public intellectual

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Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

As Archon Fung points out, Chomsky’s role as a public intellectual makes clear the importance of making power visible, holding authority accountable, and engaging in rigorous critique. His work also suggests that in addition to rigorous criticism, public intellectuals can also help to “shape the democratic character of public policy,” work with “popular movements and organizations in their efforts to advance justice and democracy,” and while refusing to succumb to reformist practices, “join citizens—and sometimes government—to construct a world that is more just and democratic.”7 He may be one of the few public intellectuals left of an older generation who offers a rare glimpse into what it means to widen the scope of the meaning of political and intellectual inquiry—an intellectual who rethinks in a critical fashion the educative nature of politics within the changed and totalizing conditions of a neoliberal global assault on all vestiges of democracy.

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Prerogatives of Power Security and State Policy The Prospects for Survival Red Lines in Ukraine and Elsewhere Edward J. Snowden, the World’s “Most Wanted Criminal” The Sledgehammer Worldview Nightmare in Gaza CODA The Owl of Minerva Index NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IN TURBULENT TIMES By Henry A. Giroux World-renowned academic Noam Chomsky is best known not only for his pioneering work in linguistics but also for his ongoing work as a public intellectual, in which he addresses numerous important social issues that include and often connect oppressive foreign and domestic policies—a fact well illustrated throughout this important collection of his recent political columns, BECAUSE WE SAY SO.

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The point here is neither to idolize nor to demonize Chomsky—the two modalities that often mark reactions to his work. Rather, the issue is to articulate the ways in which Chomsky as a public intellectual gives meaning to the disposition and characteristics that need to be in place for such critical work: a historical consciousness, civic courage, sacrifice, incisiveness, thoughtfulness, rigor, compassion, political interventions, the willingness to be a moral witness and the ability to listen to others. As a public intellectual, Chomsky speaks to all people to use their talents and resources to promote public values, defend the common good and connect education to social change.

Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

There’s a lot of talk today about public intellectuals. Does that term mean anything to you? That’s an old idea. Public intellectuals are the ones who are supposed to present the values and principles and understanding. They’re the ones who took pride in driving the U.S. into war during World War I. They were public intellectuals. On the other hand, Eugene Debs wasn’t a public intellectual. In fact, he was in jail. A very vindictive Woodrow Wilson refused to grant him amnesty when everyone else was getting Christmas amnesty. Why wasn’t Eugene Debs a public intellectual? The reason is that he was an intellectual who happened to be on the side of poor people and working people.

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He was telling the truth about the First World War, which is why he was thrown into jail. Look back at what he was saying, it’s quite accurate. So he was thrown into jail and wasn’t a public intellectual. Public intellectuals are the ones who are acceptable within some mainstream spectrum as presenting ideas, as standing up for values. Sometimes what they do is not bad, maybe even very good. But again, take a look at humanitarian intervention. The people who do not accept the principles, the assumptions, rarely qualify as public intellectuals, no matter how famous they are. Take Bertrand Russell, who by any standard is one of the leading intellectual figures of the twentieth century.

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It’s the other fellow’s crimes that arouse horror and indignation, not those for which we share responsibility and which we could therefore terminate or mitigate. These must be marginalized or suppressed, a crucial requirement of any well-functioning doctrinal system and a prime responsibility of responsible public intellectuals. Is the U.S. or NATO doing anything to clean up the mess they left behind in the Balkans? The war caused enormous environmental and infrastructural damage, in addition to its immediate toll. Both in Kosovo and East Timor the U.S. is refusing to undertake constructive efforts, with marginal exceptions.

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

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

Department of Economics 53 8. “Positive Economics” 63 9. Family 77 10. Professor 85 11. A Theory of the Consumption Function 97 12. Keynes 105 13. A Monetary History of the United States 113 14. Chicago School of Economics 129 15. Capitalism and Freedom 135 16. Travel and Goldwater 147 17. Colleagues 155 18. Public Intellectual and Policy Proposals 169 19. Nixon and the Nobel Prize 185 III. 1977 to 2006 20. Free to Choose 197 21. Reagan and International Influence 205 22. Hayek and the Role of Ideas 215 23. School Vouchers and Social Issues 223 24. Friedman Prize 231 Epilogue 241 Appendix 243 Bibliographical Essay 250 Notes 267 Index 285 he influence of Milton Friedman on our lives is signifi Tcant.

