agenda 213 regulations, proliferation 56–57 relevance decrease 37, 41, 89f loss 88–90 reporting, direction (change) 214 revitalization 213–214 ROE 22 rules, change (demand) 90 Strategic Resources & Consequences Report issue 197 treatment. See Intangible assets. uncertainty/vagueness, example 94–95 usefulness, quest 62 Accounts receivable 96 Acquired intangibles, certainty 84 Adjusted coefficient of variation (R2 ) 33, 89, 108 Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) 221 Agent-driven policies 152 Agents, importance 152–153 All-in sustaining costs (AISC) 204 Allstate advertising campaign 155 Drive Wise car device 152 online customers 156 rate-increasing policy 151 Alphabet (Google) 120 Amazon, patents 78 247 248 Ambiguity, increase 68–69 American Airlines, balance sheet 87 Amgen, Inc. market share data, inconsistency 169 sales 169 Amortization 95 estimate 79 Analyst forecasts 45, 46f performance-related information source 44 release 46–47 Analysts ambiguity, increase 64f guidance 15–17 impact 62 pipeline questions, Pfizer response 200–201 pipeline-related questions, number/percentage 202f questions 114–115 Annual earnings releases 44 Annual report, extensiveness 5 Apple brand, value 234 car streaming market 140 patents 78 problem 90 Arm’s-length transactions 83–84 Assets amortization 216–217 conceptual assets 82 deployment, outcomes 125 fair valuation 37–38 fair values 61 obsolescence 124 real assets 82 recognition 78 treatment (intangible assets) 214–217 write-downs 109 write-offs 37, 97 AstraZeneca 166 Actavis acquisition 164 drug extension 174 stock price loss 104–105 Auden McKenzie 164 SUBJECT INDEX Bad debt expense 220 Bad-debt reserve 79 Balance sheet 4, 5 corporate balance sheets, recognition 78 distortion 37 usage 7 Bayer, brand (value) 234 Berkshire Hathaway 153 Beta tests 105 Biotech, Strategic Resources & Consequences Report 163 Blackberry patents, problem 90 Blue Book 97 Boeing, innovation strategies 85 Book-to-bill ratio 204 Book value impact 31f investor usage 32–33 problems 34–35 regression 89f relevance-loss 34–35 share 35f Book value of equity (BV) 38 Bottom line 116–117 Brands 234 creation 134 development 153 enhancement 175 British Petroleum (BP) household name 180 problems 189 Buffett, Warren 37, 53, 97, 153 Build-to-order business model 232 Businesses enterprises evolution 53 long-term objective 119–120 failure 90 fundamentals 58 organization, change 6–7 processes 78, 83 IT support 122–123 volatility, decrease 71–73 BV.


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

The average American adult: Lydia Saad, “The ‘40-Hour’ Workweek Is Actually Longer—by Seven Hours,” Gallup News, August 29, 2014, http://news.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx. the number of part-timers working: Ben Casselman, “Yes, Some Companies Are Cutting Hours in Response to ‘Obamacare,’” FiveThirtyEight, January 13, 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/yes-some-companies-are-cutting-hours-in-response-to-obamacare/. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: “Employment Projections,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, D.C., https://data.bls.gov/projections/occupationProj. one such company, Kid Care Concierge: Kid Care Concierge, http://kidcareconcierge.com/.

Beyond a broad allowance for families, the elemental solution would be high-quality, across-the-board, way-better-subsidized day care. For families headed by one parent or where parents both work, the need for a day-care system is clear—something akin in philosophy and reach to the much-embattled Obamacare—for the adequate nurturance of children across our land. That decent child care is currently a sign of social privilege is simply outrageous. Broad-based, accessible, adequately subsidized day care would also make the lives of day-care workers like those you’ve met in Squeezed more secure as well; the women earning their livings in the child-care field are usually subsisting in dedicated poverty.


pages: 348 words: 99,383

The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism Is the World Economy's Only Hope by John A. Allison

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, life extension, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, obamacare, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk/return, Robert Shiller, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, yield curve, zero-sum game

Medicare and Medicaid are much bigger problems than social security. Unless there are changes, the cost of Medicare and Medicaid will consume our total GNP by 2050. The system will have to be fixed. The new healthcare program (Obamacare) only aggravates the problems in the system by promoting more healthcare demand and spending while curbing incentives for the providers of healthcare. I will not offer a diagnosis of Obamacare except to state that, as designed, it is mathematically certain to fail.5 It creates massive incentives for private employers to push their employees onto the government program. It will increase, not decrease, cost.

For further analysis and a well-thought-out plan for privatizing social security by two long-term experts, see Peter Ferrara and Michael Tanner, A New Deal for Social Security (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998). 5. For a detailed examination and critique of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), see Michael tanner, Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2011). 6. See, for example, Brian Riedl, “A Guide to Fixing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder #2114, March 2008, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/03/a-guide-to-fixing-social-security-medicare-and-medicaid. 7.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

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

The first step to correcting false beliefs is opening people’s minds to the idea that they and their community might have the science wrong. No one wants to be wrong. NINE Thinking About Politics Few recent issues have excited Americans (and American political candidates) as much as the Affordable Care Act (more familiar as Obamacare) that became law in 2010. This law has been the subject of numerous debates and served as one of the pillars of the Republican attack on Barack Obama’s presidency. The Republicans in Congress voted multiple times to repeal or change the law. Yet, even though it has engendered much excitement and posturing on both sides, few people actually understand the law.

Americans talk about the Eisenhower administration or the Kennedy administration as if the president of the United States personally carries out all the functions of the executive branch of government. The Affordable Care Act runs to about 20,000 or so pages of legalese. It is commonly referred to as Obamacare. How much of it do you think Barack Obama himself wrote? Our guess is none. Our presidents may or may not be great leaders, but they are definitely human beings. It is certainly fair to hold them responsible for the actions of their administrations, but not because they actually performed those actions.

See artificial intelligence (AI) machines and widgets problem from Cognitive Reflection Test, 82 The Matrix (film), 261 McGaugh, James, 38 McHargue, Mike (“Science Mike”), 160–62 McKenzie, Craig, 235 mechanical adjustments, difficulty making, 70–71 mechanic example of education’s purpose, 219–20 medical information example of accessible knowledge, 125 memory AJ (memory case study), 38–40, 96 estimating the size of human, 25–26 “Funes the Memorious” (Borges), 37–39 hyperthymesia, 38–40, 47–48, 96 storing details, downside of, 47–48 Mendeleev, Dmitri, 199–200 military strategy example of complexity, 32–33 mind location of the, 101–05 watering can handle example, 101–02 Minsky, Marvin, 86 modus ponens reasoning, 54, 58 moral dumbfounding, 181–82 moving text window example of human cognition, 93–95 Ms. Y’s lethargy example of causal reasoning, 59–61 Musk, Elon, 141 natural world example of complexity, 29–31 Newton, Isaac, 69–70 nudges, behavioral, 248–49 Nyhan, Brendan, 159 Obama, Barack, 197 Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act On Motion (Galilei), 66 opposition to science and technology Bodmer Report, 156–59 food irradiation, 167–68 genetically modified organisms (GMOs), 155, 165–67 vaccination, 155–56 optic flow, 98–100 bee example, 100 doorway example, 99–100 highway lines example, 99 wheat field example, 98–99 organ donation example of libertarian paternalism, 248–49 ox’s weight example of crowdsourcing, 148 Pallokerho-35 Finnish soccer club example of crowdsourcing, 148 Parker, Elizabeth, 38 Pavlov, Ivan, 50 perception, 46–47 Perkins, David, 222 phobias, 104 physics curving bullets example, 69–70 Newton’s laws of motion, 69–70 placeholders, knowledge, 125–26 plants vs. animals, 40–42.


pages: 197 words: 49,240

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders by Reihan Salam

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bonfire of the Vanities, charter city, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, gentrification, ghettoisation, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, megacity, new economy, obamacare, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, two tier labour market, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor

Just under one third (32 percent) of unauthorized immigrant adults lived in families below the poverty level, and 62 percent lived in families earning less than 200 percent of the poverty level. Only 14 percent lived in families earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, the cutoff for Obamacare subsidies. A narrow 51 percent majority of unauthorized children lived in families earning less than the federal poverty level, 78 percent lived in families earning less than 200 percent of the poverty level, and only 8 percent lived in families earning more than 400 percent. This is despite the fact that employment among unauthorized immigrants is high: 79 percent of men and 48 percent of women were employed in 2011.23 This makes for a total of just under 7.25 million unauthorized laborers in the U.S. workforce, a figure that doesn’t include those who do informal work.

., 138–39 U.S. retirees in, 135–38 midcentury America, 16–17, 79, 80 middle-class melting pot, 26–29 migrant worker programs, 58–60, 98–99, 111–14 minimum wage, 47–48, 97, 107 model minority illusion, 38–44 monogenerational immigration systems, 57–61, 102 multigenerational immigration systems, 57–61 Muslim immigrants, 3–4, 89–90 Napoleonic Wars, 73 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), 53–55, 56 National Affairs, 162 nativism, 91, 105 naturalization, 23 New Deal, 14, 16–17, 80 New York City attempted bombing of 2017, 2–3, 4, 6–7 author’s immigrant story, 63–64, 67–68, 75–76 Bangladeshi community, 64, 74–78 civil unrest in, 181–82 New York Times, The, 61 New York University, 121 Nigeria per capita income, 132–33 population growth, 140 “non-zero-sum mobility,” 79 Northwestern University, 52 Obama, Barack, 9–11, 49 Obamacare, 174 offshoring, 12–13, 94–96, 102–7, 123, 135 of caregiving, 137–38 South Korean model, 103–4 virtual immigration, 148–50 Okun, Arthur, 118 open border advocates, 4–5, 8–11, 84, 113, 115, 188. See also immigration advocates open borders immigration policies, 59, 108–9 open vs. closed borders, 11 Page, Marianne, 178 parental leave, 47 people smuggling, 82, 134 per capita income, 131–33 Perdue, David, 169 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, 50–51 Peters, Margaret E., 105 Pethokoukis, James, 117 “place discount,” 149 points-based immigration system, 4, 169–73 population growth, 140–41 Posner, Eric, 113–14, 128, 162, 171 Postel, Hannah, 111–12 postwar America, 16–17, 79, 80 poverty rates, 22–25, 34, 35–36, 43 presidential election of 2016, 90–91, 157–58, 159–60 Princeton University, 168 Pritchett, Lant, 108–9, 111, 113 productivity, 28, 80, 96, 156 progressive tax code, 55–56 pro-immigration advocates.


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

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

(In case you’re wondering: in the event of a “potentially uncontained military conflict in which the global superpowers get involved,” the yield curve on Eurobonds would “likely flatten due to weaker risk appetite.”)12 Because this is so contrary to our nature, eventually even the U.S. political system will work its way back to some kind of balance. The Koch brothers may well have hit their zenith. Political scientists crunching the polling data said that the Kochs’ two signature laws (the attempted repeal of Obamacare and the successful tax “reform” package) were the “most unpopular pieces of major domestic legislation of the past quarter-century,” the journalist Michael Tomasky points out. Of the nine most popular recent laws, he observes, “eight pursued what could broadly be defined as liberal goals, like gun control and environmental protection.”13 For the last few years, America’s most liked politician, by far, has been a socialist, Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on the antilibertarian slogan “Not Me, Us,” and who holds up Scandinavia as a model.

Millennia after they’ve lost the ideological fights, the sea level will still be rising. They’ve scrawled their names into geological history, ugly graffiti that scientists will be deciphering millions of years into the future (assuming there are scientists). Many of the same people managed to cripple Obamacare, too, which is a tragedy—it means lots of people will suffer unnecessarily and die. But when eventually our politics escapes their grip, it won’t be impossible to build a health care system like those in all the other nations of the world. Climate change is different. Once the Arctic melts, there’s no way to freeze it back up again, not in human time.

Koch, Mary Koch, William “Bill” Kodas, Michael Kona Korea Krueger, Alan Kumkum Bhagya (soap opera) Kurzweil, Fredric Kurzweil, Ray Kyoto Protocol labor law labor unions Lahore, Pakistan laissez-faire Lanier, Jaron Las Vegas lead poisoning Leap Manifesto Lear, Norman Leary, Timothy Lee, Kai-fu LeFevre, Robert leukemia leverage Lewis, Seko Serge Lexington, Battle of libertarianism Libertarian Party life expectancy lightning strikes limestone limits Limits to Growth, The (Meadows) Lindbergh, Charles lobster fisheries Locklear, Samuel Lomé, Togo London Los Angeles Los Angeles Times Louisiana Lovelock, James Lowndes County, Alabama Luntz, Frank Lyme disease Machine Intelligence Research Institute MacLean, Nancy Maduro malaria Mallory, George Maltese Falcon (yacht) Mann, Michael Manson, Charles manufacturing MAOA gene variant marine species Maris, Bill markets marlin Mars Marsh, George Perkins Marshall Islands mass extinctions Matchright maturity Mauryan Empire Mayans Mayer, Jane McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index McCain, John Medicaid Medicare Megafire (Kodas) Mehlman, Maxwell Mekong Delta meltwater pulse 1A Mercer, Robert Merkle, Ralph Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge methane Mexico Miami Beach Microsoft migration Mill, John Stuart Miller, Dean Milner, Yuri Milosevic, Slobodan Minsky, Marvin Mises, Ludwig von Mississippi Delta MIT Technology Review Mongolia Monsanto Montgomery Bus Boycott Mont Pelerin movement Montreal Montreal Protocol More, Max mortality Moses, Robert Mount Kenya MSTN gene Muir, John Mumbai Murdoch, Rupert Musk, Elon Nabokov, Vladimir nanobot blood cells National Academy of Medicine National Academy of Sciences National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Cancer Institute National Coal Association National Energy Policy Act (proposed) National Geographic National Governors Association National Journal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) national parks and monuments Native Americans natural gas Nature Nawabshah, Pakistan Nazi Germany Nectome neoliberalism Neolithic period Nepal Netherlands New Deal NewsCorp New York New Yorker New York Times Magazine Nietzsche, Friedrich Niviana, Aka Nixon, Richard Nokia nonviolence North America North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) North Carolina North Korea Norway Novartis nuclear power Nuclear Test Ban Treaty nuclear weapons nutrition Obama, Barack Obamacare Objectivist oceans. See also sea ice; sea level rise; acidification of carbon absorbed by dead zones in oxygen production in plastic waste in warming of Octopus (yacht) Off-Grid Electric Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy oil oil and gas industry climate change research and ideology and leverage and methane leaks and Paris accords and Oklahoma Olduvai Gorge Oman Omohundro, Stephen M.


pages: 320 words: 97,509

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, delayed gratification, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, medical malpractice, moral hazard, obamacare, PalmPilot, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, source of truth, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra

There are many downsides to having too many doctors on a case. Specialists’ recommendations are often at cross-purposes. The kidney doctor advises “careful hydration”; the cardiologist, discontinuation of intravenous fluid. Because specialists aren’t paid to confer with one another or coordinate care—at least as of this writing; Obamacare is looking to put into place payment systems that will do just this—they often leave primary attendings without a clear direction as to what to do. More important, patients don’t always require specialists. Patients often have “overlap syndromes” (we used to call it aging), which cannot be compartmentalized into individual problems and are probably best managed by a good general physician.

Another option is to use bundled payments. A major driver of overutilization is that doctors are paid piecework. There is less of an incentive to increase volume if payments are packaged (e.g., for an entire hospitalization) rather than discrete for every service. Yet another possibility is “accountable care organizations” advanced by Obamacare, in which teams of doctors would be responsible (and paid accordingly) for their patients’ clinical outcomes. Of course, such a scheme would force doctors to work together and to coordinate care. Unfortunately, most doctors, notoriously independent and already smothered in paperwork, have generally performed poorly in this regard.

Another said, speaking for many in private practice who stand to lose the most from policy proposals to restrict fee-for-service and encourage greater use of nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants to do what was formerly doctors’ work, “We look forward to a future of a fully implemented Obamacare where physicians are but meaningless pawns in the hands of those who are pushing this absurd social experiment.” Such irrational anger, the almost operatic self-pity, has become commonplace. I encountered it countless times those first few years at LIJ. Colleagues would complain: We are not being allowed to work in a market economy.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Partisan politics has played a role in this disaster. When someone who has lost their job needed healthcare, a recourse was supposed to be Obamacare. Unfortunately, many Republican states like Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Nebraska decided to make a show of resisting the federal government by denying their citizens this option. This pushed some people to apply for disability status in order to get healthcare. Indeed, after the adoption of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), disability claims increased by 1 percent in states that refused to expand Medicaid, while they decreased by 3 percent in expansion states.55 But the causes run deeper.

Mayawati, the leader of one of those parties, decided to rebrand herself as the leader of all poor people, including poor upper castes, and won the 2007 Uttar Pradesh state elections on that basis. She went for broad inclusivity, not narrow sectarianism. More recently, in the United States we are struck by the curious history of the once much hated Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. As the signal policy initiative of the much despised black Kenyan Muslim Barack Obama, it was something that many Republican governors refused to have anything to do with, and many refused federal subsidies to expand Medicaid, a key mechanism to extend health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

In a recent experiment in Pakistan, providing a bit more flexibility to the procurement officers of hospitals and schools by giving them some free cash to spend on basic supplies greatly improved their ability to negotiate low prices, leading to big savings for the government.26 Putting too many constraints on government officials and government contracts can discourage talent when it is the most needed. Despite the fact that the United States is the world leader in computing, none of the big tech firms chose to bid on contracts to set up the computer system supporting Obamacare. The reason was apparently that there were so many boxes to check off to be a government contractor that very few firms were willing to do it. The Federal Acquisition Regulation has eighteen hundred pages. So, in order to win a government contract, it is more important to be good at paperwork than to be able to do the job.27 In the development world, the contractors that systematically bid for and win the USAID contracts are known as “Beltway bandits.”


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Clinton and his allies,” a Times analysis explained in 1994, “were trying hard to redefine the Democratic Party away from traditionally liberal approaches to domestic policy; they were almost inevitably drawn to the ideas of managed competition. Though still largely theoretical, the concept relies on market forces, not government, to hold down costs and expand access to health insurance.” That is, Clinton tried and failed to pass a version of Obamacare sixteen years before Obama succeeded. One of the many congressional committees that held hearings on the Clinton healthcare plan was Senate Finance, chaired by Moynihan. His chief of staff was Lawrence O’Donnell, who later became an MSNBC anchor. “At the end of the last of two dozen hearings on the indescribably complex Clinton healthcare bill,” O’Donnell told me, “I’m sitting behind Chairman Moynihan, and he puts his hand over his microphone and turns over his shoulder and whispers to me, ‘Why don’t we just delete the words ‘age 65’ from the Medicare statute?’ 

“It took twenty-four hearings studying every detail of healthcare policy for him to arrive there. He was a very careful juror who waited until he heard every word of testimony. It was literally while the last witness was finishing that he gave me his verdict. He hated unnecessary government complexity,” and the Clinton plan, O’Donnell says, was complex and hard to explain (as Obamacare would be as well). Also, Moynihan “could see the ‘reform’ policies” proposed by Clinton would “not perform as promised.” As these hearings and negotiations went on for the first eighteen months of the Clinton administration, Democrats had large majorities in both the Senate and House. The main labor union federation, the AFL-CIO, had broached the idea of a single-payer healthcare system.

Even though the new law wouldn’t go into effect for four years—and would enable 20 million more Americans to have health coverage, nearly half of them as new customers of private insurance companies—the political operation nevertheless convinced millions of Americans to be frightened of the prospect, to hate Obamacare. That project was helped, as if providentially, by a signature success of the right’s judicial long game: at the beginning of the year, the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, effectively prohibiting serious election finance laws and giving big business (and unions, as if) free rein to spend money on campaigns.* And in that fall of 2010, Democrats lost their large majorities in both the Senate and House.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

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

See Chapter Twelve for further discussion; see also Rebecca Vallas, Shawn Fremstad, and Lisa Eckman, A Fair Shot for Workers with Disabilities (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, January 2015), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2015/01/28/105520/a-fair-shot-for-workers-with-disabilities/. 30. Gene Sperling, “If You Like Choice, Competition, and Entrepreneurship, You Should Like Obamacare,” Forbes, March 28, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/03/28/if-you-like-choice-competition-and-entrepreneurship-you-should-like-obamacare/. 31. Linda J. Blumberg, Sabrina Corlette, and Kevin Lucia, “The Affordable Care Act: Improving Incentives for Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment,” Timely Analysis of Immediate Health Policy Issues (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, May 2013), 1, https://www.urban.org/research/publication/affordable-care-act-improving-incentives-entrepreneurship-and-self-employment. 32.

Matt Broaddus and Edwin Park, “Affordable Care Act Has Produced Historic Gains in Health Coverage,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, December 15, 2016, https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/affordable-care-act-has-produced-historic-gains-in-health-coverage. 18. Robert Pear, “Marco Rubio Quietly Undermines Affordable Care Act,” New York Times, December 9, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/us/politics/marco-rubio-obamacare-affordable-care-act.html. 19. Paul Ryan famously warned that low-income workers face marginal tax rates of 80 or 90 percent from taxes and loss of benefits. Paul Ryan, “#ConfidentAmerica: Speaker Ryan’s Address at the Library of Congress,” streamed live December 3, 2015, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

United States, 72, 116 Norway, GDP, 5 Nozick, Robert, 224, 340n Nussbaum, Martha, 44 Obama, Barack (Obama Administration), 85 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, 221, 266–67 Auto Task Force, 137–38, 139–40 combating discrimination against long-term unemployed, 52–53, 213 Clean Power Plan, 141 Cummings’s funeral eulogy, 224 Executive Order 13563, 135 expansion of EITC, 160 gainful employment regulations, 113–14 international tax policy, 124 mortgage forbearance, 132, 137 proposal related to UBI to Rise, 143 Sperling as national economic adviser, xiii–xiv, xix, 37–38, 39–40, 52–53, 132, 143, 213, 250, 290 State of the Union address (2014), 46 Obama, Michelle, 214 Obamacare. See Affordable Care Act Obergefell v. Hodges, 18 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 103 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 71, 73, 74–75, 235 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), 35, 50, 96, 121, 129, 132, 183–84, 198, 249, 285 offshoring, 128, 139–41, 295 oil, 5, 71–72, 116 Oldham, Greg, 226–27 Oliver, John, 238 Oman–United States Free Trade Agreement, 123 On the Clock (Guendelsberger), 236–37 opioid addictions, 60, 61, 96, 206, 315n Opportunity@Work, 284 Oreopoulos, Philip, 273 Orszag, Peter, 9, 247 Osterman, Paul, 283 Oxfam, 80, 81, 249 paid family and medical leave, 34–37, 96, 310n Palladino, Lenore, 119, 121 Parks, Rosa, xviii patents, 98–99, 124 “pattern bargaining,” 253–54 Paul, Rand, 93 Paycheck, Johnny, 243–44 payday lending, 84–85 Pell Grants, 54, 55, 111, 275 Pelosi, Nancy, 166, 179 Pepsi, 263 Perkins, Frances, 69–71, 158 personal bankruptcies, 9, 49–50 personal care aides, 217–20 pesticide use, 76 Petersen, Anne Helen, 238 Petronijevic, Uros, 273 Philippon, Thomas, 115 Phillips curve, 266–67 Piche-Lichtman, Michelle, 92–93 Pinto, Sergio, 60 Pisano, Gary, 140 Pittston Coal strike, 68 Platform to Employment (P2E), 213–14 Pollock v.


pages: 31 words: 7,670

Why America Must Not Follow Europe by Daniel Hannan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, carbon tax, mass immigration, obamacare, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Upton Sinclair

Europe is falling further and further behind, sustaining its living standards by borrowing, dwindling as a force in the world. The U.S., which has expanded its federal government by 30 percent since 2008, seems determined to duplicate that error. REPEALING STATE HEALTH CARE: IF IT WERE DONE WHEN ’TIS DONE, THEN ’TWERE WELL IT WERE DONE QUICKLY Once ObamaCare takes hold, it won’t easily be undone. The moment politicians become responsible for treating the sick, it becomes almost impossible to suggest any significant overhaul of the system – or indeed, any reduction in the budget. I can best demonstrate this phenomenon with a personal recollection. In August 2009, I was asked on Fox News whether I’d recommend the British health care model to Americans.


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

The United States is famously resistant to anything smacking of redistribution. Yet it allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow. The most recent expansions are a prescription drug benefit introduced by George W. Bush and the eponymous health insurance plan known as Obamacare introduced by his successor. Indeed, social spending in the United States is even higher than it appears, because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government. When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.34 For all their protestations against big government and high taxes, people like social spending.

Social Security has been called the third rail of American politics, because if politicians touch it they die. According to legend, an irate constituent at a town-hall meeting warned his representative, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” (referring to the government health insurance program for seniors).35 No sooner did Obamacare pass than the Republican Party made it a sacred cause to repeal it, but each of their assaults on it after gaining control of the presidency in 2017 was beaten back by angry citizens at town-hall meetings and legislators afraid of their ire. In Canada the top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their health care system and boasting about their health care system.

Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.91 Though we think we understand how a zipper works, or a cylinder lock, or a toilet, as soon as we are called upon to explain it we are dumbfounded and forced to confess we have no idea. That is also true of hot-button political issues. When people with die-hard opinions on Obamacare or NAFTA are challenged to explain what those policies actually are, they soon realize that they don’t know what they are talking about, and become more open to counterarguments. Perhaps most important, people are less biased when they have skin in the game and have to live with the consequences of their opinions.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

The net to the worker is the same, and an inefficient pretense of private salaries and public taxation is eliminated. Schumpeter’s suggestion has found new life in policy proposals for a Basic Guaranteed Income championed in various forms by Bernie Sanders on the left and Charles Murray on the right. The expansion of food stamps, disability payments, Obamacare, Medicare, and the earned income credit are all forms of government income maintenance, evidence of a movement toward true socialism. Schumpeter said democracy was not an ideology in which the will of the people was fulfilled. Instead it was a process by which elites competed for leadership roles.

Fascism is above all belief in the state rather than God or the individual as a source of authority and normative conduct. The fascist project is ratchet-like; it does not always move, but when it does it cannot be reversed. There are long periods like the 1920s and 1980s when the progressive-neofascist project makes little headway. Still, when fascism breaks through as with the New Deal, the Great Society, and Obamacare, the changes are here to stay. Each breakthrough enhances state power at liberty’s expense. Dependency is increased at the expense of self-reliance. Americans barely notice. Fascism’s advance is often aided by a crisis; an application of shock doctrine. Wilson’s authoritarian tendencies were empowered by the First World War.

In a fascist system, a Faustian bargain is struck between big business and big government. Fascists are perfectly willing to allow private companies and private property to exist. They are unwilling to allow private realms to stand in the way of state power. Hospitals and health insurers may be private enterprises, but their products, prices, and policies are controlled by Obamacare. Google, Twitter, and Apple may be private companies, but Internet access and fees are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, an agency established in 1933 by FDR, almost sixty years before the World Wide Web was launched. Banks are private entities, but are highly regulated under Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve Act, and a litany of other statutes.


pages: 201 words: 62,452

Calypso by David Sedaris

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, obamacare

She started explaining what had taken her from North Carolina to Central America, but then the flight attendant came to take a drink order from the guy next to me, and I missed it. Just as I was tuning back in, a man across the aisle tried to open his overhead bin. It was stuck for some reason and he pounded on it, saying to anyone who would listen, “This is like Obamacare: broken.” Several of the passengers around me laughed, and I noted their faces, vowing that in the event of a crisis, I would not help lead them to an emergency exit. You people are on your own, I thought, knowing that if anything bad did happen, it would likely be one of them who’d save me. It would be just my luck.

We could see them in their kitchens and family rooms, watching TV or standing before open refrigerators. They were white, for the most part, and conservative, the sort of people we’d grown up with at the country club, the kind who’d have sat in the front of the plane and laughed when the man across the aisle compared his broken overhead bin to Obamacare. That said, we could have knocked on any of these doors, explained our situation, and received help. “These folks have a house but don’t know which one it is!” I could imagine a homeowner shouting over his shoulder into the next room. “Remember when that happened to us?” It’s silly, but after a while I started to panic, thinking, I guess, that we could die out there.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Perhaps Roberts was not willing to go along again with such an aggressive approach in another highly politically charged case that threatened to undermine his stated desire for a legacy as a minimalist who kept the court out of politics.2 AT THE IOWA STATE FAIR SOAPBOX, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MITT ROMNEY SAID, “CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, MY FRIEND.” There was, however, one legal challenge to a smaller piece of Obamacare that succeeded, and it involved the rights of corporations. Hobby Lobby Stores, Incorporated, a national chain of craft stores with over 23,000 employees, filed suit against an Obamacare regulation that required large employers to include birth control in their employees’ health insurance plans. The owners of Hobby Lobby, David and Barbara Green and their three children, were Evangelical Christians who believed some of the mandated forms of birth control caused abortion, which the Greens opposed on religious grounds.

They called corporations “people,” yet pierced the corporate veil, looking right through the corporate form to base the decision on the rights of the corporations’ members. The centerpiece of Romney’s presidential campaign was a promise to repeal and replace President Obama’s signature legislation: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Popularly known as “Obamacare,” the healthcare law triggered a wave of legal challenges, including a historic, high-profile Supreme Court case on the law’s mandate that nearly all individuals have or buy health insurance. In a 2012 decision that surprised many court watchers, the court upheld the health insurance mandate in a narrow 5–4 decision in which Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four liberal justices.

., 255, 277, 278, 281, 283, 296–97, 314, 316, 333–34 North, Frederick (Lord North), 27 North Carolina, 124, 125, 167 Northern Securities Co., 172 Northwestern National Life Insurance Company v. Riggs, 183–84, 185, 192 NYNEX, 305 oaths, 51, 131, 165 Obama, Barack, xvi, 325, 344, 359, 360, 370–72, 378 Obamacare, 378–82 Obergefell v. Hodges, xxiv, 231 Occupy Wall Street, xvi, 374–75, 394 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 336, 337, 349–50 “Octopus,” 111, 114, 119 Ohio, 124, 125, 167, 168, 198 Ohio River, 103–4 oil industry, 167, 168, 171–72, 234–35, 244, 275–76, 308, 389–94 Old South Meeting House, 30 Olin, John M., 302 Olivas, John, 389–94 Oliver, Andrew, 29 Olson, Theodore “Ted,” xxii–xxiii, 324–26, 335, 338–40, 343–44, 346–62, 370, 382 Olympics (1936), 253 opium, 27 ordinances, 389–94 Oregon, 124, 375 organized crime, 257 Orwell, George, 286 “other people’s money” corruption, 205–6, 212, 215–17, 315–16 Otto, William Tod, 149 out-of-state citizens, 97–103, 257–58, 265–67 Oxford University, 45 Pacific Legal Foundation, 310 Panama, 9 panic of 1837, 100 panic of 1893, 198 pardons, 20 Paris Commune, 146 Parish, Ashley, 346 Parker, Alton, 202–3, 209 Parks, Rosa, 257 Parliament, British, 15, 22–23, 25, 27–28, 29, 30–31, 43, 62, 63, 85–86, 87, 88 “partisan realignment,” 326–27 partnerships, 44–45, 49, 78, 178, 179–80, 181, 380–81 Paspahegh Indians, 10 pasteurization, 223 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010), 378–82 Patterson, Albert, 257 Patterson, John, 257–59, 258, 264, 265, 272 Patterson v.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

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

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

“If you’re a physician and you read the data, it’s not about your opinion; it’s irrefutable,” said Olt, who had lost her teenage son to overdose, of the efficacy of buprenorphine. “The problem is getting people to read the research. To step away from their inherent biases and opinions, which are wrong.” Most of Olt’s bupe patients are covered by Medicaid, as Illinois was an early adopter of Obamacare—still the No. 1 tool for helping people with SUD access care. But for six years, Olt funded Narcan distribution in her community out of her own pocket, hand-delivering kits to users. She gave tearful speeches at community meetings to get police and health department leaders to work with her. “Being a doctor gave her the credibility to say hard things about the way we treat SUD,” said Chris Schaffner, Olt’s program director.

“After about three visits to deliver them needles, they’ll ask, ‘Hey, can you help me get clean?’” Getting people admitted to quality residential treatment remained his biggest hurdle. Half the people with OUD in Surry County couldn’t access treatments because they didn’t have Medicaid or private insurance; it was that way in the dozen states that still hadn’t expanded Medicaid under Obamacare. And most church-affiliated centers still refuse to allow treatment with medications; some say they don’t have the medical staff to supervise it, but many cling to abstinence-only models and are philosophically opposed: Jesus loves the “addicts” but he doesn’t want them taking bupe. It is perhaps the sorest point of the ongoing overdose crisis that the very sickest people—many of them unhoused and devoid of support from friends or family—are the ones left to navigate this thorny divide.

The largest Medicaid-funded option for addiction medicines remained Daymark Recovery Services, but most drug users I met found its mandatory counseling requirements exceedingly onerous, and roughly half of the addicted working poor in the community don’t qualify for Medicaid because state politicians had shunned Obamacare as socialism. An estimated half-million North Carolinians would benefit from closing the Medicaid coverage gap. (It would most help those who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but still can’t afford insurance and too often end up using costlier emergency rooms rather than primary care.) Even those who did qualify for Medicaid had trouble getting to appointments.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

In 2011, health insurance companies certainly appeared to have the Porterian wind at their backs. Spending on health care had grown from roughly 6 percent of gross domestic product in the 1960s to almost 20 percent, a number that dwarfs the spending of any other country in both absolute and relative terms. Although the 2010 Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare, had the potential to put pricing pressures on pharmaceutical and medical device companies, it looked like a panacea to insurance companies. After all, a key provision of the act was that every American needed to have health insurance, which meant that roughly fifty million uninsured people became target customers.

., 5 Martin, Roger, 124, 140, 177 McClatchy, 97 McGrath, Rita, 65, 146 Meckling, William, 177 media companies founded after disruption in, 47–50 streaming, 33–36, 93–95 transformations in, 2–3 Media General, 155–157 Medicity, 183 Medtronic, 72–73, 74 Merck, 22 metrics, 42–43 microlenders, 73 Microsoft, 4, 49, 54 Mint, 132 mission statements, 177, 178 mobile phones, 3–5, 91–93 banking and, 151–152 shipping industry and, 202–203 Monte Carlo techniques, 98–99 moonshot, 24, 115–116, 131–132 Morton, Marshall, 155–156 motivation, 175–176 leaders on, 194 Motorola, 4–5, 92 M-PESA, 201 Mulally, Alan, 153–154 Mulcahy, Anne, 14, 86 multisystem operators (MSOs), 96, 98–99 Murdoch, Rupert, 97, 109 Myspace, 48, 97, 109 Narayen, Shantanu, 31–33 National Basketball Association, 98–99 National Science Foundation, 56 Navarrete, Minette, 143–144 Nestlé, 204 Netflix, 23, 97, 104 Amazon Web Services and, 54 business model innovation at, 40, 42, 146 business model of, 106 content creation at, 34–35 decision making at, 93–95, 102 early warning signs at, 108 metrics at, 43 postdisruption job to be done at, 39 transformation A at, 32–36 transformation B at, 69–70 transformation journey at, 181 net present value (NPV), 110 net promoter scores, 78 Netscape, 2–3, 47 News Corp, 48, 97 Newspaper Association of America, 3 newspapers. See also Deseret Media disruptive challenges to, 97–98 Google advertising and, 77 internet and transformation of, 3, 4 Media General, 155–157 Nexstar Broadcasting Group, 156–157 Nokia, 4–5, 8, 91–92, 102 nonconsumption, illusory, 62–63 Nook reader, 12–13 Novartis, 17 Obamacare, 100 Oculus, 48 Odeo, 49, 138 Ofoto, 1–2 Ok.com, 67–68 Omidyar, Pierre, 48–49 Omniture, 67 On Dialogue (Bohm), 130 Open Handset Alliance, 4 operating engines, 137–139 opportunity. See also curiosity capabilities link and, 74–75 disruption as, 8–12, 47–50 focusing on highest-potential, 141–142 leaders on, 196–197 stopping exploration of, 126–127 strategic opportunity areas and, 123–127 Optus, 145, 147–148, 149 Orange Is the New Black, 35 O’Reilly, Charles III, 53, 54 outsiders, involving in decision making, 109–110 overshooting, 103 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), 13, 31 Pandesic, 78–79 parable of the eleventh floor, 77 Pathway, 58 patientslikeme.com, 60 PayPal, 200 Paytm, 202 Pearson, 67 penicillin, 139 periphery, spotting warning signs from the, 107–108 Perry, Tyler, 98 Pfizer, 17, 22, 138–139 Pharmacyclics, 19 Photoshop Express, 32 Pixar Animation Studios, 3–4 planning fallacy, 120 Playing to Win (Martin and Lafley), 124 Plunify, 72, 74 Porter, Michael, 99–100, 177 portfolio management systems, 80–82 Potemkin portfolios, 120 potential estimating current operations’, 118–119 estimating existing investments’, 119 problem solving approaches, 140–141 Procter & Gamble (P&G), 23, 64, 109 capabilities identification at, 79–80 innovation at, 146 predictability versus innovation at, 137–138 Professional Golfers’ Association, 99 Project ET, 127–128 Psychology Today, 177 purpose, 175–179 leaders on, 194–195 QQ, 106 Quantum Solutions, 51, 52 Quattro Wireless, 67 Quicken, 132–133 Qwikster, 94 Rakuten Group, 143 recommendations engine, Netflix, 33–35 reinvention, 42–43 Reminder app, 152 repositioning, 12, 27–45.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

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

Millions of low-income families would benefit from having more choice over how to spend such safety-net dollars that way, instantly rendering those dollars more valuable. The United States could also get rid of welfare and create a universal child benefit, something that would eliminate child poverty, support women, and help to build a healthier generation. We could make our existing programs simpler and more universal too. Getting rid of Obamacare’s complicated set of subsidies and letting everyone buy into Medicare or Medicaid is a very different policy proposal than a UBI, but one motivated by the same ideas. Ditto with making the tax code more transparent and less laden with loopholes and shelters, or turning programs like welfare into an entitlement based on income, with no complicated application paperwork, asset testing, or work requirements.


pages: 231 words: 76,283

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way by Tanja Hester

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy and hold, crowdsourcing, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, full employment, General Magic , gig economy, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, independent contractor, index fund, labor-force participation, lifestyle creep, longitudinal study, low interest rates, medical bankruptcy, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, multilevel marketing, obamacare, passive income, post-work, remote working, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, stocks for the long run, tech worker, Vanguard fund, work culture

And until recently, this system made early retirement and all forms of work-optional living much more challenging than they are now, because people younger than Medicare-qualification age (65) had few options for obtaining health insurance on their own. That all changed with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, also known as Obamacare. In addition to creating an individual marketplace that allows people to buy plans directly from insurers instead of having to go through an employer or expensive insurance broker, the ACA also made most types of preventive care entirely free, it allowed kids to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26, and it outlawed old practices of denying coverage for preexisting conditions.

Before electing to accept COBRA coverage, price out your options on the health care exchange plans available to you, knowing that the exchange plans will likely end up being cheaper. Exchange Plans Since the passage of the ACA, exchange plans have been available in every state in the US, either through the federal Healthcare.gov exchange or through individual state exchanges. Exchange plans, often called Obamacare plans, are just like regular private health insurance, though with a few notable features. To help consumers compare plans, ACA plans are grouped by levels, with bronze plans covering 60% of expenses, silver plans covering 70%, gold covering 80%, and platinum covering 90%. Most people who purchase exchange insurance policies opt for silver-level plans that cover 70% of medical costs, and if your prior employer plan was typical and covered 82% of costs, you may notice more out-of-pocket costs after transitioning to an ACA plan.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

In February, dismayed by hostility among healthcare adepts to the American associations of ‘accountable care’, NHS England came up with a new name: Integrated Care Systems. Since we’ve already had ICS standing for something else, let’s stick with ‘accountable care’. What is it? In the United States, it was spelled out in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, as a way for hospitals, community practitioners and local clinics to integrate into a single system to provide complete healthcare to a set of elderly Americans receiving the form of US healthcare that most resembles Britain’s NHS – the mainly taxpayer-funded, partly free at the point of delivery system for over-sixty-fives known as Medicare.

It was a first for me to hear somebody say, as Louise did: ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for the workhouse. But …’ Building up slowly, then with increasing enthusiasm, determination and evidence of considerable prior thought, Louise Warren laid out an ideal of healthcare and welfare in general that lay somewhere between mid-Victorian England and the modern, pre-Obamacare United States: an England of private medical insurance, self-reliance, self-help, of a reckoning for feckless welfare recipients who don’t understand that pay TV is a luxury, of decent poor people fallen on hard times being helped by acts of charity in the same way the Lincolnshire Chronicle’s ‘simple, kindly country folk’ helped Maud Elizabeth-Norman in 1924, an England which (despite seventy years of evidence to the contrary) simply could not afford to run a national health service from public funds.


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

subgroups on Twitter by messaging pattern example words characteristic speech percent of sample nigga, poppin, chillin shortened endings (e.g., -er => -a or -ing => -in) 14 tweetup, metrics, innovation tech buzzspeak 12 inspiring, webinar, affiliate, tips marketing self-help 11 etsy, adorable, hubby crafting lingo 5 pelosi, obamacare, beck, libs partisan talking points 4 bieber, pleasee, youu, <33 lengthened endings (repeated last letter) 2 anipals, pawesome, furever animal-based puns 1 kstew, robsessed, twilighters amalgamations/puns around the Twilight movies 1 It’s important to note that the study grouped users by their words alone, who they messaged, and what they wrote—these language clusters were not determined a priori.

People at the top and bottom of this list use the same framework to speak at cross-purposes: No one should … political bias of the person posting … die because they cannot afford health care … –0.87 more liberal … be frozen in carbonite because they couldn’t pay Jabba the Hutt … –0.37 … die because of zombies if they cannot afford a shotgun … –0.30 … have to worry about dying tomorrow, but cancer patients do … –0.02 … be without a beer because they cannot afford one … +0.22 … die because the government is involved with health care … +0.88 … die because Obamacare rations their health care … +0.96 … go broke because government taxes and spends … +0.97 more conservative In 1950, at the dawn of the age of television, the American Political Science Association actually called for more polarization in national politics—the parties had grown too close together, the electorate didn’t have clear choices.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Mailin Aasmäe, ‘ETCS and Uber collaborate in seeking solutions for the devel- opment of the sharing economy’, Republic of Estonia Tax and Customs Board (9 October 2015), http://www.emta.ee/eng/etcb-and-uber-collaborate-seeking- solutions-development-sharing-economy, archived at https://perma.cc/47YA- Z49P; Jurate Titova, ‘Uber signs MoU with the City of Vilnius’, Uber Newsroom (2 November 2015), https://newsroom.uber.com/lithuania/uber-vilnius-memo- randum-with-the-city-of-vilnius/, archived at https://perma.cc/RV4R-HN7X 31. Ina Fried, ‘Gig economy companies like Uber are helping the Feds spread the word about Obamacare’, Recode (25 October 2016), http://www.recode. net/2016/10/25/13389860/gig-economy-uber-obamacare-burwell, archived at https://perma.cc/P6S8-JYDS 32. Work and Pensions Committee, Written Evidence: Self-employment and the Gig Economy (HC 847, 2016–17), Uber, Hermes and Deliveroo workers questioned on challenges of self-employment, http://www.parliament.uk/business/com- mittees/committees-a-z/commons-select/work-and-pensions-committee/ news-parliament-2015/self-employment-gig-economy-evidence-16–17/, archived at https://perma.cc/R7CX-GWCG; Sarah Butler, ‘Uber driver tells MPs: I work 90 hours but still need to claim benefits’, The Guardian (6 February 2017), http://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/06/uber-driver-mps- select-committee-minimum-wage, archived at https://perma.cc/Z2D5-SCW3 33.


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Over the last decade, pharmaceutical interests have spent almost two billion dollars lobbying U.S. government branches to meet commercial goals, such as preventing drug price negotiations and new importation laws to lower domestic prices. Additionally, the Obama administration made a deal with the pharmaceutical industry; the administration would drop its tacit support of drug importation in exchange for industry support of Obamacare and modest price rebates to government health care programs. Had SOPA become law, search engines, domain registrars and registries, credit card companies, payment processors and advertisers would be encouraged to refuse their services to safe online pharmacies. Supporters of SOPA obtusely pointed to the bill’s language on online pharmacies to argue that the bill was not only about protecting intellectual property and copyrights but protecting lives.

Specifically, government guarantees of health care—a Medicare-for-all program, more efficient than the private insurance system—and pensions more robust than Social Security—would give Americans some assurance that they wouldn’t starve. They’d enable entrepreneurship, as health care access is a concern that forces people to scurry towards and hold onto jobs they don’t want instead of starting their own shops (though this predicament will be somewhat improved under Obamacare). The appropriate societal response to hard economic times and workers’ desires for portable retirement plans isn’t to convert traditional pensions into 401(k)s—rather, it’s to institute a robust federal pension system. A step between here and there would be to adopt the plans most Europeans have access to—much more robust even under austerity than the crumbs we toss at American seniors.

For example, some Pentagon officials might want to discredit those sharing information about how the American public were misled into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke might seek to prevent exposing the role of the Federal Reserve in bailing out up both American and European banks. Some supporters of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) might want the government’s fact checkers to discredit those who expose how the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance lobby provided sought to enrich themselves by supporting the bill. Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize a propaganda machine designed to keep them from knowing the truth about their government.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

In 2014, the Institute of Medicine issued a report on medical education, assessing the physician workforce with a key conclusion about the looming shortage: “does not find any credible evidence to support such claims.”106e Echoing this conclusion, a most unlikely bipartisan combination of authors—Scott Gottlieb and Ezekiel Emanuel—representing extreme views of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, wrote a pointed piece, “No, There Won’t Be a Doctor Shortage.”107 While acknowledging the aging of the population and the increased demand related to thirty million newly insured Americans via the Affordable Care Act, they declared: “The road to Obamacare has seen its share of speed bumps, as well as big potholes. But a physician shortage is unlikely to be one of its roadblocks.”107 Beyond echoing the use of nurses, pharmacists, dieticians, health aides, and other nonphysicians, and the profound waste in American health care (as reviewed in Chapter 8), they aptly point out: “Innovations, such as sensors that enable remote monitoring of disease and more timely interventions, can help pre-empt the need for inpatient treatment.”107 And that is just the beginning of how innovative technology and unplugged medicine can markedly improve the efficiency of physicians.

., “Teaching Residents to Provide Cost-Conscious Care: A National Survey of Residency Program Directors,” JAMA Internal Medicine 174, no. 3 (2013): 470–472. 83. R. Srivastava, “How Can We Save on Healthcare Costs If Doctors Are Kept in the Dark?,” The Guardian, March 14, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre/2014/mar/14/how-can-we-save-on-healthcare-costs-if-doctors-are-kept-in-the-dark/print. 84. J. H. Cochrane, “What to Do When ObamaCare Unravels,” Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304866904579265932490593594. 85. M. J. DeLaMerced, “Oscar, a New Health Insurer, Raises $30 Million,” New York Times, January 7, 2014, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/oscar-a-new-health-insurer-raises-30-million/. 86.

McLeod, “New Outpatient Treatment Paradigm Spurs Construction of ‘Bedless Hospitals’; Trend May Reshape Clinical Pathology Laboratory Testing,” Dark Daily, April 1, 2013, http://www.darkdaily.com/new-outpatient-treatment-paradigm-spurs-construction-of-bedless-hospitals-trend-may-reshape-clinical-pathology-laboratory-testing-40113#axzz3Arr352HN. 29. F. Palumbo et al., “Sensor Network Infrastructure for a Home Care Monitoring System,” Sensors 14 (2014): 3833–3860. 30. G. Orwell, “How the Poor Die,” 1946, accessed August 13, 2013, http://orwell.ru/library/articles/Poor_Die/english/e_pdie. 31. “Hospital Operators and Obamacare: Prescription for Change,” The Economist, June 29, 2013, http://www.economist.com/node/21580181/print. 32. D. Chase, “What’s the Role of a Hospital in 10 Years?,” Forbes, July 24, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/davechase/2013/07/24/whats-the-role-of-a-hospital-in-10-years/print/. 33. T. C. Tsai and A.


pages: 689 words: 134,457

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

McKinsey believed most issues, no matter how complex, could be defined one way or another through numbers. Trump believed the best solutions to problems came from loyal friends, especially when they coincided with his own political or financial interests. There were policy differences. Trump had forcefully opposed Obamacare and supported a failed effort by Republican members of Congress to strip out the guts of the law. In contrast, McKinsey had harvested big profits helping states adjust to the new law. But the firm had both sides of the aisle covered. In Washington, D.C., where campaign contributions signal who merits attention, McKinsey’s four biggest individual donors to political campaigns were leading health-care consultants, an indication of that sector’s importance to the firm.

In recent years, UnitedHealth was among the top 10 percent of McKinsey clients in terms of revenue. It directly benefited from McKinsey’s work in helping to shape the 2012 law. By 2014, Simon Stevens, a former executive vice president of UnitedHealth, was running the NHS in England. In Washington, he had made a case against more government involvement in Obamacare, arguing that the United States didn’t need a system like the NHS. As the 2012 law took hold, the share of NHS money going to private companies increased, partly due to the requirement that the work of the doctors’ groups be put out for bids, a policy decision that McKinsey helped to shape. When John Major served as prime minister in the 1990s, the government spent about £96 million on health-care services from private companies each year.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT privately tried to kill it: A former Obama official said the companies disliked the requirement that they spend 80 percent of their premium income on health care and return the rest to customers. Rick Ungar, “Busted! Health Insurers Secretly Spent Huge to Defeat Health Care Reform While Pretending to Support Obamacare,” Forbes, June 25, 2012. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT remove the “public option”: Wendell Potter, “Elimination of ‘Public Option’ Threw Consumers to the Insurance Wolves,” Center for Public Integrity, Feb. 16, 2015. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT McKinsey shocked Washington by releasing: Shubham Singhal, Jeris Stueland, and Drew Ungerman, “How US Health Care Reform Will Affect Employee Benefits,” McKinsey & Company, June 1, 2011.


pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

Changing the market for health care is famously difficult; national political campaigns have been waged over it. More than four decades ago, President Richard Nixon tried and failed to set up a nationwide system that would provide health care for all. Only in the past couple of years has another attempt, the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, been enacted, and it is still hotly contested. But if I had to guess where the beginnings of good design might emerge, it would be in the health-care policies of large companies that self-insure their workers. Such companies benefit from keeping their workers healthy, as well as from reducing the costs of caring for them once they become ill.

See also repugnant markets NEPKE, 8, 37, 38, 42, 44, 49, 50 New England Journal of Medicine, 45 New England Organ Bank, 36 New England Program for Kidney Exchange (NEPKE), 8, 37, 38, 42, 44, 49, 50 New York City school system, 8, 106–10, 112, 122, 153–61 benefits of revised, 160–61 old compared with new, 155–58 preferences in, 153–54, 156–60 New York State attorney general, 86, 88 New York Stock Exchange, 82–83 New York Times, 110 Nguyen, Hai, 38–39 Niederle, Muriel, 75–76, 176–77 Nixon, Richard, 224 nonsimultaneous chains in kidney exchange, 43–46, 49, 51–52, 235 NRMP, 7–8, 146 Obamacare, 224 objectification, 203 Ockenfels, Axel, 118, 120–21 Oklahoma Land Rush, 57–59, 80, 113–14 once-per-second market, 86, 88 OpenTable, 218 operating systems, 21–22 Orange Bowl, 61–62, 66 orthopedic surgeons, 78–80 Ostrovsky, Mike, 86–87 package bidding, 188–89, 225–26 parking decisions, 72–73, 125–26 Pathak, Parag, 107, 126, 149, 153, 165 payment systems credit cards, 23–26 in Internet marketplaces, 24, 104, 117 mobile, 26–27 privacy in, 119 PayPal, 24, 117, 119 Payzant, Tom, 126, 129 peacocks, 177–78 penicillin, 133–34 Peranson, Elliott, 147–48, 157 performance evaluation, 64 political campaign contributions, 203 politics free markets and, 226–28 in kidney exchanges, 49–51 polycystic kidney disease, 38–39 polygamy, 199 Posner, Richard, 91 price and pricing, 9.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

. [>] “You have to work: Andy Reinhardt, “Steve Jobs on Apple’s Resurgence: ‘Not a One-Man Show,’” Business Week Online, May 12, 1998, http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may1998/nf80512d.htm. [>] Much of the complexity: Scott A. Hodge, “Out with the Extenders, In with the New Obamacare Taxes,” Tax Foundation, Tax Policy Blog, December 31, 2013, http://taxfoundation.org/blog/out-extenders-new-obamacare-taxes. [>] A recent study found: Sophie Shive and Margaret Forster, “The Revolving Door for Financial Regulators” (working paper, University of Notre Dame, May 17, 2014), available at Social Science Research Network, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2348968 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2348968. [>] Andy Haldane is: John Cassidy, “The Hundred Most Influential People: Andy Haldane,” Time, April 23, 2014, http://time.com/70833/andy-haldane-2014-time-100/. [>] At a recent conference: Andrew G.


pages: 234 words: 84,737

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, cotton gin, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, off-the-grid, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, white flight, Zipcar

Ugh, I was feeling bad about my shoes at this fancy “cocktail lounge” the other night with this bitch I don’t like that much who I know for a fact is greater-than-slash-equal to me in levels of poverty, and she made an elaborate show of heaving her giant designer purse onto the bar so she could dig through it to find the laundry money she was going to use to pay for her Sazerac. “That’s a really nice bag,” I said genuinely, taking a sip of my light bill. “Did you recently receive a settlement of some kind?” She laughed heartily and poured her Obamacare deductible down her throat in one long swallow. “Girl, nah, I bought this with money I should’ve spent on my car payment.” I clinked the ice in my checking account overdraft fees and nodded solemnly in agreement. A lot of us are living like this, right? Taking cabs and ordering takeout Thai on payday, then walking the three blocks to work from the train with a bologna sandwich in our bags a week or so later?

All this might be easier if I could punch something, but I’m not a punch-something person. I’m a “sit in the dark in the bathroom with a package of sharp cheddar cheese slices” person. Except I don’t even really eat cheese anymore. Plus I can’t fight. I’m soft, man. And I don’t have any answers. The world is scary and terrible and people out here don’t want Obamacare to fix a paper cut let alone offer some discounted mental health care, so what is left for us to do? Talk about it? Stop being afraid of it? Shut down those who want to dismiss us as fragile or crazy?! I went on Lexapro, but after three weeks I had stopped sleeping and fuck that. Maybe it doesn’t work that way for everyone, but I’d rather be angry and well rested than tired and happy.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

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

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

In fact, Obama’s personal story was part and parcel of this appeal: he could justifiably claim to unite the most contentious strains of America in his own background, being the child of a white mother and a black father, raised in Hawaii but ensconced in the hard-knock world of Chicago, born to a single mother and raised by grandparents but educated at Columbia and Harvard Law School. Obama was, as he himself stated, a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”3 By 2012, however, Obama had cast aside those ambiguities. He was the architect of Obamacare, the creator of Cash for Clunkers and “shovel-ready jobs,” a critic of police departments across the country, a newfound expositor of same-sex marriage, a defense-cutting, tax-increasing, big-spending progressive. His progressivism had prompted an ardent response from the American Right: the Tea Party movement and Obama’s loss of Congress in 2010.

Obama even wrote that he deployed Vice President Joe Biden to Capitol Hill to negotiate with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) instead of doing so directly because of his awareness that “negotiations with the vice president didn’t inflame the Republican base in quite the same way that any appearance of cooperation with (Black, Muslim socialist) Obama was bound to do.” Obama and Michelle both chalked up Tea Party opposition to Obamacare to racism as well.40 Given Obama’s personal rejection of opponents as benighted racists, it was no wonder that in 2012 he charted a different course than in 2008. Instead of running a campaign directed at a broad base of support, Obama sliced and diced the electorate, focusing in on his new, intersectional coalition, a demographically growing agglomeration of supposedly victimized groups in American life.


pages: 277 words: 86,352

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

In her account, Hillary Clinton told deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, Tripp’s boss, to order the tear gas operation. Why? Political infighter Roger Stone provided the answer. “Hillary Clinton gave the go order,” Stone declared. “She wanted Waco off the front pages so she could do Hillarycare,” a precursor of the medical-insurance program later known as Obamacare. Vince Foster’s death was a puzzle piece in the theories of Stone and Alex Jones. A forty-eight-year-old lawyer from Hope, Arkansas, who suffered from clinical depression and loathed his White House job, Foster had written a suicide note that read, “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington.”

See Branch Davidians Mount Carmel compound Mount Zion MREs MTV Mulloney, Dan “My Sharona” (song) Nahum Napolitano, Janet National Enquirer National Firearms Act National Rifle Association (NRA) National Security Agency (NSA) NBC Nebuchadnezzar neo-Nazis Ness, Eliot Netflix Newbold College New Mexico Newport, Kenneth Newsweek New York Times Nichols, Terry Nightline (TV show) Nineteenth District Court of Texas Nobrega, Natalie Noesner, Gary Noriega, Manuel North Carolina Central College Nova Religio NPR nuclear war Numbers, book of Oath Keepers Obama, Barack Obamacare Oklahoma City bombing Oldham, Tony Old Testament O’Neill, John (John 5) Operation Desert Storm Operation Nifty Package Operation Trojan Horse Oprah Winfrey Show, The (TV show) Ottman, Gladys Pace, Alexa Pace, Charles Palestine, Texas, commune Palestine Liberation Organization Panama City raid of 1989 Paramount TV Pardo, Mary Parkland Hospital (Dallas) Passover Patriot movement Paul the Apostle (Saul of Tarsus) PBS Peeler, Jim Pence Mike People Peoples Temple.


pages: 374 words: 94,508

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage by Douglas B. Laney

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, behavioural economics, blockchain, book value, business climate, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon credits, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, hype cycle, informal economy, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, it's over 9,000, linked data, Lyft, Nash equilibrium, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, profit motive, recommendation engine, RFID, Salesforce, semantic web, single source of truth, smart meter, Snapchat, software as a service, source of truth, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, text mining, uber lyft, Y2K, yield curve

Clinical pathways are structured, multidisciplinary plans of care designed to support the implementation of clinical guidelines and protocols.31 As databases of electronic medical records (EMRs) are quickly replacing years of pen-and-paper-based diagnoses, lab results, surgical records, and notes from doctors, nurses, physical therapists, etc., this wealth of data is a fuel spawning additional innovations in health care—particularly mining it to develop new or improved clinical pathways. The imperative is there too. In the U.S., Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) each incentivize health care providers for the quality of care, and disincentivize repeat visits by a patient for the same ailment. With this kind of innovating in mind, Mercy Hospitals, one of the top five health systems in the U.S., worked with advanced analytics provider Ayasdi to identify situations in which clinical variation could be narrowed, and narrowed toward protocols which provided better outcomes.

Index 3 “V”s of big data 101n9 Abe’s Market 39 accessibility 249 accounting: accountants and information 227–9; cashing in on information 229; information 201–5; probable economic value 229–30 ACNielsen 12, 22 Acxiom 229 Adams, Paul 168 Advanced Drain Systems (ADS) 97 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) 98 Albala, Mark 261 algorithm(s) 84, 88–9, 94, 96, 98, 137, 199, 230–1, 279, 286, 289–91 Amazon 36, 132, 211, 217n2 American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) 21, 205–6 analytics: actionable decision-making 89–93; advanced 289–90; advanced analytics advantage 83–5; business intelligence implementation 82; descriptive 82–3; diagnostic 82–3; exploiting Big Data 86–9; Gartner analytic ascendency model 83; identifying monetizable insights 93–9; information management 99–100; information monetization 75–6; predictive 82–3; prescriptive 82–3; value 266 application program interfaces (APIs) 34, 73 applied asset management: governance 186–9; information strategy 177–81; information vision 174–7; infrastructure 196–8; metrics 182–6; people 189–92; process 193–6; roles for infosavvy organization 198–200 Aquatics Informatics 114 Archer Daniels Midland 8 Armstrong, Neil 1 Arthur Andersen 205, 217 artificial intelligence (AI) 85, 90, 115, 286, 289–90 Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) 144n4 asset, definitions 2–3, 9–11, 214–15 asset management: barriers to information 114–16; fiduciary responsibility 164; financial methods 163–5; intangibles 168–9; lessons from sustainability 138–43; see also applied asset management; physical asset management AULIVE 12 Australian Computer Society Data Taskforce 222 Australian Privacy Commissioner 233 Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) 43–4 Auto Trader 23 Ayasdi 14, 27n6, 42, 98 balance sheet assets 158–9; physical asset management 9, 116, 158–63, 176, 184, 188–9, 198, 235 Bardin, Noam 35 bartering: favorable terms and conditions 38–9; goods and services 37–8; relationships 38–9 Becker, Gary 128 Becker, Mark 30 Beechcraft Cessna 292 Beechwood House Publishing 255–6 Bekenstein Bounds 273 Bell Helicopter 292 Bespoke Data Organisation 225 Beyer, Mark 186 Big Data 10, 12, 26n2, 49n1, 59, 212; exploiting 85–9; health insurance company 107; information trend 287; processing 40–1; roadblocks to information monetization 287–8; term 86, 101n8; variety of information 88–9; velocity of information 85–6; volume of information 87 biodiversity 136 Bippert, Doug 84 Birchler, Urs 272 blockchain 291 Bloomberg 12, 211, 229 blunderfunding 244, 268n5 Boone, Ryan 40 Box, George 246 BrightPlanet 65 Brownstein, John 96 Brynjolfsson, Erik 272 Brzmialkiewics, Caryl 44 Buchanan, Stewart 107 Bugajski, Joe 281 business: asset 10; climate 136; information 48–9; introducing a new line of 33–4; models 24–6; performance 43–4 business intelligence (BI) 14, 77, 81, 198, 211, 292; analytics 82; beyond basic 81–6; innovation 97–9; see also analytics business-to-business (B2B) 15, 38 business-to-consumer (B2C) 15 business value of information (BVI) 253–4 Bütler, Monka 272 Buytendijk, Frank 34, 281 Caltex 63 Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) 148 cash 14–16, 20–1, 28, 35, 37, 39, 42–4, 96, 128, 161, 165, 188, 209, 227, 229, 257, 260, 293 Casonato, Regina 132 Casper, Carsten 244 Center for Disease Control 65; Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) 89 chief data officer (CDO) 3, 9, 17, 25: analytics 106–7; balancing act of 288–9; concept of 190; emergence of 293; hiring 211; information ecosystem 138; information leader 56–6, 155; information management 154; leadership 112; role of 192, 199–200 chief financial officer (CFO) 3, 100, 105, 107, 165, 200, 213, 245, 250 chief executive officer (CEO) 15, 32, 34, 40, 57, 100, 112, 155, 168, 175, 190, 200 chief information officer (CIO) 3, 40, 42, 58–9, 81, 106, 112, 132, 134, 175–6, 190, 200 China 35, 64, 159, 224 Christiaens, Stan 106 Cicero Group 148, 265, 269n25 Citigroup13–14, 16 Clark, Christina 243 Coca-Cola 83–4, 88, 132 Cohen, Jack 91 Coles Supermarkets 192 Collibra 106, 163 commercial data 63 commercial general liability (CGL) 241–2 competitive differentiation 36–7 completeness 248, 252 Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) 14 Connotate Software 62, 65 consistency 248 content management, contending approaches for 154–5 Corbin, Stacey 63 Cordner, Matt 292 costs, defraying information management and analytics 40–1 cost savings, monetization success 74 cost value of information (CVI) 256–7, 261–2, 274–5 cultural attitudes, information management 114 customer acquisition and retention 29–31 customer relationship management (CRM) 140 D&B 22, 57, 63–4, 229 DalleMule, Leandro 176, 184 dark data 32, 42, 62–3, 141; information asset 61–2; understanding 94–5 data as a service (DAAS) 181–2 database management system (DBMS) 134, 302 Data Driven Leaders Always Win (Zaidi) 234 data governance 188–9; see also governance, information Data Management Association International (DAMA) 148 data ownership 20; see also ownership data preparation 17, 73–4, 189; for monetization use 72–3 data quality: assessing 246–9; objective metrics 248; subjective metrics 249 Data Republic 63 data science 289–90 Datateam Business Media (DBM) 221 Davis, Lord Justice 221 DB2 database 115, 228 DBS Bank 43–4 decision making: actionable 85, 89–93; complexity, activity and change 89–90; governance, risk and compliance (GRC) 91–2; optimizing business processes 90–1; scenario planning 92–3 deinformationalization 36 Deming, Edward 243 derivative data 279 Desai, Samir 58 Deutsche Telekom 225 Dibble, Bill 94 differential data 278 digerati 210 digital detritus 42 digital industry, intellectual property of 288 diminishing marginal utility 276–8; law of 276 Direct Eats 39 direct information monetization 66–8 Disney World 83 distinct data 278 diversity, people 191–2 Dollar General 32, 36, 40 Dominick, Lauren 92 Drucker, Peter 243 DSCI 63 Dun & Bradstreet see D&B Duncan, Alan 160, 272 economic attribution, monetization success 74 economics: applying concepts to information 272–3; as dismal science 271; principles 271–2; see also infonomics economic value of information (EVI) 258–9, 266 economy 11, 147, 192, 205–6, 217, 242, 272 ecosystem: definition 132–3; entities 135–6; features 136; influences 137; management 137–8; processes 136–7; sustainability principles 138–43, 180; see also information ecosystem Ehlers, Brian 183 elasticity, information pricing and 275–6 Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 224 endowment effect 279 enterprise architect 10 enterprise asset management (EAM): infrastructure 197–8; systems 162 enterprise content management (ECM) 154, 181 Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Council 148 enterprise information management (EIM): impediments to maturity 111–14; leadership issues 112; levels of maturity 109–11; maturity model 108–11, 174; metrics 182–4; vision 174–7 enterprise resource planning (ERP) 140 Equifax 12, 57, 63 Equinox Fitness Clubs 58 Evans, Nina 114 Everedge 168 existence 249 exogenous information 16, 165; see also external information Experian 57, 63, 213 Experience Matters 106, 114, 148, 181, 186 external information 11, 31, 36, 55, 60–1, 165, 195, 292 Facebook 11, 21–2, 31, 34, 64, 211–13, 218n10, 232 faint signals, identifying 95–6 feasibility checklist 69–70; economical 72; ethical 72–3; legal 72; manageable 71; marketable 71; practical 70–1; scalable 71; technological 71 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) 46 fiduciary 164, 189, 234 Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) 21, 206 financial valuation models, information assets 251, 255–61 Fisher, Jennifer 260 Fisher, Tony 272 Fisher, William W., III 169 FleetRisk Advisors 92 Francis, James C., IV 224 fraud and risk, identifying and reducing 44–5 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 17, 45–6 Friedman, Milton 128–9 Friedman, Ted 247, 268n12 fundamental valuation models, information assets 251–5 Gaia hypothesis 144n5 Ganschow, Karen 54 Gartner: enterprise information management (EIM) maturity model 108–11, 297–302; financial valuation models 251, 255–6; fundamental valuation models 251–5; Hype Cycle 281, 284n7; information asset valuation models 250; information value models 262; Magic Quadrants 68 Geis, Alex 33 General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) 240n24 generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) 21, 116, 217, 245 generally accepted information principles 116–19, 120n13; assumptions 117; constraints 117–18; principles 118–19 Georgia Aquarium 29–30 geographic 18, 35, 96, 235 Gledhill, David 43 goods and services, bartering 37–8 Google 11, 21, 47, 76, 211, 213, 217n2 governance: applied asset management 188–9; challenges and remedies 187; data entry 187; governance, risk and compliance (GRC) 91–2, 152; information 188, 234; information management 186–9; information management challenges 299–300; proving benefits of information 264 government 9, 17, 22–3, 41, 45–8, 61, 64, 95–6, 105, 115, 193, 206, 223–5, 237, 276, 286 Grayson-Rizzuto, Kimberly 39 Grossman, Larry 46 Hadoop 41 Hamilton, Stuart 114 Hawthorne effect 243, 268n4 Hawthorne Works 243 Health and Human Services Department 44 HealthMap 95–6 HERE Life 38 Hershberger, John 111 Higgins, Mike 97 Hillard, Rob 148, 272 Hogan, Tom 107 Holloway, Todd 32 Horrisberger, Jim 83 House of Cards (TV series) 59 Hubbard, Douglas 260 Human Capital (Becker) 128 human capital management 165–8, 184 Hutton, James 144n7 Hype Cycle 281, 284n7 IBM 87, 91, 115, 148 IMDB 34 Indigenous Land Corporation 63 indirect information monetization 68–9 industry average 283 Infinity Property and Casualty 94 infodiversity 180 infonomics 272, 285–6; concept of 3; definition 9; future of 292–5; improving information yield 281–4; information pricing and elasticity 275–6; information-related trends 286–91; managing information 106; marginal utility of information 276–9; opportunity cost for information choices 279–80; production possibilities of information 280; supply and demand of information 274–5 Informatica 163 information: accountants and 227–30; accounting for 214–17; as asset 2, 205–7; asset realization 207–8; business models and profitability 24–6; characteristics of 18–26; control of 228–9, 233; data vs 25–6, 26n4; digitalization of 288; economic alternatives for 13–14; getting more than cash for 14–16; as liability 216; liquidity of 20–1; monetizing, managing and measuring 9–11; multimedia 2; opportunity cost for information 279–80; pricing elasticity 275–6; probable economic value of 229–30; real world evidence of economic value of 210–13; replicability 23; reusable nature of 19; as second language 143–4; stop giving it away 18; supply and demand of 274–5; taxing situation 21–2; thinking beyond 16–17; transferability 23–4; uncovering hidden treasures 17–18; value of 208–10; see also ownership Information Age 3, 95, 136, 149, 160, 216 informationalize 36 informationalized product 75 information as a second language (ISL) 143–4, 192 information asset management (IAM) 107, 176; information yield 281–4; unified approach to 169–70; vision 176–7; see also applied asset management information assets 59–66; commercial data 63; commercial general liability (CGL) 241; dark data 62–3; financial valuation models 249, 255–60; fundamental valuation models 251–6; inventory 60; measuring 242–6; new supply chain model for 128–31; operational data 61; privacy and security 291; public data 64; social media data 64–5; valuation models 249–60; web content 65–6 information curation 17 information ecosystem: classic ecosystem entities concepts 135; ecosystem entities 135; ecosystem features of 136; ecosystem influences 137; ecosystem management 137–8; ecosystem processes 136–7; lessons from sustainability 138–43; preparing for 131–8; recycle 142–3; reduce 140–1; refuse 139–40; remove 143; repurpose 141–2; reuse 141; role of information in 133–5 information keiretsus 132 information lifecycle: expense 267; process challenges 301–2 information management 105–8; barriers to asset management 114–16; challenges and principles 119; cultural attitudes about 114; future of infonomics 292; generally accepted information principles 116–19; governance challenges 299–300; impediments to maturity 111–14; information metrics challenges 299; infrastructure challenges 302; leadership 112; levels of information maturity 109–11; maturity model 108–11, 174; monetization success 74; monetization to 99–100; people-related challenges 300–1; priority control 113–14; process challenges 301–2; resources 113–14; strategy challenges 298; vision challenges 297–8 information measurement, future of infonomics 294–5 information owners 222; see also ownership information ownership 222, 226–8, 232–4 information performance gap 262 information product management 56–9 information property rights 303–5; rulings affirming 303–4; rulings denying 304–5; see also information ownership; ownership information security 244 information supply chain (ISC) 8, 119; activities 131; metrics for 126–7; model for information assets 128–31; preparing for information ecosystem 131–8; scenarios 126; SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference) model 124–5; see also information ecosystem Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) 151–2 information valuation models 263–7; benefits of information governance 264; expanded revenue 266; innovation and digitalization 265; monetization and analytics 265–6; prioritizing IAM investments 264; reducing information lifecycle expense 267 information vision gap 262 information yield 281–4; concept 281; curve 281 infosavvy 3, 11; chief data officer (CDO) 199–200; growing market valuations 245; investors prizing, companies 211–13; roles for organization 198–200 infrastructure 12, 40–1, 47, 108, 139, 150–1, 192, 196–8, 267, 286, 290–1, 299, 302; information 290–1; information management 196; information management challenges 302 innovation 3, 26, 31, 46, 76, 97–9, 107, 113, 161, 236, 246, 265, 287, 289, 298, 301 innovation and digitalization, value 265 Instagram 34 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 147 intangible assets 168–9 integrity 248 intellectual property (IP) 62, 116, 128, 130, 168, 176, 181, 230–1, 288 International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) 214 International Accounting Standards (IAS) 214–15, 217 International Astronomical Union 148 International Federation of Library Association and Institutions (IFLA) 157 International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 214–15; criteria 219n19 International Organization for Standardization (ISO): ISO 8000 170n2; ISO 15489–1:2016 152, 170n8, 171n10; ISO 19770–1 149; ISO 19770–2 149; ISO 19770–3 150; ISO 19770–4 150; ISO 30300:2011 170n9; ISO 55001 158; ISO/IEC 20000 170n7; ISO/IEC 27001 147, 170n3; IT asset management (ITAM) 149–50; IT service management (ITSM) 150–1 intrinsic value of information (IVI) 251–2 Intuit’s TurboTax 36 inventory, information asset 60 investor awareness, monetization success 76 IT asset management (ITAM): International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards 149–50 IT service management (ITSM) 150–1; information strategy 180–1 J.D.


pages: 559 words: 169,094

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

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

They were people like her—not country club Republicans, just people who felt something was wrong. And she had brought them together. That was the beginning of Karen Jaroch’s life in politics. Summer brought Obamacare and a nationwide rebellion. On August 6, Tampa’s Democratic congresswoman, Kathy Castor, held a town hall meeting in a room that was far too small for the fifteen hundred people trying to get in. Things descended into chaos when members of the 9/12 Project, enraged by Castor, enraged by Obamacare, enraged that the doors to the jammed room had been shut on hundreds of protesters, started shouting, “You work for us! You work for us! Tyranny! Tyranny!”

If he could have grown up at any time it would have been in the fifties, which was the last great time in America. He hated to say it but it was true. Dean tried to do anything he could for Matt, but after Matt went five months without being able to pay his rent, Dean had to ask him to move out. The Andy Griffith Show was still popular in the region (even after Andy made an ad for Obamacare), with reruns every afternoon, because the original for Mayberry RFD was the town of Mount Airy, up at the Virginia border—now just another hard-hit textile town trying its best keep up a quaint appearance on Main Street for the sake of the tourists, shop windows displaying posters and photos and memorabilia with those goofy, reassuring, all-white faces from the show.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

Ethnic differences too can be, and are, absorbed into the national ‘we’ but it is not always a swift or easy process and liberal societies are reluctant to force the pace. The evidence suggests that ethnically heterogeneous societies show lower levels of support for redistribution and thus in the longer run have weaker welfare states.5 This is now emerging in Europe having long been evident in the US. (Trump’s furious opposition to Obamacare, perceived as obliging the mainly white suburbs and small towns to subsidise the mainly non-white inner cities through their insurance premiums, is said to be another reason for his victory.)6 And what if the Anywhere vs Somewhere divide is itself contributing to the feeling that we are no longer a single society?

Those who voted leave earning less than £20,000 were only 10 points ahead of those voting leave who earn over £60,000 while nearly 50 points separated those with no qualifications and those with higher degrees: Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath, ‘Brexit vote explained; poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 31 August 2016, https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities 4.Dame Louise Casey, ‘The Casey Review: A Review into Opportunity and Integration’, December 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/575973/The_Casey_Review_Report.pdf 5.See for example Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race and American Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015; also Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 6.Gillian Tett, ‘Did Obamacare Help Trump?’, Financial Times, 2 December 2016. See also http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/support-for-the-affordable-care-act-breaks-down-along-racial-lines/431916/?utm_source=eb 7.Some 77 per cent wanted immigration reduced either ‘a little’ or ‘a lot’ in 2013 polling. ‘Immigration: A nation divided?’


pages: 323 words: 100,923

This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir" by Doug Stanhope

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, bitcoin, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, obamacare, pre–internet, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer, traveling salesman

They emailed me posthaste after the update and offered their services. Anesthesia is 99 percent of the game as far as I’m concerned. So long as I’m unconscious, I could have my dry cleaner do the alterations. But they had a surgeon friend that was game and who waived her fee as well. Yes. Her. Thanks I assume to Obamacare and the comedy of Amy Schumer, gals too can be doctors now. This was a hot Japanese lady surgeon with ropey arms who probably mountain bikes and didn’t laugh at my examination room jokes and could have been twenty-eight or seventy the way Asian women tend to go. My immediate concern was that this selfless act of charity on her part might change my ingrained hatred of women and Asians.

Fondler on, 211–212 Irishwomen bit on, 179 Napster, 109–110, 208, 298 permanent record on, 293, 296–298 trolls, 235, 238 interviews 20/20, 52, 54–56 country-western station in Shreveport, LA, 66–67 KWHL in Anchorage, AK, 86 local TV news in San Francisco, 57–59 Muslim woman prank, 63–64 Steve Yerrid impersonation, 65–66 “In the Arms of the Angel” (McLachlan), 255 Inverness, Scotland, 204 Irishwomen, 174, 176, 177, 179 Jack the Wig, 8 Jeff Dunham, 306 Jefferies, Jim, 187, 208 The Jerk, 146 Jerry Springer Show, 48–56, 148, 259 Jimi, 255 jock strap at the beach episode, 223 “Johnny Depp Never Called Me” material, 279 Jokers Comedy Club, 95, 300 Jonathan, 31 Just for Laughs comedy festival, 183–185 Just for Spite festival, 184 Kaufman, Andy, 77 Kelly, Jim, 297 Kenny, 85 Kerry, 138 KettleBells, 257 Kilborn, Craig, 27 Kilkenny comedy festival, 176–177 Kilkenny, Ireland, 174, 176–178 Killer Termites, 238, 239 Kirschner, Jay, 17, 209, 212, 215, 220 Kitchen Nightmares (TV series), 260 Koot’s (Chilkoot Charlie’s), 80, 83–92 Koresh, David, 12 Kreischer, Bert, 288 Krystal, 30–33 KWHL, 86, 89 Laff Stop, 48 Lakers game, 258–259 Lange, Artie, 164, 165, 166 Las Vegas, 157 Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 268 Led Zeppelin, 196 Leno, Jay, 177 Levine, Kristine, 305–306 limos, 50, 199, 205 Litla-Hraun prison show, 132–134 locked-in syndrome, 231 London, England, 142–144 Lonnie, 98, 100–102 lotteries, winning, 295 Lou, 98, 100 Louisville, KY, 196 “low-watt gurgler in a high-back chair,” 301, 302, 303 Luker, 105–107 Maher, Bill, 22–25 mailing list, 18, 109, 184 Man-Dick and the nad-matter, 77–78 The Man Show, 26, 58, 59, 75, 76, 79, 145, 148, 264 Manson, Marilyn, 279, 281 marijuana, 265 Marino, Dan, 297 Maron, Marc, 292 Martin, Dean, 264 Martin, Steve, 104, 146 May, Big Fat Ralphie, 41, 88 meeting Bingo, 302–303 Metallica, 110 meth, 72, 84, 190, 287–288 Mexico, corruption in, 154 midgets, 85, 86 Midvale, UT, 97, 102 Mill Valley, CA, 110 Minneapolis, 30, 34, 157, 300 Mitchell, Tim, 272–273 mixed-bill shows, 177, 184 Montreal, Canada, 183, 184, 185 Montreal comedy festival, 93–94 Moon, Keith, 192 Morris, Garrett, 283 mother’s suicide, 225, 227 Muamba, Fabrice, 235–236 Murphy, Morgan, 202 mushrooms, 41, 80, 81, 84, 135–136, 256–257, 269, 280 naked onstage, 91–92, 93–94, 94–95 naked pool-dives, 24–25, 27 naked selfies of women, 228 name dropping, 282–283, 307 Napster, 109–110, 208, 298 Navarro, Dave, 269 Netflix, 263, 276, 309 New Orleans, 311–312 Newswipe (TV series), 128, 260 Nicklinson, Tony, 230, 231–232, 235, 238 Night Shift (TV series), 127 900 numbers, 41–42 No Class Tour at Ohio University, 167–170 No Refunds special, 128, 281, 283 noise ordinance in Bisbee, 305, 306 nose job, 37, 38 Notaro, Tig, 207 Nowhere Man, 305 Nurse Betty, 253 O’Briain, Dara, 177, 178 O’Connell, Mike, 186, 188 O’Donnell, Daniel, 203 Obamacare, 254 obsession, 33 Ocean Beach, CA, 225 The Office, 161 Ohio University show, 167–170 Okinawan girl joke, 90 Omaha, 95 Onnit, 257 open-mic comedy, 7–8 opening acts, 87, 184, 198, 271–275 OxyContin, 226 Pahrump, NV, 72 The Palms Casino Resort, 164, 165 parade, St. Patrick’s Day, 96–97 parties, 16–18, 21, 22–23, 162, 209 partying, 22–23, 28 Paula, 31, 32 Paulie, 148–149 Pearson, Allison, 231–232, 234–235, 238 pedophile’s release from prison, 175, 180 pedophile-baiting online, 43 penis exposure, 99–100, 102 Perlman, Josh, 6 Pervert Park (documentary), 224 PETA, 255 Phillips, Henry, 74, 188, 198, 199, 201, 202, 205, 255 phobias, 231 phone sex, 40–44 pig-in-the-trailer episode, 10–13 PiL (Public Image Ltd band), 60 pissing, 189, 245–247, 258 pizza under the table episode, 285–286 plagiarism, 233 poker event, 161–162 police at Super Bowl parties, 306 police interrogation at Costa Rica airport, 117–122 Politically Incorrect, 22 porn shoot, 157–158 porn stars, 160, 161, 162 portrait of Stanhope and Bingo, 225, 226 pranks, 61, 63–64, 65–66, 75–76, 89–91, 103–104, 266, 271–272, 272–273, 274–275 Dog Eats Own Leg video, 105–107 interview with “dancer,” 74–75 radio interviews, 59–61, 63–66 TV news interview prank, 58–59 Premium Blend (TV series), 45 prescription drugs, 189.


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Musicians have long been at the vanguard of the gig economy, facing many of the same problems that gig workers face today: obtaining health insurance, saving for the future, paying down debt, planning for taxes, and recordkeeping. In 2013, before Obamacare established health insurance exchanges and provided income-based subsidies for individuals to purchase insurance, 53 percent of musicians lacked health insurance, which was triple the uninsured rate for the population as a whole.8 Self-employed workers as a whole saw a greater rise in health insurance coverage after Obamacare passed than other employees. The health insurance coverage rate of musicians jumped to 86 percent by 2018.9 Not surprisingly, musicians and other freelancers have generally been more supportive of the controversial law than the public as a whole.10 Given the mental stresses and physical wear and tear that a musical career entails, the low rate of health insurance coverage historically has been a serious problem for musicians.


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

There is even some evidence that, thanks to motivated reasoning, exposure to the opposite point of view may actually backfire; not only do people reject the counter-arguments, but their own views become even more deeply entrenched as a result. In other words, an intelligent person with an inaccurate belief system may become more ignorant after having heard the actual facts. We could see this with Republicans’ opinions about Obamacare in 2009 and 2010: people with greater intelligence were more likely to believe claims that the new system would bring about Orwellian ‘death panels’ to decide who lived and died, and their views were only reinforced when they were presented with evidence that was meant to debunk the myths.40 Kahan’s research has primarily examined the role of motivated reasoning in political decision making – where there may be no right or wrong answer – but he says it may stretch to other forms of belief.

99. 39 Kahan, D.M. (2017), ‘Ordinary Science Intelligence’: A Science-Comprehension Measure for Study of Risk and Science’, Journal of Risk Research, 20(8), 995?1016. 40 Nyhan, B., Reifler, J. and Ubel, P.A. (2013), ‘The Hazards of Correcting Myths about Health Care Reform’, Medical Care, 51(2), 127?32. For a discussion of the misperceptions around ObamaCare, see Politifact’s Lie of the Year: ‘Death Panels’, Politifact, 18 December 2009, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels/. 41 Koehler, J.J. (1993), ‘The Influence of Prior Beliefs on Scientific Judgments of Evidence Quality’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 56(1), 28–55.


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

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

One couple told me about the thousands of dollars they owed for their insurance deductibles and how they would sometimes skimp on their prescriptions because they had to repair their car that month. They’d agreed to the interview because the $100 they received would get them closer to covering next month’s costs. But who did they blame for their insurance costs? Not their employer’s bad health plan or a lack of decent pay—they blamed Obamacare. They genuinely thought it was rolled out simply to help more undocumented workers come to America in a grand plan of liberal social engineering to keep the Democrats in power through more Democrat-leaning Latino voters, which in their minds made insurance and hospitals more expensive. People would feel better about their day after an hour-long session in the Fox News rage room—they could groan out their stress, and afterward their problems at work or home were someone else’s fault.

It meant that their struggles could be wholly externalized, sparing them the stark reality that maybe their employer didn’t care enough about them to give them a living wage. It would be too painful to admit that perhaps they were being taken advantage of by someone they saw every day rather than the faceless enemy of Obamacare and “illegals.” This was my longest exposure to Fox News, and all I could think about was how the network was conditioning people’s sense of identity into something that could be weaponized. Fox fuels anger with its hyperbolic narratives because anger disrupts the ability to seek, rationalize, and weigh information.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

They have been superseded and discarded, and really have no reason to persist as they are. In the United States, attacks on socialized health insurance have obvious implications for the mortality rate among poor Americans. One estimate in 2017 suggested that, if the Republican Party succeeded in repealing “Obamacare,” an additional 208,500 people would die within a decade.25 The question arises whether libertarians necessarily view this as a bad thing—do they consider those lives worth living? Or are they satisfied with a sort of market-based eugenics where competition determines biological success and failure?

., Martin Luther, 21, 224 knowledge economy, 84, 85, 88, 151–2, 217 known knowns, 132, 138 Koch, Charles and David, 154, 164, 174 Korean War (1950–53), 178 Kraepelin, Emil, 139 Kurzweil, Ray, 183–4 Labour Party, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Lagarde, Christine, 64 Le Bon, Gustave, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 Le Pen, Marine, 27, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 Leadbeater, Charles, 84 Leeds, West Yorkshire, 85 Leicester, Leicestershire, 85 Leviathan (Hobbes), 34, 39, 45 liberal elites, 20, 58, 88, 89, 161 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173, 196, 209, 226 Liberty Fund, 158 Libya, 143 lie-detection technology, 136 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 Lindemann, Frederick Alexander, 1st Viscount Cherwell, 138 Lloyds Bank, 29 London, England bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 EU referendum (2016), 85 Great Fire (1666), 67 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 and gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 78 housing crisis, 84 insurance sector, 59 knowledge economy, 84 life expectancy, 100 newspapers, early, 48 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 London School of Economics (LSE), 160 loss aversion, 145 Louis XIV, King of France, 73, 127 Louisiana, United States, 151, 221 Ludwig von Mises Institute, 154 MacLean, Nancy, 158 Macron, Emmanuel, 33 mainstream media, 197 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 Manchester, England, 85 Mann, Geoff, 214 maps, 182 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210, 211 marketing, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 169 Mars, 175, 226 Marxism, 163 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 179 Mayer, Jane, 158 McCarthy, Joseph, 137 McGill Pain Questionnaire, 104 McKibben, William “Bill,” 213 Megaface, 188–9 memes, 15, 194 Menger, Carl, 154 mental illness, 103, 107–17, 139 mercenaries, 126 Mercer, Robert, 174, 175 Mexico, 145 Million-Man March (1995), 4 mind-reading technology, 136 see also telepathy Mirowski, Philip, 158 von Mises, Ludwig, 154–63, 166, 172, 173 Missing Migrants Project, 225 mobilization, 5, 7, 126–31 and Corbyn, 81 and elections, 81, 124 and experts, 27–8 and Internet, 15 and Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 11, 12, 16, 20 and loss, 145 and Napoleonic Wars, xv, 127–30, 141, 144 and Occupy movement, 5 and populism, 16, 22, 60 and violence, opposition to, 21 Moniteur Universel, Le, 142 monopoly on violence, 42 Mont Pelerin Society, 163, 164 moral emotion, 21 morphine, 105 multiculturalism, 84 Murs, Oliver “Olly,” ix Musk, Elon, 175, 176, 178, 183, 226 Nanchang, Jiangxi, 13 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), 126–30 chappe system, 129, 182 and conscription, 87, 126–7, 129 and disruption, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 226 and great leader ideal, 146–8 and intelligence, 134 and mobilization, xv, 126–30, 141, 144 and nationalism, 87, 128, 129, 144, 183, 211 and propaganda, 142 Russia, invasion of (1812), 128, 133 Spain, invasion of (1808), 128 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Audit Office (NAO), 29–30 national citizenship, 71 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 national sovereignty, 34, 53 nationalism, 87, 141, 210–12 and conservatism, 144 and disempowerment, 118–19 and elites, 22–3, 60–61, 145 ethnic, 15 and health, 92, 211–12, 224 and imagined communities, 87 and inequality, 78 and loss, 145 and markets, 167 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145, 197, 198 and war, 7, 20–21, 118–19, 143–6, 210–11 nativism, 61 natural philosophy, 35–6 nature, 86 see also environment Nazi Germany (1933–45), 137, 138, 154 Netherlands, 48, 56, 129 Neurable, 176 neural networking, 216 Neuralink, 176 neurasthenia, 139 Neurath, Otto, 153–4, 157, 160 neurochemistry, 108, 111, 112 neuroimaging, 176–8, 181 Nevada, United States, 194 new atheism, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana, 151 New Right, 164 New York, United States and climate change, 205 and gross domestic product (GDP), 78 housing crisis, 84 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 knowledge economy, 84 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 New York Times, 3, 27, 85 newspapers, 48, 71 Newton, Isaac, 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nixon, Robert, 206 no-platforming, 22, 208 Nobel Prize, 158–9 non-combatants, 43, 143, 204 non-violence, 224 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 123, 145, 214 North Carolina, United States, 84 Northern Ireland, 43, 85 Northern League, 61 Northern Rock, 29 Norwich, Norfolk, 85 nostalgia, xiv, 143, 145, 210, 223 “Not in my name,” 27 nuclear weapons, 132, 135, 137, 180, 183, 192, 196, 204 nudge techniques, 13 Obama, Barack, 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158, 172 Obamacare, 172 objectivity, xiv, 13, 75, 136, 223 and crowd-based politics, 5, 7, 24–5 and death, 94 and Descartes, 37 and experts, trust in, 28, 32, 33, 51, 53, 64, 86, 89 and Hayek, 163, 164, 170 and markets, 169, 170 and photography, 8 and Scientific Revolution, 48, 49 and statistics, 72, 74, 75, 82, 88 and telepathic communication, 179 and war, 58, 125, 134, 135, 136, 146 Occupy movement, 5, 10, 24, 61 Oedipus complex, 109 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 Ohio, United States, 116 oil crisis (1973), 166 “On Computable Numbers” (Turing), 181 On War (Clausewitz), 130 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 171 opiates, 105, 116, 172–3 opinion polling, 65, 80–81, 191 Orbán, Viktor, 87, 146 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 72 Oxford, Oxfordshire, 85 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 Oxford University, 56, 151 OxyContin, 105, 116 pacifism, 8, 20, 44, 151 pain, 102–19, 172–3, 224 see also chronic pain painkillers, 104, 105, 116, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 parabiosis, 149 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Paul, Ronald, 154 PayPal, 149 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195, 208 penicillin, 94 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 pesticides, 205 Petty, William, 55–9, 67, 73, 85, 167 pharmacology, 142 Pielke Jr., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”


pages: 335 words: 97,468

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

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

Why was it so hard to have a decent, straightforward conversation with patients? An outspoken critic of the role that money plays in medicine, he found the fact that hospitals could do well by serving people so badly unacceptable. Ring wasn’t alone in asking these questions. The struggle to pass Obamacare, an inadequate solution that was the first politically acceptable proposal for fifty years, had left most professionals in the industry jaded, cynical and resigned. That it had had to be defended, not enlarged, only made matters worse. Experiments? The whole system felt like a failed experiment – bloated, corrupt, too big, too old and too complex to change.

Archibald, 53 Moorcraft, Penny, 289–90, 291 morality, 14, 20, 26, 62, 95, 139, 159, 177, 222, 223, 265, 280, 286, 312, 317 Morning Star, 200 Morrison, Toni, 42, 194 motivation, 36, 41, 118, 126, 164, 216–18, 252, 255 Moyes, Richard, 308–9 Mozart, Amadeus, 71 MRI scanning, 43, 136, 210 Mulally, Alan, 253 Mullis, Kay, 83 multiple schlerosis (MS), 82, 89 Munch, Edvard, 15, 274 Munich Agreement (1938), 53 MUSE, 70, 72–3 Mussolini, Benito, 71 Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), 73–5, 80, 97 Myers, Isabel, 73, 74 Narragansett Pier, 13 narrative, fallacy of, 47 National Assembly of Wales, 309 National Economic Council (US), 28 National Health Service (NHS), 259 National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (US), 260 National Rifle Association (NRA), 268 National Union of Miners (NUM), 270 natural disasters, 4, 15 Natural History Unit (NHU), 109 NBC, 111 neighbourhood care, 125 neighbourhood schools, 133 neighbours/neighbourhood, 2, 5, 6, 41, 94–5, 125, 133, 279, 312 Neruda, Pablo, 151 Nessi, Marzio, 213–17, 227 neuroticism, 92 neutrino detectors, 204 New Hampshire University, 114 New Lens scenarios, 156–7 New York Stock Exchange, 260 New York Times (NYT), 208 newgenics, 98 Newton, Isaac, 19 Next, 117 Ngo Dinh Diem, 54 NGOs, 56, 166 NHS, 259 Nine West, 117 Nipah, 298, 302 N95, 246 Nobel Prize, 24, 69, 70, 89, 98, 207, 216, 219 Nokia, 246–7, 249–51 nomenklatura, 121 Nordmarka, 190 normal line, 19, 23 Norris, Peter, 254 not-knowing, 62, 67, 100, 102, 108, 172, 177, 191, 193, 201, 205, 242, 268, 295, 314 noucentisme, 225 novel methodology, 30 NRA, 268 nuclear warfare, 205–6, 299, 308 nursery history, 59 Obama, Barack, 56 Obamacare, 128 Obrador, Andrés Manuel López, 173 OECD, 30 oil industry, 154–8 Old Vic Theatre, 276 ‘Olivia’ anecdote, 271–4, 295 Olympic Games, 227 O’Mahony, Yulia, 118–19, 120–1 O’Neil, Cathy, 5, 78 OPEC, 155 openness, 92 operating systems, 246–7 optimism, 8–9, 22, 161, 187, 229, 264, 286, 317 oracles, 2, 28 organic agriculture, 113 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), see OECD Organizational Health Index (OHI), 247 Orwell, George, 226 Ostrich, 166 OurLivesOurVote, 268 outcome, 62–3 overload, 44 overreach, 234 Oxford Martin School, 29, 30 Oxford University, 95, 215 OXXO, 151 pandemics, 57–9, 298, 300 (see also epidemic) paradox, 156–7 parenting, 70–3 Paris Accord, 116, 159 Parkinson’s disease, 82 Parks, Rosa, 56 passive investment funds, 27, 29 passive observation, 26, 40, 103, 269, 314 passivity, 96, 102 Patagonia, 200 Patau’s syndrome, 89 patented machine learning, 70 Paterson, Katie, 180, 185–6, 190, 191–2, 194 pathogens, 297 Patrick, Peter, 144, 147 PayLess, 117 Peace Prize, 219 penicillin, 84 Pentland, Alex, 101 Pentland’s well-ordered moor, 103 perfectionism, 9, 80, 100, 126, 138, 285, 318 personality, 65, 73–6, 80, 91–2 personality tests, 76 Persons, Warren, 16, 20–1, 23, 26, 31, 41 PET scanning, 210 Petretti, Silvia, 263, 267, 321 philosophers, 177 photovoltaics, 160 Picasso, Pablo, 15, 178, 197, 226 Pinnington, Elizabeth, 169 ‘Pits and Perverts’ benefit ball, 264 ‘plastic straw’ moments, 315 Plomin, Robert, 91–3, 94–6 Plummer, Daryl, 34–6 poetry, 151, 190, 194, 196, 278 Pol Pot, 287 Polaroid, 248 political discontent, 4 polling, 75 pollution, 2, 14, 111, 282 polymerase chain reaction (PCR), 83 Popper, Karl, 51, 61, 232 Porter, Michael, 115 Post Office Tower, London, 226 Pound, Ezra, 194 Power Rangers, 68 Prague Spring, 55 precision education, 96 predetermination, 7, 46, 50, 153, 174, 178 prediction, 4, 6, 13–103, 120, 166, 183, 199, 219, 258, 280, 298, 301, 313, 321 pro-creation tickets, 97 probability, 37–41, 87, 89, 93, 155–6, 161, 247 procreative benevolence, 98 Profectus, 304 profiling, 5, 20, 33, 69, 73–89, 100–2, 297 progress, 2–3, 8, 15, 51, 70, 83–4, 98, 114, 175, 182, 269, 274, 280, 303, 309, 317 propaganda, 1, 9, 26, 31, 32, 40–1, 62, 100, 286 prophets, 5, 39, 285 prospection, 1–2 Prosperity Paradox, 156 protease inhibitors, 265–7 protest, history of, 59 protoDUNE, 204, 216 Proust, Marcel, 176 pseudo-science, 21, 195 psychographic profiling, 76, 84 psychological profiling, 5 public trust, 221, 234 punditry, 5, 7, 16, 18, 20, 27–30, 35–6 Pygmalion effect, 76 Rabbit, Peter, 15 RadioShack, 117 Rand Corporation, 152 Rand Kardex Company, 18 Ranney, Ambrose, 14 rationing, 93, 96 Reader, Sally, 291 Reagan, Ronald, 28, 260 Rees, Martin, 317–18 referenda, 39, 140–7 Reid, Richard, 85 rejection, 7, 26, 37, 78, 102, 132, 144, 155–6, 196, 223, 226, 277, 313 religion, 2, 4, 20, 139, 224, 238, 239, 278, 285, 295, 307 religious strife, 4 Rembrandt, 277 Renner, Michael J., 94 Reos Partners, 167, 322 Repository for Germinal Choice, 98 revolution, 15, 55, 60, 91, 122, 125, 163, 184, 193 Rift Valley fever, 302–3 Rilke, René, 185 Ring, David, 128, 130–1, 133–5, 137 Roche, 79 Rockport, 117 Rohe, Mies van der, 226 Rosenzweig, Mark R., 94 ‘Rosina’ anecdote, 173 RTÉ, 145 Rubbia, Carlo, 207, 216 rules-bound games, 107–8 Rumi, 296 Russell, Bertrand, 97 Russia Today (RT), 111 Sagrada Família, 224–8, 232 St Margaret’s Hospice, 289–94, 321 St Patrick’s Cathedral, 260 Samaritans, 119 same-sex marriage, 140 Sanford Underground Research Facility, 204 Sanger Centre, 219–21, 224, 231, 232 Santayana, George, 51 Saquinavir, 266 Sargent, Singer, 15 SARS, 298 Saunders, Cicely, 289 scenario planning, 155–75 Schatz, Albert, 15 schizophrenia, 92, 93, 96 Schoenberg, Arnold, 197 Schrödinger, Erwin, 206 Schubert, Franz, 277 scientific management, 120, 199 Scotland, independence sort by, 39 Seagram Building, 226 Sears, 117 Second World War, 54, 73, 80, 99, 147, 152, 162, 164, 273–4, 279 seedbanks, 306, 316 segregation, 33, 97, 129 self-discipline, 19, 230 self-interest, 23, 29, 36, 174 Sencer, David, 58–9 sensitive humility, 192 Shafak, Elif, 191 Shakespeare, William, 31, 108–9, 184, 195, 198, 275–6 shamanism, 2 Sharper Image, 247 Sheffield Health Geeks, 118 Shell Oil Corporation, 154–66 passim short-termism, 78, 308 sickle-cell anaemia, 89 Siilasmaa, Risto, 248–50 ‘Silence = Death’ campaign, 265 Silicon Valley, 33, 129, 246, 285 Skidelsky, Robert, 25 Sky, 111 ‘sleeping beauties’, 82 sleight of hand, 3 Sloane Kettering Cancer Center, 296 social connection, 103 social efficiency, 101 ‘social rubbish’, 97 social turmoil, 4 soft data, 156, 159, 168 ‘something for everyone’, 76 soothsaying, 2 Sophocles, 177 Spence, Basil, 226 Spiritual Association of the Devotees of Saint Joseph, 224 SSC, 209 stability, 17–18, 22, 56, 113, 154, 158, 282 Standard Life (SL), 251 Stanford, 273 statistics, 16, 20, 23, 40, 74, 82, 92, 136, 139, 178 stereotyping, 79–80, 93, 95, 151 sterilisation, 97 Stonyfield, 113–14, 115 Strauss, Levi, 274 Stravinsky, Igor, 15 streptomycin, 15 Suez Crisis, 53 Sugrañes, Domènec, 225 Suharto, Tommy, 254 Sulston, John, 219 Sumpter, Donald, 195 super-collider projects, 185, 204–32 super-forecasting, 37, 38, 41, 63 SUperSYmmetry (SUSY), 216 surrender, 7, 36, 96, 102, 103, 202, 242, 319 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 309 SUSY, 216 Svalbard, 306–7, 316 swine flu, 57, 58 Symbian, 247 Syngenta, 160 Szabłowski, Witold, 121 Tambo, Oliver, 258 Tate, 186 taxation, 28 taxi drivers/driving, 42–6, 63, 181, 314 TB, 14–15, 19, 41 Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), 257–8, 268 terrorism, 15, 36, 85–6, 173, 305 test-tube baby, first-ever, 222 Tetlock, Philip, 5, 27–8, 36–7, 40 Texas University, 129, 163 Thamotheram, Raj, 279, 294 Thatcher, Margaret, 209 Thiel, Peter, 286 Third Law of Motion, 19 THT, 257–8, 268 Thunberg, Greta, 269, 317 Tóibín, Colm, 179 Toys “R” Us, 248 track record, 5, 28, 41 trade wars, 4 Transcend, 283 transformation programmes, 116, 166, 199 transhumanism, 280, 283–7 Trump, Donald, 4, 28, 39, 40, 170, 176 trust, 2, 9, 17, 19, 28, 41, 54, 70, 103, 108, 112, 140, 151, 163–5, 172, 182–7, 201, 211, 221–2, 234, 244, 249, 252, 255, 266, 270, 302, 304–7, 316, 318 tuberculosis, see TB 21/7, 85 23andMe, 95 Twitter, 4 tyranny, 7, 63, 121–2 Umbert, Esteve, 229–30 Unified Planning Machine, 154 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 312 United Nations (UN), 309, 313 unknowns, density of, 17 urban crowding, 14 US Congress, 1, 24, 58, 264 utopia, 6, 103, 312, 313 vaccines, 14, 57–8, 297–304, 298–304 Venter, Craig, 219 Vera Drake, 185, 192 Vidal, Francesc de Paula Quintana i, 227 Vietnam War, 53–4 Vision for Slovenia, 162–5 volatility, 3, 4, 17–18, 147, 155, 157, 224, 237 W boson, 207, 216 Wack, Pierre, 154, 155–6, 159, 168 Waksman, Selman, 15 Wall Street, 20 Walmart, 151 war on cancer, 82 Warnock Commission, 222, 223, 234 Warnock, Mary, 222–3, 316 Washington Mutual, 248 wasteful exuberance, 20 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 97 wellbeing, 118, 156, 164, 309, 312 Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015) (Wales), 309, 310, 311, 313 Wellcome Sanger Institute, 219, 224, 231 Wellcome Trust, 85 Wells, H.


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

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

Out of the hundreds of thousands of visitors on October 1, 2013, a total of six users completed and submitted their applications and selected an insurance plan on the day of launch. The website became a national punch line. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart joked to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services at the time, “I’m going to try and download every movie ever made, and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first.” To fix HealthCare.gov and build up the website’s capacity, private contractors, including Mikey Dickerson from Google, headed to Washington, D.C. By December 1, the website could handle 35,000 concurrent users, still far below demand but a big improvement.

CDC’s total budget runs Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FY 2021 President’s Budget, CDC, accessed March 1, 2021, cdc.gov. “You’ve got to be” Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, “ ‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?,’ ” Atlantic, May 21, 2020. $684 million was spent “ ‘Obamacare’ National Marketing Campaign to Cost Nearly $700 Million,” CBS DC, July 24, 2013. the website had massive problems ABC123, “The Failed Launch of www.HealthCare.gov,” Technology and Operations Management, Harvard Business School, Nov. 18, 2016. Jon Stewart joked Ibid. To fix HealthCare.gov Ibid.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Among Democrats, the most popular issues in the relevant period include health care (#ACA, for the Affordable Care Act), student loans (#DontDoubleMyRate), and employment (#JOBS). The Republicans’ top issues are not so different: employment (#4jobs), themselves (#tcot), and health care (#Obamacare). But the two parties do use radically different frames. The term #ACA, preferred by Democrats, has a positive or neutral valence about the Affordable Care Act, whereas #Obamacare and #Fullrepeal, favored by Republicans, are clearly meant to be negative. Like political activists, members of Congress can be seen as hashtag entrepreneurs. They choose a particular frame: #AllLives Matter, #TheSystemIsRigged, or #CorruptHillary.


Lonely Planet's Best of USA by Lonely Planet

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, mass immigration, obamacare, off-the-grid, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, the High Line, the payments system, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration

This one related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama’s program to extend healthcare through subsidies to millions of uninsured Americans. The court upheld key provisions of the law (the second time the Supreme Court had ruled on Obamacare), though the future of the ACA remains far from certain. Since the law’s implementation the House and Senate had tried (unsuccessfully) to repeal Obamacare more than 50 times. Despite congressional obstructionism, the program has been a success, allowing over 16 million uninsured Americans to obtain coverage. Changing Cityscapes Cities are booming in America, growing at a faster rate than the rest of the country.


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

He’d gotten hooked on the subject after realizing that Safeway’s rising medical costs threatened to someday bankrupt the company if he didn’t do something to tame them. He’d pioneered innovative wellness and preventive health programs for his employees and become an advocate for universal health coverage, making him one of the only Republican CEOs to embrace many of the tenets of Obamacare. Like Dr. J, he was serious about his own health. He worked out on a treadmill at five every morning and lifted weights in the evenings after dinner. At Burd’s invitation, Elizabeth came to the supermarket chain’s headquarters in Pleasanton, on the other side of San Francisco Bay, to make a presentation.

Rather, it was what its name implied: an interview whose tone was usually friendly and nonconfrontational. Moreover, her message of bringing disruption to an old and inefficient industry was bound to play well with the Journal editorial page’s pro-business, anti-regulation ethos. Nor did Rago, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for tough editorials dissecting Obamacare, have any reason to suspect that what Elizabeth was telling him wasn’t true. During his visit to Palo Alto, she had shown him the miniLab and the six-blade side by side and he had volunteered for a demonstration, receiving what appeared to be accurate lab results in his email in-box before he even left the building.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

For the US, see Stiglitz, 336–55. 51 Interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail, 6 July 2002. 52 For more discussion and references see Mcquaig and Brooks, 121–3. 10. A TROUBLED RELATIONSHIP: MODERN ECONOMICS AND US 1 Avik, Roy, ‘ACA Architect: “The Stupidity of the American Voter” Led Us to Hide Obamacare’s True Costs from the Public’, Forbes, 10 November 2014. 2 Coyle, D. (2002), Sex, Drugs and Economics (New York: Texere), 226. 3 Caplan, B. (2007), The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 30. 4 Caplan, 201. 5 Sapienza, Paola, and Zingales, Luigi (2013), ‘Economic Experts versus Average Americans’, American Economic Review, 103 (3), 636–42. 6 Lazear, E. (2000), ‘Economic Imperialism’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115 (1), 99–144.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

So I’d focused on winning the midafternoon, when office workers hit refresh on my blog at Politico. I’d persuaded a Politico techie to embed a bit of tracking software on my site so I wouldn’t have to wait for clunky updates from headquarters, and I watched it jealously, pleased when I had forty thousand views a day and thrilled when Drudge put me over one hundred thousand. But since the Obamacare battle of 2010, that traffic had plateaued. And I could see that all my sources, all my readers, even my crazy and abusive commenters, had moved on to Twitter, where I was spending more and more time too. I tried to explain some of this to Jonah, but I felt we parted in a state of mutual incomprehension.

See also MIT Media Lab “matchmaking” events, 15–16 Mayer, Kevin, 196, 199–200 Mayer, Marissa, 64–65 McCain, John, 167, 248–49, 251 McCain Institute, 250 McCarthy, Megan, 85 McCollum, Ashley, 193 McEnroe, John, 28 McInnes, Gavin, 97, 139, 184, 290 McKinsey consulting firm, 225 McNeill, Caitlin, 209–10 “meaningful social interactions” metric, 272–75, 284 Media Matters, 191 Meier, Barry, 249, 258 memes and Bannon’s political activism, 117 and BuzzFeed’s competition, 196, 284 and BuzzFeed’s journalism, 280 and BuzzFeed’s news and social content, 151, 167 and BuzzFeed’s traffic sources, 123, 126–27, 153 and Contagious Media Showdown, 48–49 and Gionet, 295 and political campaigns, 254 and right-wing media, 186, 188, 192 and social engagement on Facebook, 276–77 and “the Dress” viral post, 210–11 Mensch, Louise, 255–56 Mercer, Robert, 177 Merkley, Jeff, 295 MetaFilter, 3 #MeToo movement, 100 Millard, Wenda Harris, 106, 169 Miller, Katherine, 194, 240 Miller, Zeke, 166 Mini Cooper, 47 misogyny, 143, 184 MIT Media Lab, 1–2, 8, 11, 47 mobile phones, 151, 262 Modi, Narendra, 243 Morales, Oscar, 179, 240 Moreover, 16–18, 20, 51, 138 Morgan Stanley, 120 Morin, Dave, 216 Moss, Kate, 57 Mosseri, Adam, 211 Movable Type software, 34 MoveOn.org, 180–81, 237 Moyers, Bill, 98 MSN, 196 MSNBC, 255–56 MTV, 73, 110, 127–28, 154–55, 269 Mucha, Zenia, 117 mullet strategy, 79–80 Murdoch, Rupert, 53, 56, 255, 272 mybarackobama.com, 111, 114 MySpace, 93, 111 N NAACP, 135 National Review, 167 National Rifle Association (NRA), 25–28, 129, 187 native advertising, 130, 266 NBC, 268–69, 279–80, 283, 301, 303 NBCUniversal, 238, 300 Negations, 7 nepotism, 283 netroots, 29 Netscape, 207 New Black Panther Party, 187 Newmark, Craig, 281 new Right, 41, 43 NewsBlogger, 16 News Feed (Facebook) and BuzzFeed’s news and social content, 160–62 and BuzzFeed’s traffic growth, 205 and BuzzFeed’s traffic sources, 152 and funding for Ratter, 216 and origin of social media politics, 115 and social engagement on Facebook, 273 and “the Dress” viral post, 211 and Upworthy, 182–83 NewsGuild, 282 Newsweek, 33, 70 New Yorker, 207, 249 New York magazine, 54, 181 New York Observer, 57, 156 New York Post, 86 New York Times and anti-NRA efforts, 28–29 and BuzzFeed’s influence, 186 and BuzzFeed’s layoffs, 280–82 and BuzzFeed’s SPAC deal, 301 and BuzzFeed’s traffic growth, 167 and changing media environment, 218 and coverage of Trump presidency, 269 and Denton’s wedding, 213–14 and Disney’s bid to buy BuzzFeed, 196 and Facebook’s dominance of social media, 270 and Facebook’s political content, 238 on Gawker scandals, 54 and news aggregation–distribution startups, 15 Peretti’s address to board, 218–20 and political blogs, 33 and revival of legacy media, 220–30 and shifting strategy at Huffington Post, 81 and social engagement on Facebook, 275–76 and social media politics, 115 and splintering of internet media, 298 and the Steele Dossier, 248–49, 255, 256 and traffic monitoring tools, 105 Wirecutter acquisition, 287 Nguyen, Dao, 192, 244, 267, 288 Nielsen ratings, 150 Nike, 2–4, 7–8, 10–11, 27, 149, 288, 300, 302 Nisenholtz, Martin, 222, 223 Nolan, Hamilton, 176 NowThisNews, 283 “Numa Numa Dance” (video), 72 O Obama, Barack and Breitbart’s political background, 43 and BuzzFeed’s traffic sources, 155–56 and Facebook’s influence, 152, 177 and Facebook’s political content, 240 and Harman’s investment in Huffington Post, 120 and Harman’s support, 118–19 and Huffington Post’s political content, 107–8 and Huffington Post’s traffic, 70, 116 Iger’s access to, 197 and Lerer’s political clout, 149 Obamacare, 158 and online political activism, 132, 134–35, 152 and Pariser’s background, 180 presidential campaign, 102–3, 106, 109–15 and right-wing media, 186, 191 and shape of today’s internet media, 304 and the Steele Dossier, 250 Tkacik’s support for, 94, 97 and Wonkette’s political content, 31 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 277, 284 Occupy Wall Street, 166 Ochs, Adolph, 222 Oddjack blog, 55–56 OkCupid, 149 O’Keefe, James, 133–34, 135 O’Malley, Martin, 168 One D at a Time (Egan), 92 One Million Voices Against FARC, 113, 131–32 The Onion, 180 Openbook, 206 O’Reilly, Bill, 135 Oxfeld, Jesse, 56 Ozy, 195, 284–85, 286, 299 P pac-manning, 81–82 Page, Larry, 64 Palihotel, 197 Palin, Sarah, 82 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 46 paparazzi, 141–42 Pariser, Eli, 179–81, 183, 237, 269 Parsons, Richard, 25 Paul, Ron, 166 Paulson, Hank, 118 PayPal mafia, 85 paywalls, 224–26, 229, 269 Peacock streaming platform, 300 Pelosi, Nancy, 277 Peretti, Chelsea, 24, 47, 49, 58–59 Peretti, Della, 4–5 Peretti, Jonah acquisition of HuffPost, 286–87 and Arianna Huffington’s influence, 34 arrival in New York, 10, 12 and author’s background, 157–64, 247 background and education, 1–9 bet with Marlow, 1, 9, 49, 302–3 and Breitbart’s death, 178–79 and Breitbart’s departure from Huffington Post, 131–32 and Breitbart’s political background, 43 and Breitbart’s role at Huffington Post, 40 and BuzzFeed’s labor tensions, 280–86 and BuzzFeed’s news and social content, 167–69 and BuzzFeed’s office leases, 204–5, 319n204 and BuzzFeed’s SPAC deal, 300–303, 324n302 and BuzzFeed’s traffic, 122–29, 152–54, 154–56, 203–8 and competition with Huffington Post, 67–77 and Contagious Media Showdown, 51 and Daulerio’s background, 139 and Denton’s arrival in New York, 18 and Denton’s parties, 52, 58, 59 and devaluation of traffic, 264–70 and Disney’s bid to buy BuzzFeed, 196–202 and early virality projects, 24–29 and Facebook’s political content, 237–38, 244–45 and Gionet, 292 and Huffington Post’s investors, 116–18, 120 and Huffington Post’s launch, 44–50 and Huffington Post’s political content, 313n102 and Huffington Post’s strategy, 78–82 and launch of Upworthy, 180–83 meeting with New York Times board, 219–20, 222 and New York blogging scene, 21 Nike sweatshop email prank, 2–4, 7–8, 10–11, 27, 302 and political engagement, 102–8 and product marketing, 287–89 and revival of legacy media, 230 and right-wing media, 185, 191, 290 and rise of New York tech companies, 61–62 rivalry with Denton, 170–72, 177, 206, 315n126 and sale of Huffington Post, 147–51 and social engagement on Facebook, 272–74 and social media politics, 111 and the Steele Dossier, 248, 258 and “the Dress” viral post, 210–11 and venture capital investments, 213 and Zuckerberg’s purchase offer for BuzzFeed, 160–62, 165 Perpich, David, 220–27, 229–30 Perry, Rick, 158, 160 PETA, 153 Petraeus, David, 180 PewDiePie, 201 Philadelphia magazine, 138 photoshopping (photo retouching), 93 Pinterest, 182, 267, 269 Pitney, Nico, 159 plagiarism, 187, 193–94 Politico, 156, 158, 165, 180, 246 Pollak, Joel, 145 Poochareon, Ann, 47–48 Poole, Chris (“moot”), 117, 126–27, 290 populism, 166, 191, 238, 240, 243, 255, 302, 304 pornography, 57, 97–98.


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

My business emerged from the need to pay rent in a city where people bleed thousands of dollars to live in apartments far too small and dilapidated for their price tag. The $28,000 I made my first year in LA—cobbling together paychecks for freelance copywriting and editing and groveling at the altar of any place that published my essays and poetry—placed me squarely below the city’s “Very Low Income Level.”IV My father began to subsidize my Obamacare health insurance. And each month, I forked over an out-of-budget check for a one-bedroom apartment with a photogenic yet termite-ridden vaulted ceiling, one noisy and tepid AC unit, and a kitchen only slightly larger than a bathtub. I woke up most mornings to the ruckus of trash hauls, fire trucks, and the onslaught of gentrification construction.

My parents decided they’d try again to convince me to have WLS in preparation for the trip, in the hopes that no one would notice how much weight I’d gained since our last trip six years ago. I had no interest in WLS, but at twenty-six, I had just lost my health insurance coverage under my parents and was on Obamacare. It was working fine for my minimal medical needs, but my parents lured me with the promise of paying for better health insurance. And they’d chosen a plan that specifically covered all comprehensive costs related to WLS. They were offering more than insurance: I was promised a sports car, a new wardrobe, and plastic surgery for all the excess skin I’d have once I’d lost enough weight.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

He was going to ‘heal this nation’, close Guantánamo Bay, reform healthcare, bring peace to the Middle East. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize simply for having been elected. Amid such expectations he could not, poor chap, fail to disappoint. As Andrew Bacevich, a political scientist at Boston University, commented in 2013, amid the disappointments of Obamacare’s launch, ‘Obama himself may have turned out to be something of a dud, but the cult of presidential personality that has dominated American politics for decades now still persists.’ Doomed every four years to disappointment when a demigod turns out to have feet of clay, when the most powerful man in the world turns out not to have much power to change the world, the American people none the less never lose faith in the presidential religion.


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

From the “inadequate black male” diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC against subsidizing “losers’ mortgages,” to Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, to John Boehner’s screaming “Hell no!” on the House floor about Obamacare in 2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte.

But he struggled to win over even some of his own allies. Ben Nelson, the Democratic senator from Nebraska whom Obama helped elect, became an obstacle to healthcare reform. Joe Lieberman, whom Obama saved from retribution at the hands of Senate Democrats after Lieberman campaigned for Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain, similarly obstructed Obamacare. Among Republicans, senators who had seemed amenable to Obama’s agenda—Chuck Grassley, Susan Collins, Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe—rebuffed him repeatedly. The obstruction grew out of narrow political incentives. “If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Another urgent round of lobbying produced millions of dollars in emergency funding from the state, and using the breathing room these funds provided, the nuns sold the high school to the city, which turned it into a charter school, and the hospital to the Sinai Health System, a Jewish nonprofit organization that agreed to let Holy Cross remain a Catholic institution (that last arrangement had to go all the way to the Vatican for approval). Those moves, along with the passage of the federal law known as Obamacare, which enabled a lot of the hospital’s patients to pay for their medical care, made the hospital look safe, at least for a while. The only large new building in Chicago Lawn was the headquarters of the Chicago Police Department’s 8th District, which took up most of a block on Sixty-Third Street.

NBC Neal, Ann Collier Neal, Richard Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago net neutrality Netscape networks; academic study of; as alternative to institutions and transactions; as disruptive; human need and; inequality maintained by; political application of; pre-digital; users vs. income of New Century New Deal; dismantling of; repudiation of New Democracy, The (Weyl) New Freedom New Nationalism New Republic, The New York New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nicklaus, Jack NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act) Nissan Nixon, Richard Nobel laureates in economics Nonzero (Wright) normative, as economic term Nortel North American Free Trade Agreement nouveau riche Nudge (Thaler) Obama, Michelle Obama administration; auto industry and; donors to; during 2008 crisis; tech industry and Obamacare Obama Foundation Oberlin College Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oil prices old money O’Neill, Eugene online dating ontology “Open Letter on the Digital Economy” open marriage options market Orange County, CA O’Reilly, Tim Organization Man; rebellion against; replaced by network model; replaced by transaction model; see also corporations; General Motors; institutions Organization Man, The (Whyte) “Organization Study” (Sloan) OTC market; see also derivatives overnight lending systems Packard, David Page, Larry Painter, Patrick Palmer, Arnold PalmPilot Panetta, Leon paradigm shifts; in economics Park Forest, IL Partnoy, Frank Patil, DJ Patriot Act Paulson, Henry PayPal Pearl Harbor Pecora hearings Peltz, Nelson Penn Central Railroad pension funds; economy changed by; 401(k)s vs.; investing of; maintained by corporations Perot, Ross Perrin, Steve Peterson, Rafi Petito, Frank Pfleger, Michael phenomenology Phibro Pickens, T.


pages: 399 words: 114,787

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

It was one that nobody knew about yet and that, even if someone had, would not have been easy to defuse or even control. The problem had a name: Val. Chapter 25 Poor Brilliant Bill The front page of The Wall Street Journal on July 23, 2014, featured five articles: one each about Israel, Obamacare, Russia, cocktail-scented household cleaning supplies, and a certain German bank. “Fed Raps Deutsche Bank for Shoddy Reporting” was the headline in the newspaper’s lower right corner. The Journal had obtained a letter sent to the bank months earlier by Daniel Muccia, a senior vice president at the Federal Reserve in New York, one of the people responsible for regulating Deutsche on a day-to-day basis.

See Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena Moore, Simon, 287 Morandi, Michael, 208, 223, 226–27, 228, 230, 285 Morgan Grenfell, 24–25, 42–43 MortgageIT, 131–32, 136–37, 138, 139, 195, 340, 360 Mortgage Observer, 276–77 Moscow, John, 330–33 Moscow College of Agriculture, 213 Mountain Home Inn (Mill Valley), 256 Muccia, Daniel, 241–42, 249, 264 Mueller, Robert, 342–43 Museum Tower (New York City), 76, 95, 140 NatWest, 74 Nazi Party, 19–21, 23, 66–67, 182, 213 Neiberger, Christopher, 105, 105n Netanyahu, Benjamin, 159 New York blizzard of 1996, 71 New York Department of Financial Services, 236 New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), 69 New York Observer, 172, 276, 277, 336–37 New York Palace Hotel, 14n New York Post, 301, 301n New York Rangers, 168 New York Stock Exchange, 95–96 New York Times, 140, 169, 307 New York Yankees, 168 Noble, Dan, 354 North American blizzard of 1996, 71 Northern Pacific Railway, 13, 14–15, 17–18 North Korea and Sony Pictures hack, 252–55, 281 Northwestern University, 32 Nothing Personal: A Novel of Wall Street (Offit), 308 Obama, Barack, 147, 176, 269–70, 339–40, 344 citizenship conspiracy theories, 176, 269–70 Obamacare, 241 Occupy Wall Street, 163–64 O’Connor, Sinéad, 90, 229 Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 343 Offit, Avodah, 68 Offit, Kenneth, 68, 76 Offit, Mike, 68–72, 308 background of, 68–69 at Goldman Sachs, 69–72 Nothing Personal, 308 Trump campaign and presidency, 308–309, 334–36 Offit, Mike, at Deutsche Bank, 72–74, 170 firing, 80, 81, 308 hiring, 72–74 Trump loans, 75–80 Offit, Morris, 69 Offit, Sidney, 68, 78 O’Malley, Sean, 332 O’Neal, Stanley, 49, 86 Orange County bankruptcy, 40–41, 49, 295 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 146 Otting, Joseph, 343 OxyContin, 320 Palio di Siena, 154, 303 Panama Papers, 199, 341 Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, 237–38 PayPal, 322 Pelosi, Nancy, 353 Philipp, Michael, 55, 57, 63 appointment to vorstand, 85 hiring, 46–47 Mitchell and Estelle, 60–61 Mitchell’s death, 89 retirement, 101, 102 September 11 attacks (2001), 94–95 Pitt, Brad, 254 Postbank, 148, 234 Powell, Dina, 320 Presidential campaign of 2016.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

He spoke about the corrupting influence of money in politics. The last time a GOP candidate for president did that (Buddy Roemer, 2012), he was pushed off the national debate stage. Trump had no time for free trade. No respect for interventionist foreign policy. He promised universal health care—better than Obamacare. He attacked Wall Street. He loved Russia. This gap signaled to the wonks that Trump could not be the Republican nominee. But of course, most Republican voters—like most voters generally—know nothing about “Republican policies.” Beyond vague clichés (which, like “fiscally responsible,” have no connection to reality), most Americans identify with identities, not policies; with tribes, not truth.81 Political parties are attitudes, not collections of party platforms.

Yes, the Democrats could hold the House. It is completely possible for the Democrats to take the Senate and the presidency. But if the Democratic Party tries to win platform reform the way they win the battles of ordinary politics—in the media environment that is today—then reform will be rendered as Obamacare. It will become the lightning rod of resistance and ultimately fail to bring about the changes that this democracy so desperately needs. It is possible to imagine something more. I could see a presidential candidate making a pledge equivalent to Nancy Pelosi’s—a kind of POTUS 1 to parallel HR 1.


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Once politicians believe that their job is its creation and redistribution, to speak about health becomes a provocation. Trump was called a “populist” Ed Pilkington, “Trump turning US into ‘world champion of extreme inequality,’ UN envoy warns,” TG, Dec. 15, 2017. 13 million: Sy Mukherjee, “The GOP Tax Bill Repeals Obamacare’s Individual Mandate,” Fortune, Dec. 20, 2017. Trump quotation: “Excerpts from Trump’s Interview with the Times,” NYT, Dec. 28, 2017. On one level See Katznelson, Fear Itself, 33, sic passim. Cf Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity, 2000): “the dearth of workable solutions at their disposal needs to be compensated for by imaginary ones.”


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

mc_cid=b2a6abaa55&mc_eid=aeb68cfb98; National Science and Technology Council, Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Subcommittee, The National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan (Executive Office of the President, October 2016), https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/whitehouse_files/microsites/ostp/NSTC/national_ai_rd_strategic_plan.pdf. 48. AI Now, The AI Now Report: The Social and Economic Implications of Artificial Intelligence Technologies in the Near-Term, September 22, 2016, https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2016_Report.pdf. 49. Dan Diamond, “Obamacare: The Secret Jobs Program,” Politico, July 13, 2016), http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/07/what-is-the-effect-of-obamacare-economy-000164. 50. Alyssa Battistoni, “Living, Not Just Surviving,” Jacobin Magazine, August 2017, https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/living-not-just-surviving/. 51. Eamonn Fingleton, In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Andy Grove, “How America Can Create Jobs,” Bloomberg (July 1, 2010), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grove-how-america-can-create-jobs. 52.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy. Barack Obama1 This book is about freedom. It is about its loss as a result of policies designed to slow down what is presumed to be man-made global warming. Avoiding planetary catastrophe gives a president and the executive branch a higher dispensation than that granted by the Constitution. Obamacare was implemented under the Affordable Care Act. Implementation of the Clean Power Plan was by administrative fiat and the Senate bypassed when the United States ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement: America’s eighteenth-century Constitution is not going to be allowed to impede a project in which society is to be radically transformed through the agency of the state.

Wright Power Elite, The (1956) Mills, Mark Bottomless Well, The (2005) MISEREOR Lenten Campaign Mises, Ludwig von Moderate Party Montesquieu Montreal Protocol (1987) Moore, Patrick Moore, Stephen Fueling Freedom Moore Foundation Moore’s Law Morgan, John Pierpont Mossman, Walter Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Muir, John Müller, Werner Mulroney, Brian Myrdal, Alva Crisis in the Population Question Nobel Peace Prize recipient Myrdal, Gunnar Crisis in the Population Question Næss, Arne Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) National Academy of Engineering National Academy of Sciences (NAS) “Fossil Fuel Scenario: The Probability of a Crisis in the Biosphere, The,” National Research Council (NRC) report on acid rain (1981) National Audubon Society founding of (1905) National Cancer Institute Environmental Cancer Section National Climate Center (Australia) National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory National Socialism National Wildlife Federation nationalism Far Right natural gas pricing of shale gas Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Nature Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) National Sustainability Strategy Nature Conservancy Nazi Party Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Völkischer Beobachter Nazism Neeley, Josiah Netanyahu, Benyamin Netanyahu, Yonatan death of (1976) Netherlands Amsterdam Neue Zürcher Zeitung New Left ideology of New Republic New Scientist New York Times Newsweek Newman, Paul NextGen Niagara Falls Power Company Nicholson, Max Nierenberg, William director of Scripps Institution Nilson, Ulf nitric oxide emissions of nitrogen dioxide (NOx) emissions of Nixon, Richard administration of Project Independence Speech Nobel, Alfred Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth Spiral of Silence, The (1984) nongovernmental organizations (NGO) environmental North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea North Vietnam Hanoi Norway Norwegian Institute of Water Research nuclear power civil closure of stations commercial disasters popular opposition to Ny Teknik Obama, Barack administration of Clean Power Plan electoral victory of (2008) environmental policies of State of the Union Address (2010) State of the Union Address (2011) State of the Union Address (2014) State of the Union Address (2015) Obamacare Observer, The Odén, Svante Ofgem Ohio State University Institute of Polar Studies oil oil price shock (1973) OKG-Aktuellt Oldham, Jennifer Ono, Yoko Operation Entebbe (1976) Oppenheimer, Michael Oppenheimer, Robert Oreskes, Naomi Merchants of Doubt (2010) Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Orwell, George 1984 Ostrom, Elinor Ostwald, Wilhelm O’Sullivan, Terry Ott, Hermann Overrein, Lars Oxford University ozone Pacific Gas and Electric Company Paepcke, Walter Palestine Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) training camps of Palme, Olof administration of Christmas speech (1972) death of electoral victory of (1982) foreign state visits of Palme Commission on Disarmament and Security Parade Paris Climate Conference/Agreement (2015) Article Three Park Foundation Peace Movement Generals for Peace and Disarmament Pearce, Fred peat carbon intensity of Peccei, Aurelio Peiser, Benny Perez de Cuellar, Javier UN Secretary-General Persian Gulf War (1990–1991) Kuwaiti oil fires (1991) Peto, Richard Petrén, Alfred Pew, Joseph N., Jr.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

For example, in the United States, when a worker loses their job (and with it, their health insurance), they are offered the “choice” of buying into their former employer’s insurance plan via the 1985 Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (more often known by its sinister acronym, COBRA). Since 2011, they could also buy into a plan under the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), where the onus is on the unemployed worker to make the right choice in a market exchange. But if the premiums for a family are hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month to buy into COBRA or Obamacare, how much “choice” does a newly unemployed worker actually have? The last scene of Parasite helps explain why many members of the middle and underclass in societies around the globe reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic with far less fury at oligarchs than they might have.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Here’s How He Responded,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-socialism-20190213-story.html; Tom van der Voort, “In the Beginning: Medicare and Medicaid,” Miller Center, July 24, 2017, https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/us-domestic-policy/beginning-medicare-and-medicaid; “Why Calling Obamacare ‘Socialism’ Makes No Sense,” ABC News, October 1, 2013, https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/calling-obamacare-socialism-makes-sense-analysis/story?id=20435162; Fred Sievert, “‘Build Back Better’? Beware of the ‘Free’ Gifts of Socialism, America,” Fox Business, November 5, 2021, https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/build-back-better-free-gifts-socialism-fred-sievert. 33.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

‘No man is an island … therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’33 Decent societies do not give people the option of being unable to afford necessary medical treatment, or of finding themselves destitute in old age, even if these options have in some sense been chosen by the individuals themselves. Or at least enough people feel that way to make it impossible, even if it were practicable, to implement solutions to the challenges of everyday risk based exclusively on personal choices and market solutions. ‘Obamacare’ – President Obama’s scheme for universal health provision in the USA – is the last skirmish in the battle to provide universal healthcare throughout the developed world. In other countries this issue is no longer contested, although the precise mechanisms and the levels of provision vary. Private health insurers, where they exist, are generally either social agencies or organisations that pool risks on behalf of employers.

.: Hyperion 220 Loomis, Carol 108 lotteries 65, 66, 68, 72 Lucas, Robert 40 Lynch, Dennios 108 Lynch, Peter 108, 109 M M-Pesa 186 Maastricht Treaty (1993) 243, 250 McCardie, Sir Henry 83, 84, 282, 284 McGowan, Harry 45 Machiavelli, Niccolò 224 McKinley, William 44 McKinsey 115, 126 Macy’s department store 46 Madoff, Bernard 29, 118, 131, 132, 177, 232, 293 Madoff Securities 177 Magnus, King of Sweden 196 Manhattan Island, New York: and Native American sellers 59, 63 Manne, Henry 46 manufacturing companies, rise of 45 Marconi 48 marine insurance 62, 63 mark-to-market accounting 126, 128–9, 320n22 mark-to-model approach 128–9, 320n21 Market Abuse Directive (MAD) 226 market economy 4, 281, 302, 308 ‘market for corporate control, the’ 46 market risk 97, 98, 177, 192 market-makers 25, 28, 30, 31 market-making 49, 109, 118, 136 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MIFID) 226 Markkula, Mike 162, 166, 167 Markopolos, Harry 232 Markowitz, Harry 69 Markowitz model of portfolio allocation 68–9 Martin, Felix 323n5 martingale 130, 131, 136, 139, 190 Marx, Groucho 252 Marx, Karl 144, 145 Capital 143 Mary Poppins (film) 11, 12 MasterCard 186 Masters, Brooke 120 maturity transformation 88, 92 Maxwell, Robert 197, 201 Mayan civilisation 277 Meade, James 263 Means, Gardiner 51 Meeker, Mary 40, 167 Melamed, Leo 19 Mercedes 170 merchant banks 25, 30, 33 Meriwether, John 110, 134 Merkel, Angela 231 Merrill Lynch 135, 199, 293, 300 Merton, Robert 110 Metronet 159 Meyer, André 205 MGM 33 Microsoft 29, 167 middleman, role of the 80–87 agency and trading 82–3 analysts 86 bad intermediaries 81–2 from agency to trading 84–5 identifying goods and services required 80, 81 logistics 80, 81 services from financial intermediaries 80–81 supply chain 80, 81 transparency 84 ‘wisdom of crowds’ 86–7 Midland Bank 24 Milken, Michael 46, 292 ‘millennium bug’ 40 Miller, Bill 108, 109 Minuit, Peter 59, 63 Mises, Ludwig von 225 Mittelstand (medium-size business sector) 52, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172 mobile banking apps 181 mobile phone payment transfers 186–7 Modigliani-Miller theorem 318n9 monetarism 241 monetary economics 5 monetary policy 241, 243, 245, 246 money creation 88 money market fund 120–21 Moneyball phenomenon 165 monopolies 45 Monte Carlo casino 123 Monte dei Paschi Bank of Siena 24 Montgomery Securities 167 Moody’s rating agency 21, 248, 249, 313n6 moral hazard 74, 75, 76, 92, 95, 256, 258 Morgan, J.P. 44, 166, 291 Morgan Stanley 25, 40, 130, 135, 167, 268 Morgenthau, District Attorney Robert 232–3 mortality tables 256 mortgage banks 27 mortgage market fluctuation in mortgage costs 148 mechanised assessment 84–5 mortgage-backed securities 20, 21, 40, 85, 90, 100, 128, 130, 150, 151, 152, 168, 176–7, 284 synthetic 152 Mozilo, Angelo 150, 152, 154, 293 MSCI World Bank Index 135 muckraking 44, 54–5, 79 ‘mugus’ 118, 260 multinational companies, and diversification 96–7 Munger, Charlie 127 Munich, Germany 62 Munich Re 62 Musk, Elon 168 mutual funds 27, 108, 202, 206 mutual societies 30 mutualisation 79 mutuality 124, 213 ‘My Way’ (song) 72 N Napoleon Bonaparte 26 Napster 185 NASA 276 NASDAQ 29, 108, 161 National Economic Council (US) 5, 58 National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) 255 National Institutes of Health 167 National Insurance Fund (UK) 254 National Provincial Bank 24 National Science Foundation 167 National Westminster Bank 24, 34 Nationwide 151 Native Americans 59, 63 Nazis 219, 221 neo-liberal economic policies 39, 301 Netjets 107 Netscape 40 Neue Markt 170 New Deal 225 ‘new economy’ bubble (1999) 23, 34, 40, 42, 98, 132, 167, 199, 232, 280 new issue market 112–13 New Orleans, Louisiana: Hurricane Katrina disaster (2005) 79 New Testament 76 New York Stock Exchange 26–7, 28, 29, 31, 49, 292 New York Times 283 News of the World 292, 295 Newton, Isaac 35, 132, 313n18 Niederhoffer, Victor 109 NINJAs (no income, no job, no assets) 222 Nixon, Richard 36 ‘no arbitrage’ condition 69 non-price competition 112, 219 Norman, Montagu 253 Northern Rock 89, 90–91, 92, 150, 152 Norwegian sovereign wealth fund 161, 253 Nostradamus 274 O Obama, Barack 5, 58, 77, 194, 271, 301 ‘Obamacare’ 77 Occidental Petroleum 63 Occupy movement 52, 54, 312n2 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ slogan 305 off-balance-sheet financing 153, 158, 160, 210, 250 Office of Thrift Supervision 152–3 oil shock (1973–4) 14, 36–7, 89 Old Testament 75–6 oligarchy 269, 302–3, 305 oligopoly 118, 188 Olney, Richard 233, 237, 270 open market operations 244 options 19, 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 263 Osborne, George 328n19 ‘out of the money option’ 102, 103 Overend, Gurney & Co. 31 overseas assets and liabilities 179–80, 179 owner-managed businesses 30 ox parable xi-xii Oxford University 12 P Pacific Gas and Electric 246 Pan Am 238 Paris financial centre 26 Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards 295 partnerships 30, 49, 50, 234 limited liability 313n14 Partnoy, Frank 268 passive funds 99, 212 passive management 207, 209, 212 Patek Philippe 195, 196 Paulson, Hank 300 Paulson, John 64, 109, 115, 152, 191, 284 ‘payment in kind’ securities 131 payment protection policies 198 payments system 6, 7, 25, 180, 181–8, 247, 259–60, 281, 297, 306 PayPal 167, 168, 187 Pecora, Ferdinand 25 Pecora hearings (1932–34) 218 peer-to-peer lending 81 pension funds 29, 98, 175, 177, 197, 199, 200, 201, 208, 213, 254, 282, 284 pension provision 78, 253–6 pension rights 53, 178 Perkins, Charles 233 perpetual inventory method 321n4 Perrow, Charles 278, 279 personal financial management 6, 7 personal liability 296 ‘petrodollars’ 14, 37 Pfizer 96 Pierpoint Morgan, J. 165 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster (1987) 63 Ponzi, Charles 131, 132 Ponzi schemes 131, 132, 136, 201 pooled investment funds 197 portfolio insurance 38 Potts, Robin, QC 61, 63, 72, 119, 193 PPI, mis-selling of 296 Prebble, Lucy: ENRON 126 price competition 112, 219 price discovery 226 price mechanism 92 Prince, Chuck 34 private equity 27, 98, 166, 210 managers 210, 289 private insurance 76, 77 private sector 78 privatisation 39, 78, 157, 158, 258, 307 probabilistic thinking 67, 71, 79 Procter & Gamble 69, 108 product innovation 13 property and infrastructure 154–60 protectionism 13 Prudential 200 public companies, conversion to 18, 31–2, 49 public debt 252 public sector 78 Q Quandt, Herbert 170 Quandt Foundation 170 quantitative easing 245, 251 quantitative style 110–11 quants 22, 107, 110 Quattrone, Frank 167, 292–3 queuing 92 Quinn, Sean 156 R railroad regulation 237 railway mania (1840s) 35 Raines, Franklin 152 Rajan, Raghuram 56, 58, 79, 102 Rakoff, Judge Jed 233, 294, 295 Ramsey, Frank 67, 68 Rand, Ayn 79, 240 ‘random walk’ 69 Ranieri, Lew 20, 22, 106–7, 134, 152 rating agencies 21, 41, 84–5, 97, 151, 152, 153, 159, 249–50 rationality 66–7, 68 RBS see Royal Bank of Scotland re-insurance 62–3 Reagan, Ronald 18, 23, 54, 59, 240 real economy 7, 18, 57, 143, 172, 190, 213, 226, 239, 271, 280, 288, 292, 298 redundancy 73, 279 Reed, John 33–4, 48, 49, 50, 51, 242, 293, 314n40 reform 270–96 other people’s money 282–5 personal responsibility 292–6 principles of 270–75 the reform of structure 285–92 robust systems and complex structures 276–81 regulation 215, 217–39 the Basel agreements 220–25 and competition 113 the origins of financial regulation 217–19 ‘principle-based’ 224 the regulation industry 229–33 ‘rule-based’ 224 securities regulation 225–9 what went wrong 233–9 ‘Regulation Q’ (US) 13, 14, 20, 28, 120, 121 regulatory agencies 229, 230, 231, 235, 238, 274, 295, 305 regulatory arbitrage 119–24, 164, 223, 250 regulatory capture 237, 248, 262 Reich, Robert 265, 266 Reinhart, C.M. 251 relationship breakdown 74, 79 Rembrandts, genuine/fake 103, 127 Renaissance Technologies 110, 111, 191 ‘repo 105’ arbitrage 122 repo agreement 121–2 repo market 121 Reserve Bank of India 58 Reserve Primary Fund 121 Resolution Trust Corporation 150 retirement pension 78 return on equity (RoE) 136–7, 191 Revelstoke, first Lord 31 risk 6, 7, 55, 56–79 adverse selection and moral hazard 72–9 analysis by ‘ketchup economists’ 64 chasing the dream 65–72 Geithner on 57–8 investment 256 Jackson Hole symposium 56–7 Kohn on 56 laying bets on the interpretation of incomplete information 61 and Lloyd’s 62–3 the LMX spiral 62–3, 64 longevity 256 market 97, 98 mitigation 297 randomness 76 socialisation of individual risks 61 specific 97–8 risk management 67–8, 72, 79, 137, 191, 229, 233, 234, 256 risk premium 208 risk thermostat 74–5 risk weighting 222, 224 risk-pooling 258 RJR Nabisco 46, 204 ‘robber barons’ 44, 45, 51–2 Robertson, Julian 98, 109, 132 Robertson Stephens 167 Rockefeller, John D. 44, 52, 196 Rocket Internet 170 Rogers, Richard 62 Rogoff, K.S. 251 rogue traders 130, 300 Rohatyn, Felix 205 Rolls-Royce 90 Roman empire 277, 278 Rome, Treaty of (1964) 170 Rooney, Wayne 268 Roosevelt, Franklin D. v, 25, 235 Roosevelt, Theodore 43–4, 235, 323n1 Rothschild family 217 Royal Bank of Scotland 11, 12, 14, 24, 26, 34, 78, 91, 103, 124, 129, 135, 138, 139, 211, 231, 293 Rubin, Robert 57 In an Uncertain World 67 Ruskin, John 60, 63 Unto this Last 56 Russia defaults on debts 39 oligarchies 303 Russian Revolution (1917) 3 S Saes 168 St Paul’s Churchyard, City of London 305 Salomon Bros. 20, 22, 27, 34, 110, 133–4 ‘Salomon North’ 110 Salz Review: An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices 217 Samuelson, Paul 208 Samwer, Oliver 170 Sarkozy, Nicolas 248, 249 Savage, L.J. 67 Scholes, Myron 19, 69, 110 Schrödinger’s cat 129 Scottish Parliament 158 Scottish Widows 26, 27, 30 Scottish Widows Fund 26, 197, 201, 212, 256 search 195, 209, 213 defined 144 and the investment bank 197 Second World War 36, 221 secondary markets 85, 170, 210 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 20, 64, 126, 152, 197, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 247, 292, 293, 294, 313n6 securities regulation 225–9 securitisation 20–21, 54, 100, 151, 153, 164, 169, 171, 222–3 securitisation boom (1980s) 200 securitised loans 98 See’s Candies 107 Segarra, Carmen 232 self-financing companies 45, 179, 195–6 sell-side analysts 199 Sequoia Capital 166 Shad, John S.R. 225, 228–9 shareholder value 4, 45, 46, 50, 211 Sharpe, William 69, 70 Shell 96 Sherman Act (1891) 44 Shiller, Robert 85 Siemens 196 Siemens, Werner von 196 Silicon Valley, California 166, 167, 168, 171, 172 Simon, Hermann 168 Simons, Jim 23, 27, 110, 111–12, 124 Sinatra, Frank 72 Sinclair, Upton 54, 79, 104, 132–3 The Jungle 44 Sing Sing maximum-security gaol, New York 292 Skilling, Jeff 126, 127, 128, 149, 197, 259 Slim, Carlos 52 Sloan, Alfred 45, 49 Sloan Foundation 49 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), financing 165–72, 291 Smith, Adam 31, 51, 60 The Wealth of Nations v, 56, 106 Smith, Greg 283 Smith Barney 34 social security 52, 79, 255 Social Security Trust Fund (US) 254, 255 socialism 4, 225, 301 Société Générale 130 ‘soft commission’ 29 ‘soft’ commodities 17 Soros, George 23, 27, 98, 109, 111–12, 124, 132 South Sea Bubble (18th century) 35, 132, 292 sovereign wealth funds 161, 253 Soviet empire 36 Soviet Union 225 collapse of 23 lack of confidence in supplies 89–90 Spain: property bubble 42 Sparks, D.L. 114, 283, 284 specific risk 97–8 speculation 93 Spitzer, Eliot 232, 292 spread 28, 94 Spread Networks 2 Square 187 Stamp Duty 274 Standard & Poor’s rating agency 21, 99, 248, 249, 313n6 Standard Life 26, 27, 30 standard of living 77 Standard Oil 44, 196, 323n1 Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) 323n1 Stanford University 167 Stanhope 158 State Street 200, 207 sterling devaluation (1967) 18 stewardship 144, 163, 195–203, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213 Stewart, Jimmy 12 Stigler, George 237 stock exchanges 17 see also individual stock exchanges stock markets change in organisation of 28 as a means of taking money out of companies 162 rise of 38 stock-picking 108 stockbrokers 16, 25, 30, 197, 198 Stoll, Clifford 227–8 stone fei (in Micronesia) 323n5 Stone, Richard 263 Stora Enso 196 strict liability 295–6 Strine, Chancellor Leo 117 structured investment vehicles (SIVs) 158, 223 sub-prime lending 34–5, 75 sub-prime mortgages 63, 75, 109, 149, 150, 169, 244 Summers, Larry 22, 55, 73, 119, 154, 299 criticism of Rajan’s views 57 ‘ketchup economics’ 5, 57, 69 support for financialisation 57 on transformation of investment banking 15 Sunday Times 143 ‘Rich List’ 156 supermarkets: financial services 27 supply chain 80, 81, 83, 89, 92 Surowiecki, James: The Wisdom of Crowds xi swap markets 21 SWIFT clearing system 184 Swiss Re 62 syndication 62 Syriza 306 T Taibbi, Matt 55 tailgating 102, 103, 104, 128, 129, 130, 136, 138, 140, 152, 155, 190–91, 200 Tainter, Joseph 277 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 125, 183 Fooled by Randomness 133 Tarbell, Ida 44, 54 TARGET2 system 184, 244 TARP programme 138 tax havens 123 Taylor, Martin 185 Taylor Bean and Whitaker 293 Tea Party 306 technological innovation 13, 185, 187 Tel Aviv, Israel 171 telecommunications network 181, 182 Tesla Motors 168 Tetra 168 TfL 159 Thai exchange rate, collapse of (1997) 39 Thain, John 300 Thatcher, Margaret 18, 23, 54, 59, 148, 151, 157 Thiel, Peter 167 Third World debt problem 37, 131 thrifts 25, 149, 150, 151, 154, 174, 290, 292 ticket touts 94–5 Tobin, James 273 Tobin tax 273–4 Tolstoy, Count Leo 97 Tonnies, Ferdinand 17 ‘too big to fail’ 75, 140, 276, 277 Tourre, Fabrice ‘Fabulous Fab’ 63–4, 115, 118, 232, 293, 294 trader model 82, 83 trader, rise of the 16–24 elements of the new trading culture 21–2 factors contributing to the change 17–18 foreign exchange 18–19 from personal relationships to anonymous markets 17 hedge fund managers 23 independent traders 22–3 information technology 19–20 regulation 20 securitisation 20–21 shift from agency to trading 16 trading as a principal source of revenue and remuneration 17 trader model 82, 83 ‘trading book’ 320n20 transparency 29, 84, 205, 210, 212, 226, 260 Travelers Group 33, 34, 48 ‘treasure islands’ 122–3 Treasuries 75 Treasury (UK) 135, 158 troubled assets relief program 135 Truman, Harry S. 230, 325n13 trust 83–4, 85, 182, 213, 218, 260–61 Tuckett, David 43, 71, 79 tulip mania (1630s) 35 Turner, Adair 303 TWA 238 Twain, Mark: Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar 95–6 Twitter 185 U UBS 33, 134 UK Independence Party 306 unemployment 73, 74, 79 unit trusts 202 United States global dominance of the finance industry 218 house prices 41, 43, 149, 174 stock bubble (1929) 201 universal banks 26–7, 33 University of Chicago 19, 69 ‘unknown unknowns’ 67 UPS delivery system 279–80 US Defense Department 167 US Steel 44 US Supreme Court 228, 229, 304 US Treasury 36, 38, 135 utility networks 181–2 V value discovery 226–7 value horizon 109 Van Agtmael, Antoine 39 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 44 Vanguard 200, 207, 213 venture capital 166 firms 27, 168 venture capitalists 171, 172 Vickers Commission 194 Viniar, David 204–5, 233, 282, 283, 284 VISA 186 volatility 85, 93, 98, 103, 131, 255 Volcker, Paul 150, 181 Volcker Rule 194 voluntary agencies 258 W wagers and credit default swaps 119 defined 61 at Lloyd’s coffee house 71–2 lottery tickets 65 Wall Street, New York 1, 16, 312n2 careers in 15 rivalry with London 13 staffing of 217 Wall Street Crash (1929) 20, 25, 27, 36, 127, 201 Wall Street Journal 294 Wallenberg family 108 Walmart 81, 83 Warburg 134 Warren, Elizabeth 237 Washington consensus 39 Washington Mutual 135, 149 Wasserstein, Bruce 204, 205 Watergate affair 240 ‘We are the 99 per cent’ slogan 52, 305 ‘We are Wall Street’ 16, 55, 267–8, 271, 300, 301 Weber, Max 17 Weill, Sandy 33–4, 35, 48–51, 55, 91, 149, 293, 314n40 Weinstock, Arnold 48 Welch, Jack 45–6, 48, 50, 52, 126, 314n40 WestLB 169 Westminster Bank 24 Whitney, Richard 292 Wilson, Harold 18 windfall payments 14, 32, 127, 153, 290 winner’s curse 103, 104, 156, 318n11 Winslow Jones, Alfred 23 Winton Capital 111 Wolfe, Humbert 7 The Uncelestial City 1 Wolfe, Tom 268 The Bonfire of the Vanities 16, 22 women traders 22 Woodford, Neil 108 Woodward, Bob: Maestro 240 World Bank 14, 220 World.Com bonds 197 Wozniak, Steve 162 Wriston, Walter 37 Y Yellen, Janet 230–31 Yom Kippur War (1973) 36 YouTube 185 Z Zurich, Switzerland 62


pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

This concern for women’s health also extends to the political sphere: it took a woman (Paula Sherriff, the Labour MP for Dewsbury) to set up the UK’s first All-Party Parliamentary group for women’s health in 2016. It was two rogue female Republicans who scotched Donald Trump’s attempts to repeal Obamacare (which would have disproportionately impacted on women), voting three times against his proposals.20 And women are making a difference in politics more generally. It was two women, Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded the UN-backed organisation Data2x that is aimed specifically at closing the global gender data gap.

via=gdpr-consent#methodology 14 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-onhistory/may-2010/what-the-data-reveals-about-women-historians 15 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2015/the-rise-and-decline-of-history-specializations-over-the-past-40-years 16 http://duckofminerva.com/2015/08/new-evidence-on-gender-bias-in-irsyllabi.html 17 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/23/gender.uk 18 Sex Discrimination Law Review (January 2018), www.fawcettsociety.org.uk 19 Nielsen, Mathias Wullum, Andersen, Jens Peter, Schiebinger, Londa and Schneider, Jesper W. (2017), ‘One and a half million medical papers reveal a link between author gender and attention to gender and sex analysis’, Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 791–6 20 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/18/15991020/3-gop-women-tank-obamacare-repeal 21 Ransby, B. (2006), ‘Katrina, Black Women, and the Deadly Discourse on Black Poverty in America’, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 3:1, 215–22, DOI:10.1017/S1742058X06060140 22 https://grist.org/article/hurricane-maria-hit-women-in-puerto-rico-the-hardest-and-theyre-the-ones-building-it-back/ 23 https://www.vogue.com/projects/13542078/puerto-rico-after-hurricane-maria-2/ Index of Searchable Terms academia Académie française acetylsalicylic acid Achilles tendon acute coronary syndrome adverse drug reaction (ADR) Affordable Care Act (2010) Afghanistan African Americans agency workers Agenda agriculture Ahmed, Samira Alaska alcohol algorithms Ali, Syed all-women shortlists (AWS) AllBright alt-right alternative work Alvarez, Janica Always Alzheimer’s disease ambition American Academy of Family Physicians American Academy of Pediatrics American Airlines American Civil War (1861–5) American Express American Heart Association Amnesty International anaemia anatomy Anderson, Chris angina angiograms Angola animal testing antibiotics antidepressants antihistamines antipsychotics anxiety aorta Apple Applebaum, Anne architects Argentina Aristotle Armenia Arrigoitia, Melissa Fernández artificial intelligence (AI) asbestos Asperger’s syndrome aspirin Assange, Julian Assassin’s Creed assertiveness asylums Atlantic attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) ATX augmented-reality glasses Austen, Jane austerity.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

So there will be plenty of dead-end jobs without security or benefits.* This will be despite the fact that the humans in the caregiving loop might be absolutely essential to the well-being of those being cared for. *This is being written in America, in advance of the 2012 election. It is possible that “Obamacare” will stand or fall, but in either case, the larger pattern described here will persist unless it is addressed more fundamentally than by health-care finance reform. Meanwhile, the programming of caregiving robots will be utterly dependent on cloud software that in turn will be dependent on observing millions of situations and outcomes.

., 75, 91, 266–67 New York Times, 109 Nobel Prize, 40, 118, 143n nodes, network, 156, 227, 230, 241–43, 350 “no free lunch” principle, 55–56, 59–60 nondeterministic music, 23n nonlinear solutions, 149–50 nonprofit share sites, 59n, 94–95 nostalgia, 129–32 NRO, 199–200 nuclear power, 133 nuclear weapons, 127, 296 nursing, 97–100, 123, 296n nursing homes, 97–100, 269 Obama, Barack, 79, 100 “Obamacare,” 100n obsolescence, 89, 95 oil resources, 43, 133 online stores, 171 Ono, Yoko, 212 ontologies, 124n, 196 open-source applications, 206, 207, 272, 310–11 optical illusions, 121 optimism, 32–35, 45, 130, 138–40, 218, 230n, 295 optimization, 144–47, 148, 153, 154–55, 167, 202, 203 Oracle, 265 Orbitz, 63, 64, 65 organ donors, 190, 191 ouroboros, 154 outcomes, economic, 40–41, 144–45 outsourcing, 177–78, 185 Owens, Buck, 256 packet switching, 228–29 Palmer, Amanda, 186–87 Pandora, 192 panopticons, 308 papacy, 190 paper money, 34n parallel computers, 147–48, 149, 151 paranoia, 309 Parrish, Maxfield, 214 particle interactions, 196 party machines, 202 Pascal, Blaise, 132, 139 Pascal’s Wager, 139 passwords, 307, 309 “past-oriented money,” 29–31, 35, 284–85 patterns, information, 178, 183, 184, 188–89 Paul, Ron, 33n Pauli exclusion principle, 181, 202 PayPal, 60, 93, 326 peasants, 565 pensions, 95, 99 Perestroika (Kushner), 165 “perfect investments,” 59–67, 77–78 performances, musical, 47–48, 51, 186–87, 253 perpetual motion, 55 Persian Gulf, 86 personal computers (PCs), 158, 182n, 214, 223, 229 personal information systems, 110, 312–16, 317 Pfizer, 265 pharmaceuticals industry, 66–67, 100–106, 123, 136, 203 philanthropy, 117 photography, 53, 89n, 92, 94, 309–11, 318, 319, 321 photo-sharing services, 53 physical trades, 292 physicians, 66–67 physics, 88, 153n, 167n Picasso, Pablo, 108 Pinterest, 180–81, 183 Pirate Party, 49, 199, 206, 226, 253, 284, 318 placebos, 112 placement fees, 184 player pianos, 160–61 plutocracy, 48, 291–94, 355 police, 246, 310, 311, 319–21, 335 politics, 13–18, 21, 22–25, 47–48, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 149–51, 155, 167, 199–234, 295–96, 342 see also conservatism; liberalism; libertarianism Ponzi schemes, 48 Popper, Karl, 189n popular culture, 111–12, 130, 137–38, 139, 159 “populating the stack,” 273 population, 17, 34n, 86, 97–100, 123, 125, 132, 133, 269, 296n, 325–26, 346 poverty, 37–38, 42, 44, 53–54, 93–94, 137, 148, 167, 190, 194, 253, 256, 263, 290, 291–92 power, personal, 13–15, 53, 60, 62–63, 86, 114, 116, 120, 122, 158, 166, 172–73, 175, 190, 199, 204, 207, 208, 278–79, 290, 291, 302–3, 308–9, 314, 319, 326, 344, 360 Presley, Elvis, 211 Priceline, 65 pricing strategies, 1–2, 43, 60–66, 72–74, 145, 147–48, 158, 169–74, 226, 261, 272–75, 289, 317–24, 331, 337–38 printers, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 privacy, 1–2, 11, 13–15, 25, 50–51, 64, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 204, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–13, 314, 315–16, 317, 319–24 privacy rights, 13–15, 25, 204, 305, 312–13, 314, 315–16, 321–22 product design and development, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 236 productivity, 7, 56–57, 134–35 profit margins, 59n, 71–72, 76–78, 94–95, 116, 177n, 178, 179, 207, 258, 274–75, 321–22 progress, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 promotions, 62 property values, 52 proprietary hardware, 172 provenance, 245–46, 247, 338 pseudo-asceticism, 211–12 public libraries, 293 public roads, 79–80 publishers, 62n, 92, 182, 277–78, 281, 347, 352–60 punishing vs. rewarding network effects, 169–74, 182, 183 quants, 75–76 quantum field theory, 167n, 195 QuNeo, 117, 118, 119 Rabois, Keith, 185 “race to the bottom,” 178 radiant risk, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 Ragnarok, 30 railroads, 43, 172 Rand, Ayn, 167, 204 randomness, 143 rationality, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 149 real estate, 33, 46, 49–52, 61, 78, 95–96, 99, 193, 224, 227, 239, 245, 255, 274n, 289n, 296, 298, 300, 301 reality, 55–56, 59–60, 124n, 127–28, 154–56, 161, 165–68, 194–95, 203–4, 216–17, 295–303, 364–65 see also Virtual Reality (VR) reason, 195–96 recessions, economic, 31, 54, 60, 76–77, 79, 151–52, 167, 204, 311, 336–37 record labels, 347 recycling, 88, 89 Reddit, 118n, 186, 254 reductionism, 184 regulation, economic, 37–38, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 69–70, 77–78, 266n, 274, 299–300, 311, 321–22, 350–51 relativity theory, 167n religion, 124–25, 126, 131, 139, 190, 193–95, 211–17, 293, 300n, 326 remote computers, 11–12 rents, 144 Republican Party, 79, 202 research and development, 40–45, 85–89, 117–20, 128, 136–37, 145, 154, 215, 229–30, 236 retail sector, 69, 70–74, 95–96, 169–74, 272, 349–51, 355–56 retirement, 49, 150 revenue growth plans, 173n revenues, 149, 149, 150, 151, 173n, 225, 234–35, 242, 347–48 reversible computers, 143n revolutions, 199, 291, 331 rhythm, 159–62 Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Kiyosaki), 46 risk, 54, 55, 57, 59–63, 71–72, 85, 117, 118–19, 120, 156, 170–71, 179, 183–84, 188, 242, 277–81, 284, 337, 350 externalization of, 59n, 117, 277–81 risk aversion, 188 risk pools, 277–81, 284 risk radiation, 61–63, 118–19, 120, 156, 183–84 robo call centers, 177n robotic cars, 90–92 robotics, robots, 11, 12, 17, 23, 42, 55, 85–86, 90–92, 97–100, 111, 129, 135–36, 155, 157, 162, 260, 261, 269, 296n, 342, 359–60 Roman Empire, 24–25 root nodes, 241 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 129 Rousseau humor, 126, 129, 130–31 routers, 171–72 royalties, 47, 240, 254, 263–64, 323, 338 Rubin, Edgar, 121 rupture, 66–67 salaries, 10, 46–47, 50–54, 152, 178, 270–71, 287–88, 291–94, 338–39, 365 sampling, 71–72, 191, 221, 224–26, 259 San Francisco, University of, 190 satellites, 110 savings, 49, 72–74 scalable solutions, 47 scams, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 scanned books, 192, 193 SceneTap, 108n Schmidt, Eric, 305n, 352 Schwartz, Peter, 214 science fiction, 18, 126–27, 136, 137–38, 139, 193, 230n, 309, 356n search engines, 51, 60, 70, 81, 120, 191, 267, 289, 293 Second Life, 270, 343 Secret, The (Byrne), 216 securitization, 76–78, 99, 289n security, 14–15, 175, 239–40, 305–8, 345 self-actualization, 211–17 self-driving vehicles, 90–92, 98, 311, 343, 367 servants, 22 servers, 12n, 15, 31, 53–57, 71–72, 95–96, 143–44, 171, 180, 183, 206, 245, 358 see also Siren Servers “Sexy Sadie,” 213 Shakur, Tupac, 329 Shelley, Mary, 327 Short History of Progress, A (Wright), 132 “shrinking markets,” 66–67 shuttles, 22, 23n, 24 signal-processing algorithms, 76–78, 148 silicon chips, 10, 86–87 Silicon Valley, 12, 13, 14, 21, 34n, 56, 59, 60, 66–67, 70, 71, 75–76, 80, 93, 96–97, 100, 102, 108n, 125n, 132, 136, 154, 157, 162, 170, 179–89, 192, 193, 200, 207, 210, 211–18, 228, 230, 233, 258, 275n, 294, 299–300, 325–31, 345, 349, 352, 354–58 singularity, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 Singularity University, 193, 325, 327–28 Sirenic Age, 66n, 354 Siren Servers, 53–57, 59, 61–64, 65, 66n, 69–78, 82, 91–99, 114–19, 143–48, 154–56, 166–89, 191, 200, 201, 203, 210n, 216, 235, 246–50, 258, 259, 269, 271, 272, 280, 285, 289, 293–94, 298, 301, 302–3, 307–10, 314–23, 326, 336–51, 354, 365, 366 Siri, 95 skilled labor, 99–100 Skout, 280n Skype, 95, 129 slavery, 22, 23, 33n Sleeper, 130 small businesses, 173 smartphones, 34n, 39, 162, 172, 192, 269n, 273 Smith, Adam, 121, 126 Smolin, Lee, 148n social contract, 20, 49, 247, 284, 288, 335, 336 social engineering, 112–13, 190–91 socialism, 14, 128, 254, 257, 341n social mobility, 66, 97, 292–94 social networks, 18, 51, 56, 60, 70, 81, 89, 107–9, 113, 114, 129, 167–68, 172–73, 179, 180, 190, 199, 200–201, 202, 204, 227, 241, 242–43, 259, 267, 269n, 274–75, 280n, 286, 307–8, 317, 336, 337, 343, 349, 358, 365–66 see also Facebook social safety nets, 10, 44, 54, 202, 251, 293 Social Security, 251, 345 software, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 68, 86, 99, 100–101, 128, 129, 147, 154, 155, 165, 172–73, 177–78, 182, 192, 234, 236, 241–42, 258, 262, 273–74, 283, 331, 347, 357 software-mediated technology, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 South Korea, 133 Soviet Union, 70 “space elevator pitch,” 233, 342, 361 space travel, 233, 266 Spain, 159–60 spam, 178, 275n spending levels, 287–88 spirituality, 126, 211–17, 325–31, 364 spreadsheet programs, 230 “spy data tax,” 234–35 Square, 185 Stalin, Joseph, 125n Stanford Research Institute (SRI), 215 Stanford University, 60, 75, 90, 95, 97, 101, 102, 103, 162, 325 Starr, Ringo, 256 Star Trek, 138, 139, 230n startup companies, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 starvation, 123 Star Wars, 137 star (winner-take-all) system, 38–43, 50, 54–55, 204, 243, 256–57, 263, 329–30 statistics, 11, 20, 71–72, 75–78, 90–91, 93, 110n, 114–15, 186, 192 “stickiness,” 170, 171 stimulus, economic, 151–52 stoplights, 90 Strangelove humor, 127 student debt, 92, 95 “Study 27,” 160 “Study 36,” 160 Sumer, 29 supergoop, 85–89 supernatural phenomena, 55, 124–25, 127, 132, 192, 194–95, 300 supply chain, 70–72, 174, 187 Supreme Court, U.S., 104–5 surgery, 11–13, 17, 18, 98, 157–58, 363 surveillance, 1–2, 11, 14, 50–51, 64, 71–72, 99, 108–9, 114–15, 120–21, 152, 177n, 199–200, 201, 206–7, 234–35, 246, 272, 291, 305, 309–11, 315, 316, 317, 319–24 Surviving Progress, 132 sustainable economies, 235–37, 285–87 Sutherland, Ivan, 221 swarms, 99, 109 synthesizers, 160 synthetic biology, 162 tablets, 85, 86, 87, 88, 113, 162, 229 Tahrir Square, 95 Tamagotchis, 98 target ads, 170 taxation, 44, 45, 49, 52, 60, 74–75, 77, 82, 149, 149, 150, 151, 202, 210, 234–35, 263, 273, 289–90 taxis, 44, 91–92, 239, 240, 266–67, 269, 273, 311 Teamsters, 91 TechCrunch, 189 tech fixes, 295–96 technical schools, 96–97 technologists (“techies”), 9–10, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 66–67, 88, 122, 124, 131–32, 134, 139–40, 157–62, 165–66, 178, 193–94, 295–98, 307, 309, 325–31, 341, 342, 356n technology: author’s experience in, 47–48, 62n, 69–72, 93–94, 114, 130, 131–32, 153, 158–62, 178, 206–7, 228, 265, 266–67, 309–10, 325, 328, 343, 352–53, 362n, 364, 365n, 366 bio-, 11–13, 17, 18, 109–10, 162, 330–31 chaos and, 165–66, 273n, 331 collusion in, 65–66, 72, 169–74, 255, 350–51 complexity of, 53–54 costs of, 8, 18, 72–74, 87n, 136–37, 170–71, 176–77, 184–85 creepiness of, 305–24 cultural impact of, 8–9, 21, 23–25, 53, 130, 135–40 development and emergence of, 7–18, 21, 53–54, 60–61, 66–67, 85–86, 87, 97–98, 129–38, 157–58, 182, 188–90, 193–96, 217 digital, 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18, 31, 40, 43, 50–51, 132, 208 economic impact of, 1–3, 15–18, 29–30, 37, 40, 53–54, 60–66, 71–74, 79–110, 124, 134–37, 161, 162, 169–77, 181–82, 183, 184–85, 218, 254, 277–78, 298, 335–39, 341–51, 357–58 educational, 92–97 efficiency of, 90, 118, 191 employment in, 56–57, 60, 71–74, 79, 123, 135, 178 engineering for, 113–14, 123–24, 192, 194, 217, 218, 326 essential vs. worthless, 11–12 failure of, 188–89 fear of (technophobia), 129–32, 134–38 freedom as issue in, 32–33, 90–92, 277–78, 336 government influence in, 158, 199, 205–6, 234–35, 240, 246, 248–51, 307, 317, 341, 345–46, 350–51 human agency and, 8–21, 50–52, 85, 88, 91, 124–40, 144, 165–66, 175–78, 191–92, 193, 217, 253–64, 274–75, 283–85, 305–6, 328, 341–51, 358–60, 361, 362, 365–67 ideas for, 123, 124, 158, 188–89, 225, 245–46, 286–87, 299, 358–60 industrial, 49, 83, 85–89, 123, 132, 154, 343 information, 7, 32–35, 49, 66n, 71–72, 109, 110, 116, 120, 125n, 126, 135, 136, 254, 312–16, 317 investment in, 66, 181, 183, 184, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 limitations of, 157–62, 196, 222 monopolies for, 60, 65–66, 169–74, 181–82, 187–88, 190, 202, 326, 350 morality and, 50–51, 72, 73–74, 188, 194–95, 262, 335–36 motivation and, 7–18, 85–86, 97–98, 216 nano-, 11, 12, 17, 162 new vs. old, 20–21 obsolescence of, 89, 97 political impact of, 13–18, 22–25, 85, 122, 124–26, 128, 134–37, 199–234, 295–96, 342 progress in, 9–18, 20, 21, 37, 43, 48, 57, 88, 98, 123, 124–40, 130–37, 256–57, 267, 325–31, 341–42 resources for, 55–56, 157–58 rupture as concept in, 66–67 scams in, 119–21, 186, 275n, 287–88, 299–300 singularity of, 22–25, 125, 215, 217, 327–28, 366, 367 social impact of, 9–21, 124–40, 167n, 187, 280–81, 310–11 software-mediated, 7, 11, 14, 86, 100–101, 165, 234, 236, 258, 347 startup companies in, 39, 60, 69, 93–94, 108n, 124n, 136, 179–89, 265, 274n, 279–80, 309–10, 326, 341, 343–45, 348, 352, 355 utopian, 13–18, 21, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 see also specific technologies technophobia, 129–32, 134–38 television, 86, 185–86, 191, 216, 267 temperature, 56, 145 Ten Commandments, 300n Terminator, The, 137 terrorism, 133, 200 Tesla, Nikola, 327 Texas, 203 text, 162, 352–60 textile industry, 22, 23n, 24, 135 theocracy, 194–95 Theocracy humor, 124–25 thermodynamics, 88, 143n Thiel, Peter, 60, 93, 326 thought experiments, 55, 139 thought schemas, 13 3D printers, 7, 85–89, 90, 99, 154, 162, 212, 269, 310–11, 316, 331, 347, 348, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 94 Tibet, 214 Time Machine, The (Wells), 127, 137, 261, 331 topology, network, 241–43, 246 touchscreens, 86 tourism, 79 Toyota Prius, 302 tracking services, 109, 120–21, 122 trade, 29 traffic, 90–92, 314 “tragedy of the commons,” 66n Transformers, 98 translation services, 19–20, 182, 191, 195, 261, 262, 284, 338 transparency, 63–66, 74–78, 118, 176, 190–91, 205–6, 278, 291, 306–9, 316, 336 transportation, 79–80, 87, 90–92, 123, 258 travel agents, 64 Travelocity, 65 travel sites, 63, 64, 65, 181, 279–80 tree-shaped networks, 241–42, 243, 246 tribal dramas, 126 trickle-down effect, 148–49, 204 triumphalism, 128, 157–62 tropes (humors), 124–40, 157, 170, 230 trust, 32–34, 35, 42, 51–52 Turing, Alan, 127–28, 134 Turing’s humor, 127–28, 191–94 Turing Test, 330 Twitter, 128, 173n, 180, 182, 188, 199, 200n, 201, 204, 245, 258, 259, 349, 365n 2001: A Space Odyssey, 137 two-way links, 1–2, 227, 245, 289 underemployment, 257–58 unemployment, 7–8, 22, 79, 85–106, 117, 151–52, 234, 257–58, 321–22, 331, 343 “unintentional manipulation,” 144 United States, 25, 45, 54, 79–80, 86, 138, 199–204 universities, 92–97 upper class, 45, 48 used car market, 118–19 user interface, 362–63, 364 utopianism, 13–18, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 45–46, 96, 128, 130, 167, 205, 207, 265, 267, 270, 283, 290, 291, 308–9, 316 value, economic, 21, 33–35, 52, 61, 64–67, 73n, 108, 283–90, 299–300, 321–22, 364 value, information, 1–3, 15–16, 20, 210, 235–43, 257–58, 259, 261–63, 271–75, 321–24, 358–60 Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles (VALS), 215 variables, 149–50 vendors, 71–74 venture capital, 66, 181, 218, 277–78, 298, 348 videos, 60, 100, 162, 185–86, 204, 223, 225, 226, 239, 240, 242, 245, 277, 287, 329, 335–36, 349, 354, 356 Vietnam War, 353n vinyl records, 89 viral videos, 185–86 Virtual Reality (VR), 12, 47–48, 127, 129, 132, 158, 162, 214, 283–85, 312–13, 314, 315, 325, 343, 356, 362n viruses, 132–33 visibility, 184, 185–86, 234, 355 visual cognition, 111–12 VitaBop, 100–106, 284n vitamins, 100–106 Voice, The, 185–86 “voodoo economics,” 149 voting, 122, 202–4, 249 Wachowski, Lana, 165 Wall Street, 49, 70, 76–77, 181, 184, 234, 317, 331, 350 Wal-Mart, 69, 70–74, 89, 174, 187, 201 Warhol, Andy, 108 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 137 water supplies, 17, 18 Watts, Alan, 211–12 Wave, 189 wealth: aggregate or concentration of, 9, 42–43, 53, 60, 61, 74–75, 96, 97, 108, 115, 148, 157–58, 166, 175, 201, 202, 208, 234, 278–79, 298, 305, 335, 355, 360 creation of, 32, 33–34, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 62–63, 79, 92, 96, 120, 148–49, 210, 241–43, 270–75, 291–94, 338–39, 349 inequalities and redistribution of, 20, 37–45, 65–66, 92, 97, 144, 254, 256–57, 274–75, 286–87, 290–94, 298, 299–300 see also income levels weather forecasting, 110, 120, 150 weaving, 22, 23n, 24 webcams, 99, 245 websites, 80, 170, 200, 201, 343 Wells, H.


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

When that bill was going through Parliament to abolish the NHS, many of the peers and many of the MPs had conflicts of interest. They actually had interests in the health care companies that they were establishing. TA: It is outrageous, really. Just like the lawyer of the largest insurance company in the US who drafted the Obamacare Bill. And Alan Milburn is one of them! AP: Yes, it’s a travesty as far as democracy is concerned. It really is, and as a public health doctor it is an absolute catastrophe, because at the moment we know there are people of all ages with serious mental illnesses who cannot get access to health care; people with stroke, people with chronic illnesses, chronic diseases who are increasingly being denied access to health care.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

The voter sent the following note out to his Christmas card list: “Senator Bennett has been our friend for a long time, and he set the record straight, and I want everybody to know that these are the facts.” The correction had little effect. Repeatedly during the campaign voters came up to him at rallies, Bennett said, and grilled him: “‘You voted for ObamaCare.’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘Yes, you did. I read it on the Internet. ’ ‘You voted for ObamaCare.’ ‘You voted for the stimulus.’ ‘You voted for TARP.’ I said, ‘Look, I am the guy who changed the proposed law from $700 billion to two tranches of $350 billion, because I wanted to see if it worked before I voted for the second, and I voted against the second $350 billion because of the way the first $350 billion was headed.’


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Annual borrowing in all undergraduate and graduate student loan programs surged to over $100 billion per year in 2012, up from about $65 billion per year at the start of the 2007 depression. By August 2013, total student loans backed by the U.S. government exceeded $1 trillion, an amount that has doubled since 2009. A provision contained in the 2010 Obamacare legislation provided the U.S. Treasury with a near monopoly on student loan origination and sidelined most private lenders who formerly participated in this market. This meant that the Treasury could relax lending standards to continue the flow of easy money. The student loan market is politically untouchable because higher education historically produces citizens with added skills who repay the loans and earn higher incomes over time.

., 220 Morgan Stanley, 32–33, 262 Morocco, 152, 153 Mourdock, Richard, 205 M-Subzero, 280, 283–84 Mubarak, Hosni, 156 Mulheren, John, 18–19, 32–33 Mundell, Robert, 125 Mussolini, Benito, 294 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), 46, 63 Mutual Assured Financial Destruction, 46 “Myth of Asia’s Miracle, The” (Krugman), 94 M-Zero (M0), 280 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 254 Napoleon Bonaparte, 114 Napoleonic Wars, 115 NASDAQ Stock Market closure, August 22, 2013, 60, 296–97 National Defense University, 59 National Journal, 63 National Security Agency (NSA), 53 negative real interest rates, 183–84 neofascism, 294–95 Netherlands, 233 New Scotland Yard, 37 New York Times, The, 39, 51, 55, 133, 144 9/11 attacks continuity of government operations, failure of, 63 as failure of imagination, 256, 257 9/11 attacks, and insider trading, 17–28, 63 Mulheren’s opinion of, 18 9/11 Commission’s failure to find connection between, 21–22, 23, 25–27 Poteshman’s statistical analysis of, 22–23 signal amplification and, 24, 25, 26, 27 social network analysis of, 19–20, 25 Swiss Finance Institute study of, 23 9/11 Commission, 21–22, 23, 25–27 9/11 Truth Movement, 27 Nitze, Paul, 43 Nixon, Richard, 1, 2, 5, 58, 85, 209, 220, 235, 252, 285 Nolan, Dave, 32–33 numeraire, gold as, 219–20 Obama, Barack, 37, 57, 129, 156, 202–3, 206, 252–53 Obamacare legislation, 247–48 offensive aspects of financial war, 46 Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), 53–54 Oman, 152 one-child policy, China, 95, 102 O’Neill, Jim, 139–40, 146, 150 Operation Duplex-Barbara, 59 Otto I, Emperor, 114 Outline of Reform (C-20), 235 Pakistan, 30, 151, 156 panic dynamic, 62 Panic of 1907, 198 Panic of 2008, 46, 47, 52, 76, 77, 170, 188, 196, 201–2, 211, 296 panics, 224 paper gold transactions, 275–76, 284–86 Paulson, Hank, 206 Pei, Minxin, 106 permanent disability, 246 Peterson, Peter G., 51 Petraeus, David, 37 Pettis, Michael, 108–9 phase transitions, 172, 265, 289–90 Ph.D. standard, 177 physical targets, in financial war, 46 piecemeal engineering, 292 piggyback trading, 24 Plaza Accord, 1985, 118–19 Pleines, Günter, 277 Poland, 200, 233 Ponzi scheme, in wealth management products (WMPs), 102–3 Popper, Karl, 292 Portugal, 128, 200 Poteshman, Allen M., 22–23 pound sterling, 157, 161, 209 price discovery, 68 primary deficit sustainability (PDS) framework, 177–83 Project Prophesy, 28–34 Pufeng, Wang, 44, 45 Putin, Vladimir, 151 Qatar, 152 Qiao Liang (Unrestricted Warfare), 44–45 Qin Dynasty, 90 Qing Dynasty, 90, 91 quantitative easing (QE), 159–61 end of, implications of, 297 by Federal Reserve, 184–85 in Japan, 160–61 in United Kingdom, 160 quantity theory of credit (creditism), 168 quantity theory of money (monetarism), 168–69 Quantum Dawn 2, 54 Rajoy, Mariano, 134 Ramo, Joshua Cooper, 120 random numbers, 268–69 Rauf, Rashid, 37 Ray, Chris, 35–36, 38, 40 Raymond, Lenny, 35 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 63, 118, 166, 176–77, 210 Reagan administration, 235 real incomes, decline in, 78–79 regime uncertainty, 84–87, 125–26 regional trade currency blocs, 255–56 regression analyses, 4–5 Reinhart, Carmen, 182, 183 repatriation of gold, 40, 231–34 Republicans, 175–76, 179, 180, 205, 294 Reserve Bank of Australia, 52–53 revolution in military affairs (RMA), 43–44 Rise of the Warrior Cop (Balko), 294 risk financial, 85, 268–70 gold as risk-free asset, 219 investments and, 218–19 systemic, 11–12, 81, 188, 249–50, 251, 259, 270 uncertainty distinguished, 85, 268 Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Knight), 268 Roett, Riordan, 192 Rogoff, Kenneth, 182 Rollover (film), 1, 3 Roman Empire, fall of, 5 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 85, 295 Rothschild, Nathan, 216 Rouhani, Hassan, 57, 152 Rubin, Robert, 177, 195, 196 rule-of-law society, 166–67 Russia, 139, 151, 152, 233.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

However, when we peek behind the curtain, we see who’s spiking the tea and the motivations behind their actions. The New Yorker and several other reputable media outlets have already exposed the ultra-conservative moguls and ultra-rich foundations that fund Tea Party candidates, campaigns, and propaganda. The party’s rebel yell against “big government,” “wasteful spending,” “Obamacare,” and other sensationalized issues has been scripted, packaged, and bankrolled by rich moguls like the Koch Brothers and foundations such as Freedom Works—an organization run by former GOP Congressman Dick Armey and funded by the tobacco giant Phillip Morris.53 Writing in the October 14, 2010, edition of Rolling Stone magazine, Matt Taibbi shared interesting insights about the Tea Party and the corporate insiders who created it.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

We agree on guns—90 percent of Americans support expanded background checks on gun owners—and we largely agree on health care. Only one-third of Americans support repealing, defunding, or delaying President Obama’s health care law. These numbers decrease when the law is called by its name, the Affordable Care Act, instead of Obamacare. Seventy-two percent of Americans agree that there should not be a government shutdown. But our opinion does not matter. We are passive subjects, held hostage to a vindictive minority divorced from public will. Political scientist Daniel Drezner has noted that the government shutdown has no real precedent in American history.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The astounding rate at which news stories now moved sometimes required playing agile defense. This was the dark side of a news operation struggling to maintain its values with a digital metabolism. On another big story, the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, I instructed every editor not to publish anything until David Leonhardt, the new Washington bureau chief I had chosen, called me with a fully checked report on the decision. My caution paid off. Fox and CNN raced onto the air with wrong reports, saying Obamacare had been overturned. • • • There was a new celebrant standing next to Sulzberger at the Pulitzer event, Mark Thompson, the new CEO. In a bold move to find his “digital visionary,” the publisher had gone outside and across the ocean to hire the man who was known for pushing old Auntie Beeb into the digital age with new video technology.

., 1, 5, 9, 407 Abramson fired by, 221–24 Abramson named as executive editor by, 201–2 Abramson’s relationship with, 197–98, 207–8, 216, 402 and blurring of line between news and business departments, 69–70, 189 business-side job cuts by, 191 Chinese princelings story and, 206, 207 Google investment declined by, 97 Keller and, 66, 67–68 lasting achievements of, 427, 429 “last man standing” strategy of, 70–71 liberal views of, 78 news staff cuts and, 70–71, 186, 187, 190–91 premium projects envisioned by, 189 and purchase of Post’s share in International Herald Tribune, 66, 86 retirement party of, 429–30 Robinson fired by, 202–3 shareholder unhappiness with, 63, 74 Times’s future as envisioned by, 62–63 unflattering articles on, 64, 74–75, 79, 183, 187 and Wall Street Journal rivalry, 183 website paywall ordered by, 193–94 Sulzberger, Arthur Ochs, Sr. “Punch,” 81, 202 Sulzberger, Willa, 430 Sulzberger-Ochs family, 261, 429 commitment to quality journalism of, 225–26 rivalries among, 394 stock dividends forgone by, 75 super-sharers, 111–12 Supreme Court, U.S., Obamacare decision of, 212 Swisher, Kara, 240 Syed, Nabiha, 323, 326–28, 427 Syria, foreign correspondents in, 174–75, 208–9 Szalwinski, Richard, 44–46 T (Times style magazine), 210 Talese, Gay, 74–75 Talking Points Memo (blog), 73, 94, 129 Tapper, Jake, 325 T Brand Studio, 163, 347, 367, 393, 399–400, 401 television news: aging audience for, 60 celebrity stories on, 60 decline of public trust in, 60 1960s high point of, 59–60 staff cuts by, 94 Thiel, Peter, 273, 326 Thomas, Clarence, 196 Thomas, Shawna, 351 Thompson, Hunter S., 133 Thompson, Marilyn, 417 and gutting of McConnell story, 236 as Lexington Herald-Leader editor, 235–36 long-form journalism as strength of, 233–37 peripatetic career of, 235–37 as Post reporter and editor, 233–35 Strom Thurmond exposé by, 234–35 Thompson, Mark, 215, 389–90, 395, 398 Abramson’s relationship with, 212–14, 215 and blurring of line between news and business departments, 218 digital innovation pushed by, 398 Gibson’s hiring encouraged by, 220–21 named Times CEO, 203, 212 native advertising embraced by, 214 office downsized by, 397 paid products developed by, 213, 214, 215, 218 Savile scandal and, 214 “Times Innovation Report” and, 400 Times websites’ international reach expanded by, 398 Thune, John, 293 Thurmond, Strom, 234–35 Time, 30 Time.com, 245 Time Inc., 3–4 “Times Innovation Report,” 218–20, 394, 400 Times Insider, 250 Times Journeys, 401 Times Mirror, 67, 71 Times Select, 68, 74, 191–92, 193 Time Warner, 348 Title IV student loans, 91 Today (TV show), 146 Todd, Chuck, 339 Too Big to Fail (Sorkin), 190 Tozzi, Lisa, 141, 315 Tracy, Marc, 135 “traffic farms,” 282–83 Tremaine, Jeff, 51 Trend-Detector, 34, 38 Tribune Company, 71, 88, 182 Tronc, 414, 425 Trump, Donald: Access Hollywood tape and, 370, 377 Bezos and Amazon attacked by, 418–19, 426 border wall and, 293 on BuzzFeed’s publication of Steele dossier, 324 charitable giving claims of, 408–11 and Charlottesville violence, 354–55 election of, 224, 370–71 entertainment value of, 288 “fake news” term co-opted by, 340 Haberman’s relationship with, 388–89 as media creature, 6–7 Muslim country travel ban of, 326–27 political rise of, 288–89, 305 Post investigations of, 407–8, 426 Russian business connections of, 383–84 sexual harassment charges against, 370 Steele dossier on, 323–24 Times coverage originally craved by, 388 Times investigations of, 376, 382, 426 tweets by, 386, 387–88, 405, 418 in 2014 BuzzFeed interview, 305–6 in war on news media, 2, 7, 9, 376, 387–89, 426–27 in withdrawal from Paris climate accord, 351 Trump, Donald, in 2016 election campaign, 279 Bannon and, 298 Breitbart News and, 289–90 BuzzFeed’s coverage of, 302, 305–6, 313–14 “crooked” Hillary rants of, 377, 379 Facebook psychographic data used by, 298 Facebook’s Dark Post tool used by, 299 fake news in support of, 277, 296, 297, 299–300, 315 journalists banned from rallies of, 307–8 media coverage monopolized by, 290, 308 voter suppression operations of, 299 Trump administration: “alternative facts” and, 339–40 Post investigations of, 416 Trump Foundation: New York State lawsuit against, 411 supposed charitable giving by, 408–11, 419 Try Guys videos, 335 Tumblr, 145 Tumulty, Karen, 249, 406 Turner, Ted, 125 Twitter, 53, 130, 237, 288, 418 BuzzFeed’s morning news show on, 343, 345 #dressgate on, 145 launch of, 32 as news platform, 291 political conversation on, 126–27, 131 Tyrangiel, Josh, 350–51, 366–67 Upshot (Times blog), 248, 290 Upworthy, 414, 415 VandeHei, Jim, 97–99 Vanity Fair, 99, 187, 223 Variety, 176 Varney, Stuart, 420 Vea snacks, 393 Veles, Macedonia, 297 Veltroni, Martina, 359–61, 362 verticals, content organized by: at BuzzFeed, 123, 132, 342–43 at Vice, 161–62, 164, 167–68 Viacom, 57, 153, 154 Vice (HBO weekly show), 167, 178–80, 347, 350, 355, 366, 426 Emmy and Peabody awards won by, 179 Mojica as overseer of, 357 Vice (magazine), 147 advertisers’ wariness of, 47, 49–50 circulation growth of, 48, 56, 150 founded as Voice of Montreal, 43–45 Morton’s first articles for, 150 Morton’s immersion stories for, 151–52 9/11 attack and, 49 “Racist Issue” of, 46 in relocation to New York, 45 transgressive ethos of, 46, 47, 48–49, 148 Vice Broadcasting System (VBS.tv), 56–57, 154 see also Vice Media, video unit of Vice Canada, 358–59, 365 Vice Guide to Travel, The (video series), 57–58, 152 Viceland, 355, 359, 364, 365, 366, 367 Vice Media, 4, 8 ad agency of, see Virtue advertising revenues of, 177, 178, 347 blurring of line between advertising and news at, 158–66, 367 clients’ censorship of stories at, 164–65 coming-of-age of, 150–51 content creation as focus of, 154 Creators Project of, 162–63, 347 ethical standards as lacking at, 147, 171–72 extravagant spending on events and drugs by, 175 as failing to make lasting impact on visual journalism, 426 financial problems of, 349–50, 365 Fred Stanton Award won by, 180 Freston as full-time advisor to, 154–55 Gross Jar at, 149–50 institutionalized sexism at, 176–77, 348–49, 362, 363–64 internal disarray of, 348 investments in, 154, 177, 349 investor and advertiser defections from, 365–66 Jonze’s repositioning of, as video brand, 50 as lacking legitimacy as news brand, 158 licensing fees charged by, 177, 178, 180, 347, 367 low wages paid by, 175, 348, 357 McInnes’s exit from, 58, 181, 369 Morton hired by, 147–48 Morton named website editor of, 150 need for continuing growth at, 169, 180 new business model of, 160 nondisclosure agreements demanded by, 177, 349, 360, 361, 368–69 out-of-court settlements paid by, 361, 363 overseas revenues of, 178, 347, 367 prized youth demographic of, 347 quality news and, 10 record label of, see Vice Records reporters’ safety training ignored by, 172–73 retail stores of, 46, 150 sexist culture of, 59 sexual harassment at, 349, 361–65, 368, 426 steep learning curve of, 5 Szalwinski and, 45–46, 47 tension between transgressive ethos and corporate goals of, 59 traditional news media challenged by, 2, 4, 6 unionization of, 349 valuation of, 177, 329, 349, 365 Veltroni’s lawsuit against, 361, 362 verticals of, 161–62, 164, 167–68 Vice Media, video unit of, 329 “Chicago Interrupted” documentary of, 166 controversial Liberia documentary of, 169–70 “cool” as operative word at, 147 enormous output of, 346–47, 367 growing audience of, 59 “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” documentary of, 166, 173 as immersive journalism, 155–58, 174 “Islamic State” documentary of, 174–75 Jonze in creation of, 56–58, 152 North Korean documentaries of, 166–67 risks taken by reporters of, 172–75 Times profile of, 60–61 Vice Guide to Travel series of, 152 YouTube as platform for, 153–54, 158, 178, 368 see also Vice News Vice News, 178, 350 alt-right investigations of, 346 awards won by, 356 Charlottesville violence covered by, 353–55 Emmys won by, 355 HBO shows of, see Vice (HBO weekly show); Vice News Tonight as lacking connection to Washington insiders, 352 lack of security training at, 357–58 as loss leader, 357 Mojica replaced by Tyrangiel as head of, 350, 352, 356, 360 overtaking CNN as goal of, 346, 348, 369 Shane Smith’s vision for, 346, 369 and Trump’s election, 353 Vice News Tonight (HBO nightly show), 350–55, 366 Vice Records, 46, 56, 150, 155 video, pivot to, 328–29, 347 BuzzFeed and, 332, 336 Facebook and, 332 Vice and, 50 Vietnam Moratorium, 84 Vietnam War, 4 Village Voice, 130, 141 Vine, 332 virality, 76 as BuzzFeed’s organizing logic, 35–36, 111–12, 113–19 cats and, 36 evangelism and, 115 Marlow and, 16 native advertising and, 122–23 news media transformed by, 13 Nguyen and, 113–14 Peretti’s early experiments with, 8, 16–19 political dimension of, 18 relatability and, 115–16 Watts and, 15–16 see also contagious media Viral Rank, 35 Virtue (advertising agency), 158, 160–61, 165, 347, 369 Vladeck, Anne C., 217 Voice of Montreal, 43–45 in relocation to New York, see Vice (magazine) Volvo, 161 Vox, 239, 248, 266, 275, 405 Wallace, David Foster, 57, 168 Wall Street Journal, 64, 70, 159, 160, 189, 228, 349–50, 365, 375, 391 Abramson at, 195–96 as Chartbeat client, 245 expanded coverage of, 183 Facebook Instant Articles program eschewed by, 281 international reach of, 83 Murdoch’s acquisition of, 67, 183, 226, 229 paying digital readers of, 183, 192 Times’s rivalry with, 183 Wang, Peggy, 15, 37, 121 Warren, Denise, 215 Warrick, Joby, 92 Warzel, Charlie, 312–13, 320, 321, 338 Washington Post, 3–4, 66, 208, 220, 377, 381, 389, 391 Arc technology of, 267, 414 banned from Trump rallies, 308 Bezos’s expansion of news staff of, 404 Bezos’s purchase of, 1–2, 5, 257–61 blogs of, 23 broken business model of, 226 Buffett and, 83, 88 building scale emphasized by, 412 Chartbeat metrics used by, 245 classified advertising in, 83 Coll’s exit from, 88, 90 declining advertising revenues of, 8, 89, 254 declining reputation of, 251–52, 255–56 “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan of, 421 Don Graham era at, see Graham, Donald E.


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

Both features are a consequence of the peculiar U.S. model based on public-private partnerships. In 1998, before the Obamacare reforms, it was estimated that of the lowest-paid 20 percent of the labor force, only 24 percent were covered by health insurance. The same problems plague the pensions system where the benefits are skewed toward high-paid workers. Again in 1998, of the lowest-paid 20 percent of the labor force, only 16 percent were covered by a private pension, while for the highest-paid 20 percent the coverage rate was 72 percent. When Obamacare attempted to introduce a public option to give people access to low-cost insurance, this was shot down for being too reliant on the public sector.

.), 324, 475 National Pact (Lebanon), 60, 63 National Party (South Africa), 430 National Rifle Association, 328 National School Lunch Act, 320 National Security Agency (NSA), 309, 327, 335–36, 489–90 National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, 12–13, 390–92, 395, 396–99, 400–402, 404–5, 421, 423–24, 465 nationalization of industries, 471 Native Land Act (South Africa), 428, 430 native-place associations, 218–19 Navalny, Alexei, 287 Navigation Acts, 196 Negro Motorist Green-Book, The (Green), 69 Netherlands, 280 New Deal, 325, 329 New Territories, 221 Newcomen, Thomas, 194, 196 Newton, Isaac, 196 Nicaragua, 303 Niccolò di Bernardo, 141 Niemöller, Martin, 495 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 79–80 Nigeria, 3–7, 12, 53–56, 365, 444–47 Nine (Sienese body of electors), 129–30, 131 1984 (Orwell), 235 Nixon, Richard, 412 Njegoš (Peter II, Prince-Bishop of Montenegro), 277 Nkrumah, Kwame, 362–63, 364, 366 Nobela (witch doctor), 86 nomadic tribes, 74–75, 77, 104–5 Norman conquest, 169–71 North Korea, 234, 455, 456 Northcote-Trevelyan Report, 190 Northern Europe, 152, 153, 209 Northern Wei dynasty, 209 Northumbria, 164, 165, 167 Northwest Ordinance, 296 Norton, Caroline, 191–92, 194 Norton, George, 191 Norway, 472 Nuestras Familias, 338–40 Nyambua cult, 55–56 Oaxaca Valley, Mexico, 147, 152 Obamacare, 332 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 444 Obizzo, Lord, 413–14, 418 Odyssey (Homer), 38, 251 Offa, King of Mercia, 164 Office of Strategic Services, 334. See also Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Ogletree, Virgil, 312 oligarchy, 36, 131, 261, 286–87 Olimova, Saodot, 288–89 On the Governance of the Palace (Hincmar), 153–54 On the Magistracies of the Roman State (John Lydus), 159 Operation Desert Storm, 386 Oracle of Delphi, 33 Orange Free State, 428 Orbán, Viktor, 425 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 331–32 Origin and Growth of Village Communities in India, The (Baden-Powell), 261 Orthodox Christians, 60–61 Orwell, George, 235 ostracism, in ancient Greece, 45 Otaybi, Juhayman al-, 380 Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 417 Otto of Freising, Bishop, 128–29, 142 Ottoman Empire, 60, 276, 371, 373, 375–76, 385, 387, 439 Pacific Railroad Act, 24–25, 317 Pacto de la Concordia, 295–96 Page, Larry, 481 Palestine, 376 Pallavicino, Uberto, 418 Palmer raids, 333 Panchayati Raj Act, 261 panchayats, 245–47, 256, 261, 265 Papen, Franz von, 398 Paper Leviathan: and African nations, 360–65; and Argentinian bureaucracy, 338–41, 344–46; and Colombia, 346–50, 351–55; consequences of, 367–69; and Latin America, 355–59; mechanics of, 344–46; and paths into corridor, 434, 443–44, 450; and postcolonial world, 365–67; and social power, 367 Papin, Denis, 196 paramilitaries, 354, 395, 409 Park Chung-hee, 456 Parma, Italy, 417 Pashtuns, 7, 23–24 Pastrana, Andrés, 448 patents, 318–19 pawns (pledges), 22–23, 37, 39–40, 45 Peace of Constance, 127 Peasant Self-Defense Forces of the Middle Magdalena, 353 peasantry, 271, 279–80 Peasants into Frenchmen (Weber), 346 Peasants’ Revolt, 184 Peisistratos, 42–43 pensions, 190–91, 325–26, 332 People’s Daily (China), 230 People’s Party (U.S.), 419 perestroika, 282 Periphetes, 33–34 Peronist Party (Argentina), 343 Peru, 349, 358, 422 Peter I, King of Aragon, 182 Peter I, Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, 276 Pettit, Philip, 6–7, 9 Philippines, 425 Phillips, David Graham, 324 Phipps, John, 180 phratry/phratries, 35, 45, 58 Piacenza, Italy, 136, 418 Pienaar, François, 433–34 Pinker, Steven, 8 Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 333 Pinochet, Augusto, 406, 423 Pistoia, Italy, 415 Plaatje, Sol, 427–29 Platteau, Jean-Philippe, 388–89 Pledge of Good Pleasure, 78–79 Plutarch, 33–34, 36 Podestà (magistrate), 129–31, 133, 413, 414–18 Poland, 280, 282, 283–84, 290, 290–91 polarization, 66, 403, 421 poletai, 38 police forces, 304–6, 309–12, 327–29 Polynesian society, 87–88, 90–92 Poor Laws, 181 Popolo, 416–18 Popular Action Front (Chile; FRAP), 407–8 Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Tilly), 188–89 Popular Unity (Chile; U.P.), 407–8 populism, 39, 419–23 Portales, Diego, 359 Portuguese monarchies, 281 postal service, 318, 319 postcolonial societies, 269, 294, 365–67 Potanin, Vladimir, 286 poverty, 240–41, 262, 264–65, 291–93, 308, 327, 446 Power of the Powerless, The (Havel), 281–82 praetorian prefects (Roman Empire), 158–59 Prague Spring, 282 Prajapati, 252 Prato, Italy, 140 premodern societies, 7–8, 64 presidential power, 63, 357–58 prestige goods, 103, 120 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 266, 419 pristine state formation, 79, 80, 87, 148 privatization, 123, 285–86 Procrustes, 34 Progressive era, 323–27 property rights, 99, 113, 114, 121, 138, 144, 232–33 prostrating taboo, 91 Prussia, 12–13, 266–68, 268, 270, 273–75, 277–79, 297, 393, 395, 398–402, 404, 424, 484 public education, 139–40, 190–91, 368–69, 381 public-private partnerships, 307–8, 317–21, 324–27, 331–32, 333, 337, 485–86 Puna Coast, 88, 115 Putin, Vladimir, 286, 287–88 Putumayo, Colombia, 346–49, 347 qadis, 375 Qasim, Abd Al-Karim, 385 Qianlong emperor, 212–14, 217 Qin dynasty, 203–5, 206–9, 215, 218, 222, 229, 345 Qin Shi Huang, 206 Qing dynasty, 211–18, 224–27, 229, 233 Qubilai Khan (Kublai Khan), 210 qui tam provision, 319 Quiché people (Guatemala), 291, 293 Quran, 75–76, 371–72, 377, 379, 384, 386 Quraysh tribe, 74 racism and racial discrimination, 68–69, 304–6, 321, 326–32 railroads, 24–25, 225, 317 Rajadhiraja II, 259 Rake’s Progress, The (Hogarth), 196 Ramaphosa, Cyril, 431–32 Ramayana, 243, 251 Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan, 244 Rashtriya Sam Vikas Yojana, 262 Rathenau, Walther, 396 Rattray, Robert, 19–20, 23 Rauschning, Hermann, 390 RCD-Goma, 99 Reagan, Ronald, 108, 325 Reconstruction and Development Programme, 431 Reconstruction era (U.S.), 52–53, 311 Record of Ten Days in Yangzhou, A (Wang Xiuchu), 213 Red Queen effect: and American exceptionalism, 307; and American state building, 45–46, 49–50, 52–53, 316–17, 320–21; and ancient Greece, 40–42; and Argentina, 344–45; and development of Leviathan types, 66, 69–70; and divergent effects of state power, 281; and economy inside corridor, 146; and English political development, 180–81, 188, 190; and European political development, 153, 184; and failings of Indian state, 264–65; and fostering of Shackled Leviathan, 72–73; and Hayek’s economic theory, 466–67; and impact of structural factors, 301; and Indian caste system, 240, 244, 250, 255, 262; and Industrial Revolution, 195; and legal reforms of Henry II, 172–73; and Magna Carta, 177; and norms against political hierarchy, 57; and paradox of American Leviathan, 336–37; and Polish civil society, 284 Red Turban rebellion, 211 Redemption period (U.S.), 53, 311, 312 redistribution of wealth, 316, 451, 456, 461, 467, 473–76, 484, 486–87 redlining, 329–30 Reginald of Durham, 143 Regulation Q, 478 Rehn-Meidner model, 470 Reichstag, 390, 396, 398–99, 424 Report of the Indian Famine Commission (1880), 261 Representation of the People Act, 176 Republican People’s Party (Turkey; CHP), 439–40 Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Pettit), 6–7 research and development, investment in, 486–87, 488 Restoration Society (Fushe), 211 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 353 Revolutionary Command Council (Iraq), 385 Reyes, Rafael, 348 Rhee, Syngman, 456 Rhenish League, 184 Rhodesia, 357 Ricardo, David, 407 Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act, 479 Rig Veda, 251, 252 Riopaila Castilla, 352 Ritter von Kahr, Gustav, 396 road construction projects, 346–50, 353–55, 356 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 465, 473 Roberts, William, 119 Rock Edicts of Ashoka, 255 Röhm, Ernst, 395 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 351 Rolfe, John, 314 Roman Empire: and European political development, 153, 158–60, 182, 183, 199; fiscal systems, 187; and Frankish society, 154, 156–57; and Icelandic politics, 185; and Italian communes, 414 Roman Republic, 158.


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

It is worth noting, too, that if all states implemented Medicaid expansion—at a cost to the federal government of around $952 billion over ten years—millions more low-income women would be able to access family planning services more easily.8 It is worth noting that Vice President Mike Pence, as governor of Indiana, was one of ten Republican governors accepting Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. Concerns about access to LARCs, especially among conservatives, typically center on moral issues. Many conservatives have authentic, deep, often religiously based views about sex and contraception. But I fear that they are out of step. Most Americans under the age of thirty-five agree with the following statement: “It is all right for unmarried eighteen year olds to have sexual intercourse if they have strong affection for each other.”9 The key is to ensure that the liberalization of attitudes toward sex does not lead to a liberalization of attitudes toward the moral responsibility to plan when, how, and with whom we bring children into the world.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

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

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

Instead of encouraging the lowly to work hard and get “prepared for the new economy,” moaned the Post columnist Michael Gerson, the senator was merely offering them goodies—free health care and college—in the manner of outmoded “20th century liberalism.” Others took offense at Sanders’s health care plan because it envisioned something beyond Obamacare, which had been won at such great cost. This brings us to the question of qualifications, a nonissue for most voters that nevertheless caused enormous alarm among the punditry for a good part of April 2016. Columnist after columnist and blogger after blogger offered judgments on how ridiculous, how very unjustified it was for Sanders to suggest Clinton wasn’t qualified for the presidency, and whether Clinton hadn’t started the whole thing first by implying Sanders wasn’t qualified, and whether she was right when she did or didn’t make that accusation.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

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

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

Midwestern retirees who depended on social security had to ignore the fact that the representatives they kept electing, such as the libertarian Paul Ryan, wanted to slash their benefits. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan returned to Indiana and Texas embittered at having lost their youth in unwinnable wars, while conservative pundits kept demanding new ones. A Tea Party protester at a town hall meeting on Obamacare shouted, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” These contradictions were headed for a reckoning. As late as 2012, the Republican convention (in Tampa) was still a celebration of Free America and unfettered capitalism. Romney told donors at a fundraiser that the country was divided into makers and takers, and the 47 percent of Americans who took would never vote for him.


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

: The California Insurance Conundrum”, Santa Clara Law Review, Vol. 54 (2014), 69, http://​digitalcommons.​law.​scu.​edu/​lawreview/​vol54/​iss1/​3, accessed 1 June 2018. 114Olga Khazan, “Why So Many Insurers Are Leaving Obamacare: How Rejecting Medicaid and Other Government Decisions Have Hurt Insurance Markets”, The Atlantic, 11 May 2017, https://​www.​theatlantic.​com/​health/​archive/​2017/​05/​why-so-many-insurers-are-leaving-obamacare/​526137/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 115J.Ll.J. Edwards, “The Criminal Degrees of Knowledge”, Modern Law Review, Vol. 17 (1954), 294. 116Extreme carelessness may not suffice for murder, though it could be enough for the lesser crime of “manslaughter”.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

During the French Revolution, eventually the wine ran out. It was never going to be possible in France for Marine Le Pen to lower the retirement age to 60; the markets wouldn’t allow it. The beautiful wall was never going to be built and Mexico was never going to pay for it. The GOP had no plans ready for repealing and replacing Obamacare as they didn’t think Trump was going to win. Now the Tory party in the UK is fighting with itself like ferrets in a sack over soft or hard or no Brexit. The fact that the government has admitted that it is stockpiling food and medicines in case of a no-deal Brexit in 2019 doesn’t augur well for the future, or indeed for support of such an action among the electorate.

There was never going to be lots of money after Brexit to fund the NHS. In June 2018 Prime Minister May once again was talking about using a Brexit dividend to fund the NHS although there is none. No postBrexit paradise. No deal with the EU that doesn’t allow for free movement of capital, services, goods, and people. You can’t eat sovereignty. No repeal of Obamacare. No draining of the swamp. No return of steel or coal jobs. No wall. Dreamland. Your Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were never safe, and the middle class was never going to get big tax cuts. The lobbyists were always going to ensure the tax cuts mostly went to business and rich donors. There has been no action on guns even after all the school shootings, even when the vast majority of Americans supported such moves.


pages: 574 words: 148,233

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Two weeks after the shooting, Pieczenik emailed Infowars a racist, antisemitic screed, accusing then attorney general Eric Holder of funding the “NON-EXISTENT Newtown Massacre!” “Welcome to the New Reichstag!!” Pieczenik wrote in an email released in court proceedings. “Is a black president above reproach for having lied continuously to the American people about Osama bin Laden; Benghazi; Newtown Massacre; and of course, folks, Obamacare?” Pieczenik went on like that for three pages. He hammered the same theme on Infowars for several years. * * * — James Fetzer, a bombastic, self-promoting philosophy professor retired from the University of Minnesota Duluth, had repelled his academic colleagues with his wacky theories since the early 1990s.

And now people are seeing that, they’re saying, ‘You know, Trump predicted Osama bin Laden,’ which actually is true. And then two years later, a year and a half later, he knocked down the World Trade Center.” Trump had not in fact “predicted Osama bin Laden.” Trump meandered through talking points on terrorism, Iran, Iraq, China, Obamacare, trade, his poll numbers, and his crowd sizes. Jones nodded along for a while, placing an index finger to his lips in a show of rapt attention. But then he started cutting Trump off, pushing for more. Jones had a big, paranoid following to impress. Yapping over the older man’s braying monotone, Jones began nudging Trump further out there, to satisfy his listeners.


pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

The day after the election, Franken had lost the race to Republican senator Norm Coleman, but by only 727 votes.59 In swooped Elias and his team of attorneys and experts, who systematically set out over the course of six months to turn the 727-vote loss into a 312-vote victory.60 The ultimate decision in Franken’s favor gave Democrats a supermajority in the Senate, which they used to enact the sweeping health care legislation known as Obamacare. The Republicans never knew what hit them. In his landmark book The Victory Lab, Sasha Issenberg describes how Elias’s team used data-driven methods to secure victory. Al Franken’s lawyers began the recount not by trying to have all ten thousand challenged absentee ballots counted, but only the ones that went for the Democratic senator.

“We are just trying to make sure the integrity of the next election isn’t compromised.”64 The Franken election affected the Senate monumentally, securing for President Barack Obama a sixtieth vote that made it possible to pass filibuster-proof legislation. If Elias hadn’t changed the outcome of Al Franken’s election, Obamacare probably would not have passed. Not every recount went as well for Elias. Florida Republican Rick Scott narrowly defeated incumbent senator Bill Nelson in 2018. But late votes from Broward County in Florida pulled the election to within the .25 percent margin needed for a hand recount. It had already reached the .5 percent margin required for a machine recount.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

One such agitator, Andrew Breitbart, had in 2005 launched Breitbart.com, an irreverent right-wing digital news service that delighted in standing up for the little (white) guy and tilting against liberal establishment elites and their alleged allies in the ranks of the nation’s black and Latino poor.29 The Tea Party soared to national prominence and influence in August 2009 when its members stormed town hall meetings that had been organized by congressmen and -women to give constituents a chance to air their views on Obama’s controversial Affordable Care Act (ACA).30 Many Tea Party protestors saw “Obamacare” as the latest example of liberal elites aligning themselves with the black and Latino poor to impose a health care delivery system that the country’s good (white) citizens did not want. Tea Party activists also began to use their opposition to Obamacare to delegitimate Obama himself.31 This delegitimacy campaign rested on a spurious but serious charge: namely, that Obama had not been eligible to run for the presidency, let alone occupy the Oval Office.


The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Kickstarter, Menlo Park, obamacare, Parler "social media", Skype, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Hearing him talk about it and acknowledge what happened gave me a sense of closure and comfort in knowing that I could actually talk to him about it. About anything, really. * * * My father is now remarried, settling in with his new wife. And though I find myself tip-toeing around her with forced politeness, I don’t find myself as hesitant to get inside his head. When I’m ready to go down that road, I will. Today, with the Obamacare California deadline looming, my dad calls me to make sure I have health insurance. “Hey, Dad,” I answer. “Sign up for the California Care. Google it and tell your sister.” I’m driving on Edgewood to a meeting in Hollywood. “Dad, I been had insurance. I’m grown,” I say playfully, laughing because my dad still doesn’t know exactly what it is that I do.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

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

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

Women are also significantly more likely to avoid charges and convictions entirely, plus twice as likely to avoid prison if convicted—even if they have the same criminal background. Meanwhile, American men have been forced to register for Selective Service since 1980. Women are not. When you look at the facts, women seem clearly better off. They even live longer lives. This is partly because of health initiatives like Obamacare—or the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—which gave them preferential treatment. The ACA had 134 references to “women’s health” but only two that were specific to men. Staggering stuff considering the average American man will live to age 76, while the average woman will live to age 81, according to the CDC.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Bradford DeLong, Concrete Economics (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016). 139 families trying to navigate the maze: Stephanie Ebbert and Jenna Russell, “A Daily Diaspora, a Scattered Street,” Boston Globe, June 12, 2011, http://archive. boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2011/06/12/on_one_city_street_school _choice_creates_a_gap/?page=full. 143 in the shoes of those they mean to serve: Jake Solomon, “People, Not Data,” Medium, January 5, 2014, https://medium.com/@lippytak/people-not-data-47434 acb50a8. 143 “the poor struggle with daily”: Ezra Klein, “Sorry Liberals, Obamacare’s Problems Go Much Deeper than the Web Site,” Washington Post, October 25, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/10/25/oba macares-problems-go-much-deeper-than-the-web-site/. 144 “the best startup in Europe we can’t invest in”: Saul Klein, “Government Digital Service: The Best Startup in Europe We Can’t Invest In,” Guardian, November 25, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/15/govern ment-digital-service-best-startup-europe-invest. 145 GDS Design Principles: “GDS Design Principles,” UK Government Digital Service, retrieved March 31, 2017, http://www.gov.uk/design-principles. 145 “Start with needs”: After Mike Bracken left the GDS, the first principle was rewritten to leave out the revolutionary idea that existing government processes might be getting in the way of user needs.


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

It’s hard to convince a man sweating over a fifty-page income-tax return that the state has gone away or that markets are now in charge. And after 2008 there were some good reasons to believe—to fear—that the regulatory state was back, most obviously the universal health-care law signed by President Obama in 2010. Not only did Obamacare contain a—yes—burdensome provision that would have required businesses to issue 1099 forms for nearly every expenditure they made (it was promptly repealed in early 2011), but it required businesses with fifty or more employees to provide health insurance for workers, possibly stripping away one of the greatest competitive advantages that such firms possess.* If “capitalism” is the system in which you eke out a living installing plumbing or selling farm equipment, it is understandable that you feel that government interferes enough in capitalism already.


pages: 192 words: 72,822

Freedom Without Borders by Hoyt L. Barber

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, diversification, El Camino Real, estate planning, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, high net worth, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, money market fund, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, quantitative easing, reserve currency, road to serfdom, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail

This would include Social Security, representing 40 Freedom Without Borders $63 trillion of the total, and which pays out retiree pensions, and health care benefits to Medicare recipients. These facts are part of why the total figure sounds so high, but imagine what the deficit will look like after Obamacare kicks in? Further, illegal immigrants also contribute to the rising deficit. Should this deficit double again in four years, as it did in the previous four, we’ll be looking at $260 trillion in national debt. What comes after trillion? Europe is in bad shape, as well, with the sovereign debt problems of at least a half a dozen countries threatening the entire European Union, including Europe’s ability to keep it together.


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

Take a hypothetical but plausible example: a company’s call-center reports, customer data, and social-media tracking show that single Asian, black, and Hispanic women with urban zip codes are most likely to complain about the quality of products and service. But Asian women whose complaints are resolved become some of your most valuable customers. Should Asians get preferred treatment over black and Hispanic women when resolving complaints? Or a health insurer is seeking to grow by enrolling previously uninsured Americans. Under the Obamacare legislation, an insurer cannot discriminate against people with preexisting conditions. But applying data science to health blogs, browsing habits, social media, and profiles from data brokers can identify people most likely to have diabetes or depression. Do you systematically exclude those people from your marketing?


pages: 218 words: 68,648

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America by Dan Conway

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, financial independence, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, holacracy, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, initial coin offering, job satisfaction, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, rent control, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart contracts, Steve Jobs, supercomputer in your pocket, tech billionaire, tech bro, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Uber for X, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vitalik Buterin

Not only was I a god, but with this historic ETH boom, I was also Nostradamus. I’d never exhibited an ability to prognosticate before. Previously, I’d always been trying to catch up to new trends just as they petered out. At Safeway, I had tried to become an expert in healthcare policy too late, just as Obamacare made the real experts highly valuable. In the 1990s, I signed up for swing dance lessons after watching Swingers, right before the fad disappeared. But now, like a character out of the Bible who does something insane because God told him to, I’d ended up being right about ETH. I was right in the middle of one of the most profound disruptions the world would ever see.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

The real power is that through union dues, the labor movement can amass significant resources to engage in voter turnout, agenda setting, and issue advocacy, all on behalf of ordinary Americans. It’s that amassing of political power that is so threatening to conservatives and corporate America. After all, big labor has been responsible for advances in our day-to-day lives that still make conservatives livid: Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare too; unemployment insurance; Social Security; the forty-hour workweek; pensions (what’s left of them, anyway), and the minimum wage. These are just the greatest hits; many other humane advances in our lives owe their existence to labor unions. Power in America might be thought of as being historically represented by two scales.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

This, I realize, is not a universally held position, and not just among the people who still think he was born in Kenya. With a year remaining in Obama’s tenure, New York magazine polled fifty-three historians about his legacy, most of whom gave him lukewarm reviews. Several pointed to his inability to unite the country. Others lauded ObamaCare while criticizing his expansion of the Oval Office itself. But those critiques remind me of someone looking at the career of Hank Aaron and focusing on his throwing arm and base running. It’s not merely that Obama was the first black president. It’s that he broke this barrier with such deftness and sagacity that it instantaneously seemed insane no black person had ever been elected president before.


pages: 280 words: 79,029

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

And before you object that this rise was caused by the need to save the banks and the economies they wrecked, the financial crisis explains only some of this hike: on average, around half of these rises took place before the start of the crisis.2 As populations age, the chunk of public spending that is growing fastest is on such entitlements as pensions and health care. The Congressional Budget Office in the United States reckons that the total cost of entitlements such as Social Security (pensions), Medicare (health care for the elderly), Medicaid (health care for the poor), and the subsidies involved in Obamacare will rise inexorably over the coming years, from 9.8 percent of GDP in 2013 to 13.6 percent by 2035.3 The problem for democratic governments is that cutting back on entitlements is both the most obvious fiscal fix and the least attractive politically. The easier option, as the name suggests, is to try to reduce the pot of money for “discretionary programs,” where the state will not have to renegotiate guaranteed commitments to its citizens.


pages: 223 words: 77,566

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

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

Here’s a small sample of emails or messages I’ve seen from friends or family: •From right-wing radio talker Alex Jones on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a documentary about the “unanswered question” of the terrorist attacks, suggesting that the U.S. government played a role in the massacre of its own people. •From an email chain, a story that the Obamacare legislation requires microchip implantation in new health care patients. This story carries extra bite because of the religious implications: Many believe that the End Times “mark of the beast” foretold in biblical prophecy will be an electronic device. Multiple friends warned others about this threat via social media.


pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

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

That so many were willing to chalk up a white woman’s electoral failures to racism tells you something about the rhetorical environment in contemporary liberalism. Trump’s presidency amounted to a steady parade of gaffes and crises. Trump found it difficult to enact a legislative agenda: he failed to meaningfully change policy on his campaign’s signature issue of immigration, his Obamacare repeal effort failed to get past members of Congress in his own party, and the only major legislation he successfully passed was a large tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, hardly in keeping with the populist feints he had deployed on the campaign trail. That Republicans could force through tax cuts and no other major bills tells you something about the nature of American democracy.


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

Some economic priorities are right-­ wing: this includes supporting small-­state laissez faire economic policies, which reflect the mainstream Republican Congressional leadership and the role of the GOP Freedom Caucus on issues such as the aggressive deregulation of environmental protection, seeking to repeal Obamacare, and rolling back corporate taxes. His economic policy positions strongly 220 Classifying Parties favor the rich, exemplified by the regressive 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act cutting the corporate tax rate permanently from 35 percent to 21 percent, with benefits flowing mainly to wealthy executives and shareholders.

He addressed this group’s concern by raising their moral status, describing ‘hard-­working’ Americans as victims of globalization, voicing concern about elites, drawing strong moral boundaries toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, and Muslims, and stressing the traditional role of men as protectors of wives, mothers, and daughters.26 In practice, the Trump administration has joined Republicans in Congress to scrap many government regulations that protect families and the environment and undermined the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Tax reform, the major legislative achievement of Trump’s first year in office, has closely followed the traditional agenda of the GOP leadership, donors, and organized interests, enriching corporations by reducing taxes on profits, capital gains, and dividends, and benefitting big ticket donors, like the Koch brothers, while also weakening healthcare and exacerbating government debt.


pages: 252 words: 85,441

A Book for Her by Bridget Christie

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, Costa Concordia, David Attenborough, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, obamacare, Rubik’s Cube, Russell Brand, sexual politics, TED Talk

She said she liked the one of me as an ant inside a cardboard box surrounded by sugar, and suggested we made a film about FGM. Not dressed as ants, obviously. Her idea was that I could interview her in a funny, ignorant way about FGM, which would highlight all the ignorance surrounding it. Leyla had just watched Barak Obama’s interview about ObamaCare on Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns on the website Funny or Die, and she thought we could do something similar. In order to pay for our short film, Leyla and I needed some quick cash, because we wanted to film it before our benefit that was coming up and show it there. The quickest way we were going to get some was for me to go on ITV1’s Celebrity Squares.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

In the case I’m most familiar with, the New York Times, I saw that editors not only wanted to get the news right; they tried to achieve a balance in the stories they edited. If there was a bunch of news that seemed to appeal to the left—say, Dreamers being deported or big chunks of Antarctica breaking off and melting—they’d try to get some conservative balance, maybe a David Brooks column attacking Obamacare. Now people can argue forever about whether the shrinking ranks of responsible media actually achieve balance and get it “right.” Still, they try. When the editors are debating which stories to feature, they at least consider their mission to inform. Not everything is clicks and dollars. But for Facebook, it is.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Incapacitating your opponents’ information infrastructure in the hours before an election has become part of the game, though there have been a few criminal convictions of party officials caught working with hackers to attack call centers, political websites, and campaign headquarters. Republican National Committee official James Tobin was sentenced to ten months in prison for hiring hackers to attack Democratic Party phone banks on Election Day in 2002. Partisans continue to regularly launch denial-of-service attacks; attackers consistently target Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) websites, for example. If an aggressive move with technology provides some competitive advantage, some campaign manager will try it. So the question is not whether political parties in democracies will start using bots on one another—and us—but when. They could be unleashed at a strategic moment in the campaign cycle, or let loose by a lobbyist targeting key districts at a sensitive juncture for a piece of legislation.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

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

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

He no longer took time off on the weekends, or put in less than a twelve-hour day during the workweek, without triggering feelings of overwhelming guilt and the subtle scorn of his colleagues, who were also his friends. As for money, he earned less as a CEO than he would have if he had taken a regular job at the company. He had no health insurance, not even Obamacare. His apartment sucked. His litany continued. I tried pointing out Adrian’s many achievements: He had found investors! He had raised millions of dollars! He was walking the path to greatness! He was like a role model to millions! “If I had to do it all over again,” he told me, shoulders slumped, “I’d have gone to work for the government.”


pages: 334 words: 82,041

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Bombing’, haaretz.com. 17Paul Sperry, 15 December 2013, ‘Inside the Saudi 9/11 Coverup’, nypost.com. 18Guardian, ‘The BAE Files (series)’, theguardian.com. 19David Leigh and Rob Evans, 5 February 2010, ‘BAE and the Saudis: How Secret Cash Payments Oiled £43bn Arms Deal’, theguardian.com. 20Andrew Bousfield and Richard Brooks, 19 September 2014, ‘Shady Arabia and the Desert Fix’, Private Eye. 44. A Global Ban on Leftwing Politics 1David Cameron, 23 January 2013, ‘EU speech at Bloomberg’, gov.uk. 2George Monbiot, 14 October 2013, ‘From Obamacare to Trade, Superversion Not Subversion Is the New and Very Real Threat to the State’, theguardian.com. 3McCabe Centre for Law and Cancer, ‘Philip Morris Asia Challenge under Australia–Hong Kong Bilateral Investment Treaty’, mccabecentre.org. 4Corporate Europe Observatory, 3 June 2013, ‘A Transatlantic Corporate Bill of Rights’, corporateeurope.org. 5Thomas McDonagh, 2013, Unfair, Unsustainable, and Under the Radar, The Democracy Center, democracyctr.org. 6Glyn Moody, 23 July 2013, ‘Eli Lilly Raises Stakes: Says Canada Now Owes It $500 Million for Not Granting a Patent It Wanted’, techidirt.com. 7McDonagh, Unfair, Unsustainable, and Under the Radar; Public Citizen, March 2013, ‘U.S.


pages: 284 words: 84,169

Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, deep learning, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, framing effect, Google Chrome, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, invisible hand, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral panic, natural language processing, obamacare, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E

Other Twitter users, less prestigious or widely followed, will want to be part of the same conversation, and adopt that variant of the hashtag. The old ones often die out. (Sometimes, adoption of a hashtag can even signal group membership; after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in America in 2010, Republicans preferred #Obamacare and Democrats preferred #ACA.) In other words, this is more spontaneous order. Quickly on Twitter, more slowly in the spoken language, and more slowly still in writing, words change meaning, new ones are born, and other ones die. There is change in the system, but it functions as a system, not as a lot of randomly fluctuating pieces.


pages: 444 words: 84,486

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

He’d been en route home from his Capetown summit on Air Force One when the news broke, and after huddling with his communications team, he’d sat down with the press corps and delivered an unhinged, rambling statement that ranged over America’s “best health-care in the world,” the evils of “something for nothing culture,” and the ongoing project to “clean up the Obamacare disaster” before getting onto the main attraction: calling the shooter a “terrorist.” The word rang in Joe’s ears. His earbuds felt sweaty and itchy. He’d been a teenager on 9/11 and his strongest memory from then was this new word, “terrorist,” and its weird resonances, like it described an orc, ravening and remorseless, superhuman and subhuman at once.


pages: 306 words: 85,836

When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, feminist movement, food miles, George Akerlof, global pandemic, information asymmetry, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, Netflix Prize, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Pareto efficiency, peak oil, pre–internet, price anchoring, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Richard Thaler, Sam Peltzman, security theater, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549

That story has riled up some people, including an economics blogger named Noah Smith, who rails on us and defends the NHS. I should start by saying I have nothing in particular against the NHS, and I also would be the last one to ever defend the U.S. system. Anyone who has ever heard me talk about Obamacare knows I am no fan of it, and I never have been. But it doesn’t take a whole lot of smarts or a whole lot of blind faith in markets to recognize that when you don’t charge people for things (including health care), they will consume too much of it. I guarantee you that if Americans had to pay out of their own pockets the crazy prices that hospitals charge for services, a much smaller share of U.S.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

It cost the company millions of dollars to create and maintain. Now consider Google. It arguably has the world’s most complete spell checker, in basically every living language. The system is constantly improving and adding new words—the incidental outcome of people using the search engine every day. Mistype “iPad”? It’s in there. “Obamacare”? Got it. Moreover, Google seemingly obtained its spell checker for free, reusing the misspellings that are typed into the company’s search engine among the three billion queries it handles every day. A clever feedback loop instructs the system what word users actually meant to type. Users sometimes explicitly “tell” Google the answer when it poses the question at the top of the results page—“Did you mean epidemiology?”


pages: 252 words: 80,636

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

In a way, the famous TV character of Archie Bunker, an uneducated longshoreman who can afford a house in the suburbs and a non-working wife, and who is bigoted, sexist, and completely supportive of the status quo that allows him such secure prosperity, is the very quintessence of the corporatist age. 19. Though it is notable that it is precisely this sixties radical equation of communism, fascism, and the bureaucratic welfare state that has been taken up by right-wing populists in America today. The Internet is rife with such rhetoric. One need only consider the way that “Obamacare” is continually equated with socialism and Nazism, often, both at the same time. 20. William Lazonick has done the most work on documenting this shift, noting that it is a shift in business models—the effects of globalization and offshoring really only took off later, in the late nineties and early 2000s.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

At her funeral, my cousin told me it was the last phone call she had made. Other than that, no one in my family mentioned the O’Reilly segment at all. • • • The political bullying continued. By August, the Tea Party movement exploded into congressional town halls, where raging protesters shouted down Democrats and Republicans alike, demanding that they block “Obamacare.” Hundreds descended on a Tampa Democrat’s meeting, and a local newspaper described the event as “more like a wrestling cage match than a panel discussion on national policy.” Maryland representative Frank Kratovil was hung in effigy, Long Island representative Tim Bishop needed a police escort from an angry town hall to his car, and North Carolina representative Brad Miller reported death threats.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Fishman, “As Populations Age, a Chance for Younger Nations,” New York Times magazine, October 14, 2010. 12 Thomas Edsall, “Who is Poor?” New York Times, March 13, 2013. 13 Frank Furedi, preface to The Imaginary Time Bomb by Phil Mullan (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2002), xii. 14 Longman, op. cit. 15 Martha Albertson Fineman and Stu Marvel, “The right’s latest Obamacare lie: Scapegoating America’s seniors,” Slate.com, November 7, 2013. 16 A. Palangkaraya and J. Yong, “Population ageing and its implications on aggregate health care demand: empirical evidence from 22 OECD countries,” International Journal of Health Care Finance Econ (2009), 391–402. doi: 10.1007/s10754-009-9057-3. 17 DE Kingsley, “Aging and Health Care Costs: Narrative Versus Reality,” Poverty & Public Policy, 2015;7(1):3–21. doi: 10.1002/pop4.89 World Health Organization, “World Report on Ageing and Health,” 2015. 18 Matthew C.


pages: 326 words: 84,180

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

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

The root word -veillance is differently applied and invoked, for example, with the terms “überveillance” (often defined as electronic surveillance by way of radio-frequency identification or other devices embedded in the living body), “redditveillance” (the crowdsourcing of surveillance through publicly accessible CCTV feeds, photographs uploaded to online image sharing platforms such as Flickr, and online discussion forums, such as Reddit and 4chan), and “dataveillance,” to name a few.51 Lyon has outlined the “potency of dataveillance” in a surveillance society, which, he writes, is marked by “a range of personal data systems, connected by telecommunications networks, with a consistent identification scheme.”52 The prefix data- signals that such observing is done through data collection as a way of managing or governing a certain population, for example, through the use of bar-coded customer loyalty cards at point of sale for discounted purchases while also collecting aggregate data on loyalty cardholders, or vehicles equipped with transponders that signal their entry and exit on pay-per-use highways and roads, often replacing toll booths. The Guardian newspaper named “surveillance” and “sousveillance” as the words that mattered in 2013 alongside “Bitcoin,” “Obamacare,” and “binge-watching.”53 For Steve Mann, who coined the term “sousveillance,” both terms—sousveillance and surveillance—fall under the broad concept of veillance, a form of watching that is neutral. Mann situates surveillance as the “more studied, applied and well-known veillance” of the two, defining surveillance as “organizations observing people” where this observing and recording is done by an entity in a position of power relative to the person or persons being observed and recorded.54 Such oversight could take the form of red-light cameras that photograph vehicles when drivers violate traffic laws, or the monitoring of sales clerks on shop floors with CCTV, as well as, for example, punch clocks that track factory workers’ time on the floor to more ubiquitous forms of observation, productivity monitoring, and data collection, such as remote desktop viewing or electronic monitoring software that tracks employees’ non-work-related Internet use.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Understanding this characteristically populist gambit will help explain why the liberal response to Trump, while often admirably professional and intellectually persuasive, has been so disappointingly weak politically. Liberals despise Trump for pulling out of the Paris Accord and the Iranian nuclear deal, trying to destroy Obamacare, giving generous tax cuts to the rich while withdrawing funding from programmes that benefit the poor, putting underage children separated from their parents at the Mexican border into cages, making light of the abominations committed by autocrats he admires, using the term ‘globalist’ to suggest that Jewish Americans are disloyal, and so forth.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

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

In 2015, while Wanek was at the helm: From a 2015 OSHA news release, accessed on March 4, 2022, https://www.osha.gov/news/newsreleases/region5/02022015. entitled Mean Girl, writes: Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019). Rand inspired Whole Foods Market’s CEO John Mackey: John Mackey, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070. and was contributor to her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal: The subtitle of this book cracks me up, as capitalism can seem to be the only ideal Americans universally know. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, first edition (New York: New American Library, 1966).


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Metro West Daily News, October 24, 2011. 19Peter Orszag, “Pension Funding Scare Won’t Frighten All States,” Bloomberg View, October 23, 2012. 20Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff, “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It,” New York Times, February 12, 2012. 21Glenn Kessler, “Sarah Palin, ‘Death Panels’ and ‘Obamacare,’ ” Washington Post, June 27, 2012. 22Christine Montross, “The Woman Who Ate Cutlery,” New York Times, August 3, 2013. Chapter 15: The Marshmallow Test 1Paul Tough, How Children Succeed (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 62. 2Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip K. Peake, “The Nature of Adolescent Competencies Predicted by Preschool Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 4 (1988): 688–89. 3Yuichi Shoda, Water Mischel, and Philip K.


pages: 316 words: 91,969

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

“His vision was of a country racked with fear and bent on vengeance, one that imposed invidious choices on the world and on itself. When we listened to President Obama speak in Cairo on Thursday, we recognized the United States.” The Times’ infatuation with Obama continued in its support for his health care agenda, popularly known as “Obamacare.” To be sure, the Times had its truck with the effort. But its criticism did not focus on the shadowy horse-trading behind the bill, nor on how it would affect the deficit, nor on the constitutional issue of the federal government forcing citizens to buy insurance or face a penalty. Its major criticism came from Obama’s left, especially when he backed away from the so-called “public option,” and seemed to be dragging his feet in using his bully pulpit to lobby lawmakers, particularly Democratic representatives who might lose their seats in the midterm elections.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

he asks, before launching into a tirade of conspiracy theories about black supremacy, Black Lives Matter riots, and illegal aliens, whom he asserts comprise 90 percent of the employees in factories. With a practiced mental calm, I gently meet his provocations with light, curious inquiries and answer questions he has about socialized medicine in Canada. Ted generously concedes it must work better in its Canadian form, though he’s aggressively derisive of Obamacare. He also adds that he’s almost Jewish, though he hasn’t brought himself to fully convert yet, before turning the subject to government efforts to put gluten in bananas (even though they are naturally gluten-free). Driving is a full-time job for Ted while he goes to school to study computer science, though he’s struggling to meet his rising health-care costs, between the cost of school and his driver earnings.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

The Trump administration also reversed a directive that forced universities to quickly investigate on-campus sexual assault. Former president Barack Obama had enacted the requirement, which lowered the burden of proof and cut federal funding if schools weren’t compliant, in 2011. Trump rolled back another Obamacare provision requiring employers to offer health insurance that covered birth control. He signed a law that lets local governments withhold federal funding from healthcare providers like Planned Parenthood that offer abortions, along with myriad other women’s healthcare treatments like breast cancer screenings.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

A typical article tends to read like this one, by Barry Ellsworth, in an op-ed for the online news bulletin Allvoices.com: ‘Charles and David Koch are at it again’, Ellsworth writes, this time using their wealth to back a creepy ‘Carenival’ complete with games, jugglers, knife throwers, and acrobats whose sole purpose is to scare people away from Obamacare … some billionaires like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg use some of their vast riches to advance the cause of mankind through humanitarian donations. Then there are those like the coal-loving Koch brothers, who seem to delight in using their money to throw up roadblocks to programmes that would benefit the vast majority of Americans.38 The problem with this type of commentary is that it is a little like professing that you believe in democracy but only if your preferred party is the sole candidate.


How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

They talked about affirmative action in the police force, how standards had been lowered three times to hit the quota, and how that wasn’t fair. They talked about immigration and how everyone has to sacrifice for those who don’t want to work (never mind that we were a family of immigrants from Italy and the Philippines). My parents live in Florida, voted for Clinton, then switched to Trump after Obamacare raised the prices of their medicines. My siblings and I sensed their anger being fueled by something. When Facebook took down the Russian information operations, their accounts went down, too. When voices started rising at the table, I told my family that we should guard against hate. Vinnie told me that Toms River, with its ninety-five thousand residents, had been mentioned by the Buffalo shooter in his 180-page manifesto a week earlier because of its growing Hasidic community.1 The police had increased security around the area, and the Ocean County prosecutor had tamped down fears: “I can state, unequivocally, that there is no evidence that the shooter had any intention or inclination to travel to anywhere in Ocean County.”


pages: 270 words: 88,213

Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People by Tracy Kidder

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, coronavirus, feminist movement, fixed income, gentrification, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, medical residency, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, obamacare, San Francisco homelessness, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Soul of a New Machine, War on Poverty

And it was obvious that he’d begun to imagine a role for himself with the Street Team, as Jim’s assistant on the front lines—an unsanctioned, not yet fully formed idea of a place for himself in the world, which had the urgent quality of a thing conceived in desperation. 3 The Social Director For Jim, 2017 was a year of worries. First of all, “Trump”—shorthand for the president’s attempts to eradicate Obamacare. If successful, it would bring deep cuts in funding for poor people’s medicine and, Jim feared, maybe kill the Program. A troubling philosophical issue also loomed. He served on a panel that was compiling a study of studies for the National Academies of Sciences. The aim was to show that housing for homeless people improved their health and saved the public money, and yet no studies fully supported those widely held claims, none at least that met the standards of the academics on the committee.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Keep more of your hard-earned income, and that’s money that you could invest and compound to achieve your vision of Financial Freedom quicker. In fact, if you’re a high-income earner, living in a high-income state like California (as I used to), your total tax bill (including income, investment, payroll, Obamacare, and Social Security) clocks in at 62%. Which means that unless you have an efficient tax strategy, you get to keep only 38 cents out of every dollar you earn. There’s no good reason to pay more than you have to—in fact, it’s your right as an American not to pay more than you have to. As Billings Learned Hand, one of the most influential judges of all time, stated: Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the Treasury.

Then in 2012 California raised taxes on the highest income earners by more than 30%, to 13.3%. After a lifetime of paying through the nose on state income taxes (historically among the most punishing in the country), the tax situation got even worse. My effective tax rate—after federal and state income taxes, Social Security, investment taxes, payroll taxes, and the Obamacare tax—shot up to 62%. That meant I was left with 38 cents on every dollar. Just 38 cents! And on top of that, the new state income tax increase was made retroactive, meaning that I was going to have to pay additional tax on income I had already earned that year. They changed the rules of the game after the fact!


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

If the forecast said there was a 70% chance of rain and it rains, people think the forecast was right; if it doesn’t rain, they think it was wrong. This simple mistake is extremely common. Even sophisticated thinkers fall for it. In 2012, when the Supreme Court was about to release its long-awaited decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare, prediction markets—markets that let people bet on possible outcomes—pegged the probability of the law being struck down at 75%. When the court upheld the law, the sagacious New York Times reporter David Leonhardt declared that “the market—the wisdom of the crowds—was wrong.”15 The prevalence of this elementary error has a terrible consequence.


pages: 341 words: 95,752

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, company town, index card, microaggression, natural language processing, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, why are manhole covers round?

This trend has been much more common in the U.K.: “Bored by, of, or with?,” Oxford Dictionaries (blog), April 24, 2016, www.oxforddictionaries.com. “trying to chisel in on the beer racket”: Merriam-Webster Unabridged, s.v. “chisel, verb.” And now we see the word “muggle”: “The Supreme Court’s reading and defense of Obamacare meant to him that ‘words no longer have meaning’ and he decried his fellow justices for their ‘interpretive jiggery-pokery.’ That last insult was an unusual one, and it led the muggles of the Internet to wonder where they’d heard it before.” Marina Koren, “Antonin Scalia and the Supreme Court of Jiggery-Pokery,” National Journal, June 25, 2015.


pages: 261 words: 103,244

Economists and the Powerful by Norbert Haring, Norbert H. Ring, Niall Douglas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, buy and hold, central bank independence, collective bargaining, commodity trading advisor, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversified portfolio, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, illegal immigration, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, land bank, law of one price, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, moral hazard, new economy, obamacare, old-boy network, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Solow, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, shareholder value, short selling, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

As insurance is all about administration and marketing, this can be a very important drawback (Kirchgässner 2007). Many other kinds of insurance, including health insurance, are likely to exhibit similar patterns. Thus there might be good reasons in this particular case for a government endorsed monopoly. Indeed, even though the US Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (“Obamacare”) is badly designed, if implemented correctly its fundamental economic principles are sound. Ireland, which is one of the few countries in Europe to have a fully privatized health care system, is introducing compulsory health insurance from 2014 as a means of saving public money and achieving universal coverage, exactly as the US should have.


pages: 391 words: 97,018

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, if we pursue the “do-nothing option”—if Washington remains gridlocked over vital policy issues—the Bush-era tax cuts on income, investments, and estates will expire; the payroll tax holiday will end; the alternative minimum tax will hit ever larger numbers of taxpayers; spending cuts in Medicare passed in 1997 will finally take hold; the automatic sequestration of spending for defense and social programs envisioned in the Super Committee gambit will take place; and Obamacare will be implemented. All told, the combination of higher taxes and spending that is now the default, no-action option would reduce deficits by $7.1 trillion over ten years.4 The trade deficit, which peaked in 2006 at $753 billion, shrank to $381 billion in 2009, and started to grow again as the economy recovered, to $500 billion in 2010 and $558 billion in 2011.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

He started that speech by noting with surprise just how many people were in attendance, and then offered a rambling tour d’horizon of the epic failings of America and his unique capacity to put things right. China was beating America. So was Japan. So was Mexico. The situation in the Middle East was a disaster. Obamacare was a disaster. Obama was a disaster. “I beat China all the time.” “Nobody builds walls better than me.” “I’ve done an amazing job.” “I don’t have to brag. I don’t have to.” “We need—we need somebody—we need somebody that literally will take this country and make it great again.” Many rolled their eyes, dismissing him as they would their mad uncle muttering obscenities at the television.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

His social media pontifications promote topics and themes that play to his audience’s preferences more than they describe actual policies or reality. The online herds that supported, promoted, and now sustain President Trump shared certain preferences: anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, nationalist rather than globalist, toughness in general but particularly against the Islamic State, low taxes, repeal of Obamacare, and even standing for the national anthem rather than kneeling. The more a narrative grows in popularity, the more Trump amplifies it. The more he champions what the audience likes, the more support he accrues from this preference bubble. Trump wins the crowd regardless of whether he wins anything for the crowd.


pages: 305 words: 101,743

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

He promised to prosecute Hillary Clinton, to drop Bowe Bergdahl out of an airplane without a parachute, to make Nabisco produce Oreos in America, to make Apple produce iPhones in America, to bring back all the jobs to America, to get rid of gun-free zones in schools, to give everyone who killed a police officer the death penalty, to deport all the undocumented immigrants, to spy on mosques, to defund Planned Parenthood, to “take care of women,” to get rid of Obamacare, to get rid of the EPA, to make everyone say “Merry Christmas,” to build an “artistically beautiful” wall between the United States and Mexico that would be the “greatest wall that you’ve ever seen,” to make Mexico pay for that wall, and—funniest of all, sort of—to never take a vacation as president.


Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

There is absolutely no indication that the additional trillion dollars buy the average American significant benefit. Admittedly, it does serve the interests of some, including the wealthiest. So, no single health system will appeal to the interests of everyone. Hard choices must be made: should we have a system that benefits the majority or the wealthiest? The present system, even in its revised “Obamacare” form, favors the latter. It may be objected that if we opt for a Canadian-style health care system, taxes would have to go up dramatically to finance the increased cost. The answer to this is the mind-blowing statistics I detailed above. The US government already spends more than Canada per person.


pages: 349 words: 98,309

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Or an ‘opt-in’ that gives consumers the option of adding a nominal amount to their payment that would go to a benefits fund for workers.”90 “Somebody may be doing very, very well as an Etsy seller and Airbnb user and Uber driver and part-time consultant[,] . . . but if they hit a rough patch, they have nothing to stop them until they fall, frankly, back upon government assistance programs,” the senator explained, calling the portable benefits an “emergency fund”: “It might be a fund to take care of a disability if you get hurt. It might work with some existing retirement programs. Part of it would be, depending on what happens with Obamacare, an ability to help deal with health care expenses. I think there will be a variety of models.”91 While the portable benefits plan may be helpful for Success Stories and Strugglers whose main employment comes from the sharing economy, Strivers who have alternative employment may not be as well served under such a plan.


pages: 322 words: 99,918

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country by Helen Russell

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, death from overwork, do what you love, Downton Abbey, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, microdosing, obamacare, offshore financial centre, remote working, retail therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, work culture

Morten insists that Danish healthcare is in a good place: ‘In Denmark, we spend 12 per cent of our GDP on healthcare that works well, is efficient and is for everyone. In the US, for example, they spend 18 per cent of their GDP on healthcare but there’s no equality or sharing – so some people have nothing.’ The UK spends just 9.6 per cent, according to WHO figures. There’s a lot of interest in the Danish system from the Obamacare lobby, and Morten regularly meets with supporters in the US, keen to find out more. But many Americans remain reluctant to share their personal information. ‘A lot of people still hate the idea of the public sector seeing or owning their data,’ says Morten. ‘Some people think the whole thing sounds too much like communism, that it makes you “unfree”.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

“Perhaps the easiest coalitions to form will be those that merge parts of the capitalistic and managerial; the most difficult probably will be efforts to bridge between socialism and capitalism.” He was right about that last point—to this day, the tension between capitalism and socialism continues to be a vexing one for the country. Consider the passage of Obamacare. But he was dead wrong about the former—capitalism and managerialism did not form a coalition; capitalism chewed managerialism up and spit out the bones. In defense of Michael Jensen, then, it is somewhat of an overstatement to suggest he participated in the murder of managerialism, because by the time he was spreading his ideas about corporate and managerial purpose, managerialism was already dead.

., 77 Morgan Stanley, 455, 460 Morgens, Howard, 190–93, 195 Moriarty, Rowland, 332 Morison, Elting, 244 Morrison, Roger, 202 Moss, David, 249 Motivation, Productivity, and Satisfaction of Workers, The (Zaleznik et al), 308 Munger, Charlie, 480, 482 Murphy, Kevin, 371, 375 Murphy, Liam, 540 Murphy, Tom, 51, 76, 163, 169, 170–71, 172 “Musings on Management” (Mintzberg), 483 “Myth of the Well-Educated Manager, The” (Livingston), 290–92 My Years with General Motors (Sloan), 194, 245 Nader, Ralph, 523 Nakamura, Kaneo, 153–54, 157 Nanda, Ashish, 235–36, 521–22 Nash, Laura, 436 National Football League (NFL), 403 National Research Council, 80, 83 Nature Conservancy, 561 “Nature of Man, The” (Meckling and Jensen), 368 Networks and Organizations (Nohria), 559 “Never Overestimate the Power of the Computer” (Lewis), 296 Nevin, John, 493–94 “New Capitalism” movement, 87 New Enterprises and Small Business Management (Day and Donham), 326 Newhall, Chuck, 322 New Industrial State, The (Galbraith), 342 New Jersey Bell Telephone, 111 New Yorker, 516–17, 534; article on MBAs in consulting firms, 212 New York Stock Exchange, 469, 476 New York Times: article on Ackman, 480; article on Romney, 507; Bok looking for new dean, 337, 338; on Burke, 526; Cabrera in, 551; Clark quote, 500; conflict-of-interest policies, 404–5; David’s statement, 141; exposé of Amazon, 90; Frei on women MBA students, 569–70; gender equity at HBS, 570, 571; HBS as a golden passport, 1; HBS grading differential, 241; HBS online learning articles, 572–73; on HBS’s TUP, 160; Jensen interview, 381; Khurana in, 550; Kristof report, 166; LeBoutillier editorial, 435; Leonhard’s article, 494–95; on Levitt, 263; Martin article, 461; Material Service bribing of state officials, 346; on MBAs at McKinsey, 210; McArthur cancels interview, 341; Mintzberg interview, 485; Morgens in, 191–92; Porter’s article, 362; Shad op ed, 431–32; Stahlman’s article, 301; Tufano on Enron, 520 New York Times Magazine, 345, 360 Nixon, Richard, 354, 469, 507 Nohria, Nitin (dean), 17, 51, 52, 157–58, 194, 261, 331, 350, 408, 559, 564–74, 577 ; board memberships, 574; case method and, 565–66; digital learning, 571–74; fund-raising, 532, 533, 535, 536; inclusion as goal of, 241; “It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession,” 306, 439, 566; MBA Oath, 565, 567–68; salary of, 532; women at HBS and, 569–71 Norquist, Grover, 505–6 Norton, David S., 44, 444 Noyce, Bob, 320 Obama, Barack, 238; Obamacare, 384 Ochs, Adolph S., 105 O’Donnell, Joseph, 162 Official MBA Handbook, The, 461 “Of Harvard, Elitism, and Amorality” (LeBoutillier), 435 Olsen, Kenneth H., 126 Olsen, R. Paul, 283 O’Neal, Stan, 548 One Market Under God (Frank), 57, 161, 490 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 144, 184, 350 Orth, Charles, 398 Orwell, George, 379–80 Osgood, Mary Elizabeth, 237 O’Toole, James, 224 Overdorf, Michael, 303 Ovitz, Michael, 371 Paine, Lynn Sharp, 437 Palepu, Krishna, 408–9, 521 Palihapitiy, Chamath, 329–30 Palmisano, Sam, 404 Pareto, Vilfredo, 78, 81, 111, 112, 113, 244 Parker, Dorothy, 23 Parks, Sharon, 437 Parsons, Talcott, 356–57, 244 Pascal, Amy, 534 Patton, Arch, 538–39 Paulson, Hank, 74, 466, 475–77, 561; financial crisis of 2007–10 and, 548; Goldman Sachs and, 477–78; HBS given $400 million, 478; Paulson Institute, 561 Paulson, John, 68, 466, 477–79, 531, 533, 535 Pechter, Richard, 468 Peck, Gregory, 186 Pellegrini, Paolo, 478 Perkins, Donald, 106, 332 Perkins, Thomas, 120, 127, 322 Pershing Square Capital Management, 466, 479, 481 Person, Harlow, 38 Pestillo, Peter, 163 Peters, Tom, 417, 513 Petriglieri, Gianpietro and Jennifer, 311, 313 Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 314, 317, 424 Pickens, T.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Technologies like gene therapy, personalised medicine and smart drugs will no doubt be part of treatment regimens, but the real art for cities will be changing citizen behaviour so that overall healthcare issues are reduced or minimised. Costs will be a fraction of those of the healthcare systems today. In this future, Obamacare won’t be an issue because the cost of care will have been dramatically reduced. Call it socialism 2.0—social care that doesn’t require the massive budgets we’ve come to expect. Smart Pollution Reduction Pollution of water and air is a major challenge for modern metropolises. Large cities such as Jakarta, Beijing and Mexico City have tens of thousands who fall ill because of such pollution.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

When people tell me they don’t think these methods will work in their organizations, I like to tell them the story of HealthCare.gov. I mean, sure, your organization may be political and bureaucratic. But compared to the Department of Health and Human Services (roughly 80,000 employees and counting1)? The political maelstrom of Obamacare? Is your situation really more challenging than that? In October of 2013 Mikey Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google, made a phone call that changed not only his life but the lives of millions of Americans. He had worked on President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and had been watching in horror the recent news about HealthCare.gov, the technological centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, which the Obama administration had launched on October 1.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

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

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

Consolidate the Industry and Treat Health Insurance as a Utility One of the primary messages that leaps out from an analysis of the prices charged by providers is that Medicare—the government-run program for people aged sixty-five and over—is by far the most efficient portion of our health care system. As Brill writes, “Unless you are protected by Medicare, the health care market is not a market at all. It’s a crapshoot.” The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) will certainly improve the situation as far as individuals who previously lacked insurance are concerned, but it does relatively little to actively rein in hospital costs; instead, the inflated costs will be shifted to insurers and then ultimately to taxpayers in the form of the subsidies that were put in place to make health insurance affordable to people with moderate incomes.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, accessed February 8, 2012, http://stnw.nhtsa.gov/cars/rules/rulings/cafe/alternativefuels/background.htm. Bank of Japan. 2012. BOJ Time-Series Data Search. Barboza, David. 2009. “Still Dancing in Her Dreams.” New York Times, April 17. BBC. 2009. “Profile: Geely Automobile.” BBC News, December 23. Bell, Larry. 2012. “Obamacar: Bad Karma for Taxpayers.” Forbes, September 25. Berkshire Hathaway. 2008. Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Annual Report. Block, Fred, and Matthew R. Keller. 2009. “Where Do Innovations Come From? Transformations in the US Economy, 1970–2006.” Socio-Economic Review 7:3: 459–83. Bloomberg TV. 2012. “BYD May be Warren Buffett’s ‘Rare Mistake.’ ” June 30.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

The cost of everything, like health insurance, gas, and groceries, has been going up by leaps and bounds. Some things have even seemed to double. Versus our income not changing that much.” I tell them about the health system in my native UK—free health care for everyone. I say I remember Glenn Beck trying to scare America by saying that if Obamacare went through, things would end up like Britain, with a savage, failing, socialist health-care system. “But it’s not failing,” I say. “It’s great. And nobody has to pay anything.” (Actually, it’s funded by national taxation, and some parts of it work more efficiently than others, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Brit who doesn’t feel essentially proud and defensive of the system.)


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

THE WHITE HOUSE was losing the public relations battle. Neil Armstrong, of all people, had come out against the decision. For the Obama administration, the timing could not have been worse. It was in the middle of the fight to push through the health-care initiative, the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, and it didn’t need any distractions. Particularly not one in space, which wasn’t a high priority. And it certainly did not need America’s heroes criticizing the nation’s chief executive. This needed to be fixed, and fast. So the White House decided to bring out the president himself to help remedy what was turning into an increasingly difficult problem.


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

Cumulative wear and tear on the body over time occurs under conditions of repeated high stress. Another reason for the health-wealth connection is that the rich have greater access to quality health care. Even with the recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act in 2010 (more commonly referred to as Obamacare), access to quality health care in America is still largely for sale to the highest bidder. Under these conditions, prevention and intervention are more widely available to the more affluent. Finally, not only does lack of income lead to poor health, but poor health leads to reduced earnings. That is, if someone is sick or injured, he or she may not be able to work or may have limited earning power.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

The ‘one-dollar-one-vote’ rule of the market drastically constrains the ability of those with less money to refuse undesirable options given to them by the underlying distribution of income and wealth (recall my criticism of Paul Krugman on low wages in Chapter 4). Moreover, we can be susceptible to beliefs that go against our own interests (‘false consciousness’ from Chapter 5). This tendency makes many losers from the current system defend it: some of you may have seen American pensioners protesting against ‘Obamacare’ with placards saying ‘Government hands off my medicare’ when medicare is – well, let me put it delicately – a government-funded and -run programme. Acknowledging the difficulties involved in changing the economic status quo should not cause us to give up the fight to create an economy that is more dynamic, more stable, more equitable and more environmentally sustainable than what we have had for the last three decades.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

In January, Magerman called Rebekah Mercer on her cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. He tried her again, leaving a message that he wanted to help. Magerman got a return call, but it was from Bob Mercer. Despite his usual shyness, Mercer seemed eager to discuss the merits of Trump and various contentious political topics. They disagreed about climate change, Obamacare, and the value of a border wall, but their tone remained civil. “He will blow things up,” Mercer said about Trump. “That’s what I’m worried about,” Magerman said. “Do you really want to bring back the fear of nuclear war?” Magerman asked. Mercer said he wasn’t all that concerned about nuclear war.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

If you are a sole proprietor, you will still have to pay Social Security and Medicare tax because you are not an employee of a foreign company. However, if you have an offshore company, you are treated as the employee of that foreign company. And, since employees of non-US companies do not pay US payroll tax, you can avoid that, too. US citizens who qualify for the FEIE are also exempt from maintaining health insurance under Obamacare. If you are a US citizen who wants to spend more than one month each year back home, or you are a citizen of any other industrialized country, things get a bit more subjective. US citizens who establish a ‘bona fide residence’ overseas can spend nearly four months each year in the US, but with far stricter requirements to qualify.


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

In her research, based on survey data, Mason found that the strength of a person’s affiliation with a political identity was a much greater predictor of how they felt about the “other side” than the ideological content that might lie behind the identity. Subjects were surveyed on their opinions on six issues: immigration, gun control, same-sex marriage, abortion, Obamacare, and the deficit. Then they were asked how they felt about marrying someone of the opposite political affiliation. Or being friends with them. Or simply spending time with them. What Mason found was that the identity-based label had twice as much predictive value for how subjects felt about the “other side” as did their opinion on any of the six issues!


pages: 388 words: 111,099

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

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

Inhofe’s stance was supported by big oil companies, and his 2014 re-election campaign was funded by BP.28 Fox’s American connections began to prompt questions back home. David Cameron, who was attempting to detoxify the Tories, was accused of supporting privatised healthcare after another Atlantic Bridge-advising Republican senator wrote that he had concluded that Obamacare was “nuts” after Daniel Hannan told him “about the socialised medicine in Britain”. The pair had met in the green room of a Fox News studio.29 Cameron publicly admonished his MEP.30 After the Conservatives’ narrow election victory in 2010, the Atlanticists finally had a place in the British government.


pages: 414 words: 119,116

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World by Michael Marmot

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, cakes and ale, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Doha Development Round, epigenetics, financial independence, future of work, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Kenneth Rogoff, Kibera, labour market flexibility, longitudinal study, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, New Urbanism, obamacare, paradox of thrift, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, structural adjustment programs, the built environment, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, twin studies, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working poor

In the US much of the discussion of ‘disparities’ – the American term for health inequalities or health inequity – is indeed about health care. Such concern is hardly surprising given that although the US spends more on health care than any other country, about one-sixth of its population lack health insurance, and hence have had difficulties in access to care. This should change with the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. Well-meaning US colleagues have urged me not to talk about social determinants of health in the US because it might detract attention from inequities in access to care. An example of why they might be concerned was given to me by a US colleague. Medicaid pays for health care for the poor. Its director in one US state said he was against expansion of Medicaid coverage because insurance was less important than social determinants of health like income, education and housing conditions.18 As the colleague who sent me this remarked wryly: the devil can always quote the scriptures for his purposes.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Kalanick sat on one side of the long table and, after dinner, gave a short speech and answered questions. Emil Michael sat on the other side, across from New York Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman and Arianna Huffington. Next to them sat Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, who asked Kalanick in the Q-and-A session how he felt about the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. When the table returned to private conversations, Michael asked Smith why he had posed a political question, and Smith volunteered that he was hoping that Kalanick would give an answer that revealed libertarian leanings. That led to a broader conversation about the news media and its scruples, the exact content of which would become a topic of blistering controversy.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.3 Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

“costs more than the Pentagon budget”: Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Associated Press, “Report: U.S. Healthcare System Wastes $750B a Year,” September 7, 2012, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/report-us-health-care-system-wastes-750b-year. “The growth of American-style hospitals around the world”: E. Jim, “Can Medical Tourism Save Us from Obamacare?” Reason TV, January 29, 2013, http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/01/29/free-trade-health-care. enticing 2015 price comparisons: Compare Cost | Health Tourism, Health Care, Medical Travel | MedicalTourism.com. (2015). accessed March 4, 2016, www.medicaltourism.com/Forms/price-comparison. Hickory Springs Manufacturing, or HSM, a furniture manufacturer in North Carolina, offers its workers a choice: B.


pages: 359 words: 115,701

Educated by Tara Westover

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, hiring and firing, Mason jar, obamacare, off-the-grid, Rosa Parks, white picket fence, Y2K

I talked about England. Grandpa mentioned my mother, and when he spoke of her it was with the same look of awe that I had seen in the faces of her followers. I didn’t blame him. From what I’d heard, my parents were powerful people in the valley. Mother was marketing her products as a spiritual alternative to Obamacare, and she was selling product as fast as she could make it, even with dozens of employees. God had to be behind such a wondrous success, Grandpa said. My parents must have been called by the Lord to do what they have done, to be great healers, to bring souls to God. I smiled and stood to go. He was the same gentle old man I remembered, but I was overwhelmed by the distance between us.


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

Or, more accurately, heroic medicine. The era of heroic medicine is generally used to describe the period, roughly 1780–1850, during which medical education and practice was highly interventional, even when the interventions did at least as much harm as good. The dates are slightly deceptive. Medical practice, from Hippocrates to Obamacare, has constantly oscillated between interventional and conservative approaches; the perfect point of balance is a moving target for physicians, and seems likely always to be. Consider the persistence of the humoral theory of disease. Bloodletting, for example, was first popularized by the second-century Greek physician Galen of Pergamon as a way of balancing the four humors: blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile.


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

printable=true&currentPage=all For the resulting technical design flaws of the package, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Freefall: America, free markets, and the sinking of the world economy, Norton, New York, 2010. 24. Table 1 of the Congressional Budget Office's revised and final ‘Estimates for the insurance coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare] updated for the recent Supreme Court decision’, at: www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43472–07–24–2012-CoverageEstimates.pdf 25. Ryan Lizza, ‘The second term’, New Yorker, 18 June 2012, at: www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/18/120618fa_fact_lizza?printable=true 26. Jack Grovum, ‘States make “disturbing cuts” to unemployment benefits’, USA Today, 11 July 2013, at: www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/11/stateline-unemployment-benefits/2508115/ 27.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

noredirect=on&utm_term=.b81dd6679eee; Wyatt Andrews and Anna Werner, “Healthcare.gov Plagued by Crashes on 1st Day,” CBS News, October 1, 2013, www.cbsnews.com/news/healthcaregov-plagued-by-crashes-on-1st-day; Adrianne Jeffries, “Why Obama’s Healthcare.gov Launch Was Doomed to Fail,” Verge, October 8, 2013, www.theverge.com/2013/10/8/4814098/why-did-the-tech-savvy-obama-administration-launch-a-busted-healthcare-website; “The Number 6 Says It All About the HealthCare.gov Rollout,” NPR, December 27, 2013, www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/27/257398910/the-number-6-says-it-all-about-the-healthcare-gov-rollout; Kate Pickert, “Report: Cost of HealthCare.Gov Approaching $1 Billion,” Time, July 30, 2014, http://time.com/3060276/obamacare-affordable-care-act-cost. 2. Marshall Fisher, Ananth Raman, and Anna Sheen McClelland, “Are You Ready?,” Harvard Business Review, August 2000) https://hbr.org/2000/07/are-you-ready. 3. Fisher, Raman, and McClelland, “Are You Ready?” 4. Richard Feynman, Messenger Lectures, Cornell University, BBC, 1964, www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messenger-lectures/player. 5.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

This helped avert at home the more painful and extended reality of the crisis that gripped Europe and other parts of the world, beginning an unprecedented stretch of economic growth and job creation in the United States. But it also preserved the inequality multiplying like a virus within our system. We would have only two years with Democratic control of Congress. During that time, Obama took frenetic action to point the ocean liner in a new direction. Obamacare to enlarge the social safety net and give more people access to health services. A package to save the American auto industry. Competent management of the bailout to recover the public’s money. Stimulus funding to plug holes in infrastructure and seed clean energy industries. Increased regulation of Wall Street to avoid further crises.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

As quoted in the original French in The Waste Land but translated into English here. Andy . . . along with five thousand other employees who got the ax: Errol Schweizer to author. See also Tom Huddleston Jr., “Whole Foods Cutting 1500 Jobs,” Fortune, September 28, 2015. John Mackey came out against universal health care: Emma G. Keller, “Whole Foods CEO John Mackey calling Obamacare fascist is tip of the iceberg,” The Guardian, January 18, 2013. Whole Foods–Amazon takes the next logical step . . . cuts medical benefits for its part-time workers: Hayley Peterson, “Whole Foods is cutting medical benefits for part-time workers,” Business Insider, September 12, 2019. ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ INDEX The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

When was the last time they worked a bad job, or one without insurance? When was the last time they had a personal conversation with anyone working at McDonald’s, or an Amazon warehouse, or a call center? Do they know anyone who had kids as a teenager, or got MRSA from their job, or actually had to use Obamacare, or didn’t go to college, or has been in prison? What does in the weeds mean to them? If my newspaper hadn’t closed, I think, I might have written a quick Szechuangate blog post, probably treating all the people going to insane lengths for an advertising gimmick as dumb but harmless. Those people in line looked pretty similar to people I knew—I’d have automatically extended empathy to them.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

Occasionally, mainstream politicians criticized Serco, G4S, and other providers, but they did little to enforce greater accountability.20 Founded in 1929, Serco has been ubiquitous in British life, running ferries, London’s Docklands Light Railway, the National Physical Laboratory, prisons, defense contracts, education authorities, waste management, and a host of other operations. It has over 100,000 employees globally and controls prisons in Australia, New Zealand, and Germany. It operated with a $1.25 billion contract from the Obama administration to implement Obamacare, despite a Serco whistle-blower having alleged that its staff had “hardly any work to do” during a botched program. Both Serco and G4S were complicit in overcharging by tens of millions of pounds for the electronic tagging of prisoners—some of whom were found to have been dead at the time—from the 2000s onwards.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

half of all American workers earn less than $30,000 US Social Security Administration, “Wage Statistics for 2015,” accessed February 2, 2018, https://www.ssa.gov/​cgi-bin/​netcomp.cgi?year=2015. with a whopping $8,000 deductible eHealth, “Ten Years of Health Insurance Costs,” https://resources.ehealthin­surance.com/​affordable-care-act/​much-obamacare-cost-2017. “Rapid advancements in the field of robotics” UNICRI Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (The Hague, The Netherlands), homepage, http://www.unicri.it/​in_focus/​on/​UNICRI_Centre_Artificial_Robotics. Nor can it be dismissed as a mere happy side effect For thinking along this line I am indebted to many economists, historians, and philosophers, and to the persuasive reasoning of Harvard philosopher Michael J.


pages: 416 words: 124,469

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet Archive, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, obamacare, pets.com, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, too big to fail, yield curve

One of Bell’s greatest achievements, back when he was a Senate staffer, was helping the Reagan administration create a novel legislative maneuver called “reconciliation,” which allowed the president to pass a budget through the Senate with a bare majority of votes, bypassing the filibuster. Reconciliation was later used to pass Obamacare and the Trump tax cuts, earning Bell a level of notoriety on the Hill, a fact that he advertised decades later with pride. “I talked to somebody a couple of days ago and she said: ‘You’re the motherfucker that invented reconciliation, aren’t you?’ Her exact words,” Bell recounted. Bell’s Salomon Brothers office was located in the Willard Hotel, just across the street from the Treasury Building.


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

From his front door, I realized, a person could still maintain the illusion that the American suburb had remained the best of all possible worlds. Not with a Bang Driving east along Interstate 10, you hear Phoenix long before you see it, as a kind of nonstop, dyspeptic plaint frothing over the AM dial. Between tirades about Obamacare, Glenn Beck encourages listeners to purchase bullion as a hedge against the impending collapse of the “paper-money economy.” A longtime listener, first-time caller on the Barry “Barely Famous” Young Show opines that the United States should quit all the talk and just turn Iran into an ashtray, already.


pages: 433 words: 129,636

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

1960s counterculture, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, British Empire, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, do what you love, feminist movement, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, obamacare, pill mill, TED Talk, zero-sum game

“Muscling” black tar heroin, in turn, leads to infections, rotting skin, botulism, even gangrene.) In the 1970s, East Coast heroin dealers, mostly blacks by then, began printing brands on glassine bags broadcasting the supposed potency of the drug inside, or the headlines of the day: brands like Hell Date, Toxic Waste, Knockout, NFL, Obamacare, Government Shutdown. Over the decade the drug that square America despised became the choice drug of despised America: urban outcasts, wandering con men, homosexuals, pickpockets, artists, and jazz musicians populated the early heroin world. Underground classics such as William Burroughs’s Junky described its nonconformist denizens, and mesmerized later generations intent on rebellion.


pages: 453 words: 130,632

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

Though I do admire a satirical show named Silicon Valley that portrayed a mogul who employed a Blood Boy for regular rejuvenating transfusions. On The Late Show, wrote Tad Friend in a New Yorker exploration of the longevity industry, Stephen Colbert told young people that President Trump was going to replace Obamacare with mandatory parabiosis. “He’s going to stick a straw in you like a Capri Sun.”27 I would prefer an antiaging emphasis that is not about extension but betterment, that can alleviate Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and the other diseases that have stepped into our longer life spans to end them. I have seen how someone dies of dementia, and if that can be cured with blood, fetch me a straw


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The online activity of Tea Party supporters also focused heavily on making sure that this freshman class of members adhered to policy stances favored by the groups.42 Researchers also found that Tea Partiers were often full of misconceptions about the provisions of policy proposals, for example, the existence of “death panels” in Obamacare. However, the activists had encyclopedic knowledge of the political process by which policy gets made and implemented: veto points, committee agendas, which person needs to be called when. In fact the Tea Party activists appeared to exhibit such a deep “mastery of the legislative process and arcane party rules” that researchers thought they would do as well as political scientists who specialize in these narrow and obscure topics—topics crucial to anyone who cared about passing legislation.43 They focused intensely on process—and how to block or shift it to their liking.


pages: 470 words: 137,882

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, Gunnar Myrdal, mass incarceration, microaggression, Milgram experiment, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Peter Eisenman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, social distancing, strikebreaker, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Because the Tennessee legislature had neither taken up the Affordable Care Act nor expanded Medicaid coverage, the man was not able to get the expensive, lifesaving treatment that would have been available to him had he lived just across the border in Kentucky. As he approached death, he stood by the conviction that he did not want the government involved. “No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens,” the man told Metzl. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die.” And sadly, so he would. CHAPTER TWELVE A Scapegoat to Bear the Sins of the World Every year, on the day of atonement, the ancient Hebrews took two male goats and presented them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. Then the high priest cast lots to determine the fate of each goat.


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

Duggan, “The Growth in the Social Security Disability Rolls: A Fiscal Crisis Unfolding,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 3 (Summer 2006), 71–96; Göran Therborn, The Killing Fields of Inequality (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 112, no. 49 (December 2015), 15078–15083; David A. Ansell, The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); James S. House, Beyond Obamacare: Life, Death, and Social Policy (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015); Richard (Buz) Cooper, Poverty and the Myths of Health Care Reform (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Nathan Seltzer, “The Economic Underpinnings of the Drug Epidemic,” SocArXiv (2019), accessible at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/cdwap/; James Tyner, Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Katherine McLean, “ ‘There’s Nothing Here’: Deindustrialization as Risk Environment for Overdose,” International Journal of Drug Policy 29 (March 2016), 25. 4.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

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

In Canada and many Northern European countries, the choice has been to offer a uniform state health insurance package to all, but to allow public as well as private providers of care; private insurance markets are purely supplementary. In contrast, the United States relies mostly on private insurance markets, which is why there are large numbers of uninsured people, a situation which the recent introduction of ‘Obamacare’ has begun to correct.36 [ 190 ] Stability and Inclusion 191 India has begun to introduce a state insurance system for secondary care, viz. the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) scheme, which takes roughly a single-​payer, Canadian–​North European track.37 The scheme covers those below the poverty line (BPL) as defined by the Planning Commission, i.e. around 60 million families (300 million individuals).


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

It is well-paid jobs with some prospect of longevity, that come with health benefits and pensions, that create a sustainable economy and a just urban landscape. The evidence of the last few years in the United States suggests that new jobs are paid less well than old (vanished) jobs and come without pensions or comparable benefits—although the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), if states allow it to be fully implemented, will help. “Few Cities Have Regained Jobs They Lost,” trumpets the New York Times, citing a report focused on the absence of any real help from the federal government during the recession years.57 Worse still, while “a majority of the jobs that were lost” during the recession were middle income, “a majority of those added during the recovery have been low-paying.”58 The result is less a jobs deficit than a “good jobs deficit,” which thwarts a long-term full recovery for many cities.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

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

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

Distrust in the American media really ramped up with the Barack Obama election campaign, again with good reason. In July 2008 a poll found Americans believed by 3 to 1 that journalists favoured Obama; by October that figure was 8 to 1. By September 2009 a large majority of Americans believed the media were ‘promoting the Obama presidency’ and Obamacare ‘without objective criticism’.5 Politico’s John Harris, referring to his time at the Washington Post, wrote: ‘A couple years ago, you would send a reporter out with Obama, and it was like they needed to go through detox when they came back – “Oh, he’s so impressive, he’s so charismatic,” and we’re kind of like, “Down, boy.”’6 The Obama election to me was another one of those Diana moments when I thought everyone around me had lost their minds, except in this case it was upper-middle-class graduates and media folk rather than Daily Express readers at it.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Culberson was by then in his ascendancy in congressional appropriations, with increasing sway in Republican politics by way of the emergent Tea Party movement, of which he was a founding member in the House, spurred by frustrations with Democratic success passing the Affordable Care Act. He was philosophically disposed toward low taxes and slashed spending; “Obamacare,” as it was sometimes called, offended him.446 Still, some things needed a little coin. When John the junior subcommittee member funded JIMO all those years ago, the NASA administrator took a look at the budget (the law of the land) and the report (pretty please do JIMO), and tossed the report in the trash.


pages: 586 words: 160,321

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, Jean-Pierre Landau

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, diversification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Irish property bubble, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, short selling, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special drawing rights, tail risk, the payments system, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yield curve

But some countries had resisted, as they did not want to rock the boat and let the IMF leave Europe. The resolution of the clash came from a political process, as a result of negotiations in the US Congress, where the Republican majority was persuaded by some US economists, in particular by Stanford’s John Taylor, to insert this measure (rather than some domestic content, such as ending Obamacare) into the legislative package that increased the IMF quotas in response to the global financial crisis. Taylor had first floated the idea as a Wall Street Journal article.42 The IMF was not sorry to see the end of the exemption. In a devastating retrospective judgment, it acknowledged that the bending of the usual and traditional IMF rules had delayed “remedial measures risks impairing the member’s prospects for success and undermining safeguards for the Fund’s resources.”43 It also increased private sector risk by subordinating private claims to Fund credit, and it had thus not achieved its stated goal of minimizing contagion.


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

See Suzanne Mettler, “Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 3 (2010): 803–24. This partially accounts for the quandary that states that are the largest recipients of federal assistance tend to be most against government programs. See also the anecdote described below, in the next section, involving the elderly objecting to Obama-care because it threatened to socialize Medicare. 5. See Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (2011): 9–12. 6. See the survey on the perception of inequality in the world, conducted by the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, available at (in French) http://www.jean-jaures.org/Publications/Dossiers-d-actualite/Enquete-sur-la-perception-des-inegalites-dans-le-monde (accessed March 4, 2012). 7.


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

To be sure, many Democrats favored charter schools as a kind of midway approach between public schools and private schools. 55 For a similar interpretation of the role of racial politics in the origin and timing of polarization, see McCarty, Polarization, chap. 5. We return to the issue of race and polarization in Chapter 6. 56 These six key votes were Obama’s stimulus package, Dodd-Frank financial regulation, Lily Ledbetter gender pay equity, Obamacare (first creating it and then overturning it), and the 2017 Trump tax cuts. 57 See Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016); Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism,” 14, no. 3 (September 2016): 681–99, doi:10.1017/S1537592716001122; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F.


Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

However, they increase the expenses for the individuals themselves, and, with regard to the enterprisefinanced insurance costs for health care, they increase the costs especially for small enterprises. The latter has been a complaint about the Obama health reform law, the Affordable Care Act, called Obamacare, which has increased these costs for many small enterprises. The consequence of these policies has been that in the United States many workers have come to not see the government as a friend, one ready to come to their aid. When, over the years, health care costs and educational costs increased faster than the rate of inflation, and real wages stopped growing, while taxes on many households in the middle income classes remained unchanged, complaints and resentments about some programs rose.


Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity by Lawrence B. Afrin M. D., Kendra Neilsen Myles, Kristi Posival

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, megacity, microbiome, mouse model, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, pre–internet, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

But with mast cell disease perceived (correctly) as a complex disease (and that’s just with awareness of mastocytosis, let alone MCAS), physicians know that they generally can’t make money taking care of mast cell disease patients – at least, not within the structures of most of the health care financing systems on earth today. Although the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) is a step toward reformation, the vast majority of the current U.S. health care financing system still compensates physicians for only two things: seeing patients (regardless of whether such encounters actually help the patients) and performing procedures on patients (regardless of whether such procedures actually help the patients).


Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity by Torben Iversen, Philipp Rehm

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Big Tech, business cycle, centre right, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crony capitalism, data science, DeepMind, deindustrialization, full employment, George Akerlof, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, lockdown, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microbiome, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Robert Gordon, speech recognition, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, union organizing, vertical integration, working-age population

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009151405.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press 90 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009151405.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press 2.2 2.3 1.6 1.1 1.3 1.4 1.8 1.4 1.0 1.8 1.7 0.7 0.1 1.8 1.0 0.6 0.5 4.8 1.5 2.2 2.0 2.2 1.4 1.5 1.9 2.0 1.5 1.3 1.3 2.0 1.2 1.2 1.9 1.3 1.5 0.8 6.8 1.9 2.4 2.3 2.5 1.4 1.8 2.0 2.2 1.3 2.1 1.4 2.4 1.6 1.4 2.5 1.9 1.1 1.7 7.0 2.2 2.6 2.6 3.2 1.7 2.1 2.7 1.9 2.5 1.9 1.7 1.7 1.8 1.4 3.0 2.3 1.5 1.8 8.4 2.5 3.0 2.6 3.2 1.6 2.1 1.8 1.7 1.8 2.2 1.7 1.7 1.9 1.5 3.7 2.6 1.6 2.3 ^8.3 2.5 0.9 0.3 1.6 0.6 0.8 0.4 0.0 0.3 1.3 −0.1 0.0 1.2 1.4 1.9 1.6 1.0 1.7 ^3.6 0.8 37 33 24 13 22 20 22 19 na 29 27 12 2 38 20 8 10 58 23 34 26 26 18 20 24 25 27 19 22 29 18 17 35 22 20 16 60 25 32 24 30 17 26 21 22 22 27 20 31 22 18 30 29 14 24 56 26 2000 31 25 30 16 23 24 17 24 22 18 17 19 15 30 26 18 18 52 24 2010 33 25 30 16 23 16 15 26 26 16 17 20 15 39 29 15 22 51 24 2019 −4.5 −8.0 5.7 3.5 0.7 −4.2 −7.2 6.5 *7.2 −13.0 −9.5 8.5 12.8 1.2 9.2 6.8 11.7 −6.5 1.0 1980 => 2019 ^ Change from 1990 to 2019. The last US observation is from 2013 (pre-Obamacare). The change is therefore from 1980 to 2013. Source: OECD Health Statistics 2020 (www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-data.htm, last accessed June 3, 2021 [https://perma.cc/73SW-SYH7]). * Note: 1980 => 2019 refers to absolute change from 1980 to 2019. Australia Austria Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Ireland Italy Japan Netherlands New Zealand Norway Portugal Spain Sweden UK USA Average 1990 Private health expenditure (% of overall health expenditure) 1980 1990 2000 2010 2019 1980 => 2019 1980 Private health expenditure (% of GDP) table 4.1 Private spending on health as a percentage of GDP and total health spending Supplementary Private Health Insurance Markets 91 Private spending as a share of GDP has increased in every country, except in Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands where it remained stable (or dropped slightly in the case of Japan).


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Rather it was the private power of a handful of big cable and phone companies, including Comcast, Verizon and AT&T, which had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying, so that they could make hundreds of millions more dollars by charging other big companies, such as Netflix, for speeding their content down a fast lane.29 These companies, their lobbyists and their supporters in the US Congress argued that the profits made would help companies provide better internet access for all Americans. They also invoked the freedom of the market against some leftist, egalitarian version of free speech. (Republican senator Ted Cruz called net neutrality ‘Obamacare for the internet’.30) But this was not persuasive. The whole history of information and communications businesses, especially in the United States, suggested a tendency towards monopoly, or at least oligopoly, with a concentration of economic power in the paws of a few big cats. What was needed was actually more effective freedom of the market: that is, a well-regulated level playing field, so that new, agile entrants could sharpen the competition.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Jeffrey Smith, “DeLay Trial a Window Into Influence,” Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2010. 17 Justin Fox, “What the Founding Fathers Really Thought about Corporations,” HBR Blog Network, Harvard Business Review, e-mail exchange between Justin Fox and Brian Murphy, April 1, 2010, http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/04/what-the-founding-fathers-real.html 18 John Kay, “Beware the Bailout Kings and Backbench Barons,” Financial Times, May 20, 2009. 19 Luke Mitchell, “Understanding Obamacare,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2009. 20 Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2012). 21 Charles Morris, “A Recession Can Clear the Air,” Washington Post, Nov. 16, 2008. 22 Northeast Public Power Association (NEPPA), “Deregulation Continues to Impact Retail Electric Prices in Region,” NEPPA News Line, vol. 43, no. 12, December 2007.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Though one might think such scenarios are relegated solely to the realm of science fiction, news broke as part of the WikiLeaks scandal that the U.S. government had allegedly sent diplomatic cables to its embassies overseas instructing personnel to attempt to collect the DNA of world leaders—presumably not to enroll them in Obamacare. While most bio-hackers today are hacking for good, among the masses will undoubtedly be a number of bad apples and even criminal elements. Over time, there will be biological equivalents for all major categories of computer crime today. For example, hacking your genetic information may well be the identity theft of tomorrow—especially as DNA becomes widely used for authentication.


pages: 1,845 words: 567,850

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014 by J. K. Lasser

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, collective bargaining, distributed generation, employer provided health coverage, estate planning, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, intangible asset, medical malpractice, medical residency, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, passive income, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, telemarketer, transaction costs, urban renewal, zero-coupon bond

- - - - - - - - - - Health-care FSA Starting in 2013 (plan years beginning after 2012), the maximum salary-reduction contribution that can be made to a health FSA is $2,500. Employers may set a lower limit. The $2,500 limit was required by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare” health-care reform legislation). Plans that do not require the $2,500 limit are not qualifying cafeteria plans; all plan benefits are includible in the employees’ gross income. The $2,500 limit might be increased for 2014 by an inflation adjustment; see the e-Supplement at jklasser.com. Funds from a health FSA may generally be used to reimburse you for expenses that you could claim as a medical expense deduction (17.2) such as the annual deductible under your employer’s regular health plan, co-payments you must make to physicians or for prescriptions, and any other expenses that your health plan does not cover.

If you paid medical or dental expenses by credit card in 2013, the deduction is allowed in 2013, although you do not pay the charge bill until 2014. If you pay expenses online, the payment date shown on your online bank statement governs. - - - - - - - - - - Law Alert Deduction Threshold Increases Starting in 2013 Under the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the floor for deducting medical expenses increases for most taxpayers starting with 2013 returns. The floor, which has been 7.5% of adjusted gross income (AGI), is now 10% of AGI. However, if you or your spouse is age 65 or over by the end of the year, you may continue to use the 7.5% floor through 2016


pages: 790 words: 253,035

Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, collective bargaining, corporate governance, do what you love, Donald Trump, Easter island, family office, financial engineering, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, Joan Didion, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, obamacare, out of africa, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, stem cell, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration

We find companies or industries going through a moment of evolution, and we put our capital and creativity to work to help them through that period of time. This theme runs through a whole series of different types of investments—from Uber to turning around Continental Airlines, to our investments in health care after the passage of Obamacare. And it’s this idea of change that was one of the governing principles in our appearance as an investor in CAA. DAVID BONDERMAN, Co-Chairman, TPG Capital: The long and short of it is, the entertainment industry has been totally dislocated by what’s going on around it, and any time you have dislocation like that, you have opportunity.


Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Named after the infamous 1773 event in Boston, during which patriots dumped British tea to protest the government’s tax on it, today’s Tea Party is a populist movement of politically conservative republicans who decry high taxes and federal spending. Government bailouts (the banking and auto industries) and President Obama’s healthcare reform (derisively named Obamacare) particularly capture their ire. »Household income New Hampshire (2008-2010): $66,300 »Household income Mississippi (2008-2010): $36,850 »Population density New York City: 27,530 per sq mi »Population density Maine: 43 per sq mi »Cheese produced annually Wisconsin: 2.4 billion pounds »Number of vacant homes in Florida (2010): 1.5 million The Tea Party and fellow republicans have made inroads into traditionally liberal regions of the East.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

This in turn gave birth to the Tea Party (www.teapartypatriots.org), a wing of political conservatives who believed that Obama was leaning too far to the left, and that government handouts would destroy the economy and thus America. High federal spending, government bailouts (the banking and auto industries) and especially Obama’s healthcare reform (‘Obamacare’) particularly captured their ire. Healthcare for All For democrats, however, Obama’s healthcare bill, which became law in 2010, was a victory in bringing healthcare coverage to more Americans, lowering the cost of healthcare and closing loopholes that allowed insurance companies to deny coverage to individuals.