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He was an influential teacher because many have gained from him intellectually, professionally, and personally. But Friedman’s primary influence is not as a “teacher of economics,” as he referred to himself during his many years at the University of Chicago, as significant as this role has been. His primary influence is as an economic theorist and public intellectual. In these capacities—as scholar and wise man—he has changed and continues to change the way that economists and many others view economic history and theory and the appropriate role of government. Friedman has a clear view of the world, a view that he communicates forcefully and effectively.

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Monetary and fiscal measures are substitutes within a wide range.”30 In the coming years, Friedman would depart from the view that fiscal policy is of substantial importance in determining national economic activity and, particularly, in determining changes in average prices. In “Comments on Monetary Policy,” he presents a good description of his view of what public intellectuals should do: “The role of the economist in discussions of public policy seems to me to be to prescribe what should be done in the light of what can be done, politics aside, and not to predict what is ‘politically feasible’ and then to recommend it.”31 The economist should say what he believes is true, irrespective of political practicality.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Cowen, who’d praised Thiel lavishly at the beginning of the event as “one of the greatest and most important public intellectuals of our time,” left the idea unchallenged, and then pivoted to a question about New Zealand. “Overrated or underrated?” Cowen asked. Underrated, Thiel responded. Thiel, who has often described himself as “both a total insider and a total outsider,” was playing a delicate game. From the outside—to Cowen’s audience, for instance, or to the hosts of CBS This Morning—he was an up-and-coming thought leader whose controversial past was behind him. But, in fact, at the same time he was playing public intellectual and yucking it up with members of the press, Thiel was making moves in secret.

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Fuck You, World 2. A Strange, Strange Boy 3. Hope You Die 4. World Domination Index 5. Heinous Activity 6. Gray Areas 7. Hedging 8. Inception 9. R.I.P. Good Times 10. The New Military-Industrial Complex 11. The Absolute Taboo 12. Building the Base 13. Public Intellectual, Private Reactionary 14. Backup Plans 15. Out for Trump 16. The Thiel Theory of Government 17. Deportation Force 18. Evil List 19. To the Mat 20. Back to the Future Epilogue: You Will Live Forever Photographs Acknowledgments Notes Image Credits Index About the Author INTRODUCTION It may seem hard to remember, but there was a time when the world seemed ready to put Silicon Valley in charge of everything.

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But Paul’s supporters preferred the old Ron Paul—the Ron Paul who’d talked like one of Thiel’s old Stanford Review columnists, who’d published a newsletter that said 95 percent of Black men in Washington, D.C., were criminals and said “I miss the closet” about gay rights. Like Thiel, they wanted to stick it to the Cathedral. He was ready to help them. 13 PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, PRIVATE REACTIONARY Let us in, let us in,” they chanted. “No NSA, no police state!” The protestors were outside the auditorium, but their chants—which referred to allegations that Palantir had been violating the civil rights of ordinary Americans—were audible from the stage where Thiel sat.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal were public intellectuals; Thomas L. Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and Parag Khanna are thought leaders. Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines; thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change. Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners; thought leaders promote the winners’ values, talking up “disruption, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurial ability.” Three factors explain the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader, according to Drezner.

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” * * * — “It is the best of times for thought leaders. It is the worst of times for public intellectuals,” declares Daniel Drezner, a foreign policy scholar, in his recent treatise The Ideas Industry, a part-academic, part-first-person account of how an age of inequality, among other things, has distorted the work of thinking. Drezner starts out by defining two distinct kinds of thinkers, who share in common a desire to develop important ideas and at the same time reach a broad audience. One of these types, the dying one, is the public intellectual, whom Drezner describes as a wide-ranging “critic” and a foe of power; she perhaps stays “aloof from the market, society, or the state,” and she proudly bears a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes.”

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In recent decades, Americans have lost faith in virtually every institution in the country, except for the military, thanks in part to years of hard economic realities and a dysfunctional public sphere. Journalists have come to be trusted less than chiropractors. This loss of faith has pulled public intellectuals down a few notches, and created new space for the less-credentialed idea generators to vie for attention. Yet in Drezner’s view it is rising inequality that has most altered the sphere of ideas. It has had a paradoxical effect. On one hand, extreme inequality has created “a thirst for ideas to diagnose and treat the problems that seem to plague the United States.”

Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent by Robert F. Barsky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centre right, feminist movement, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, information retrieval, language acquisition, machine translation, means of production, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Norman Mailer, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strong AI, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, theory of mind, Yom Kippur War

Interestingly, Bar-Hillel's work on this subject is rarely mentioned. Chomsky's explanation for this follows a by-now-familiar line: "He'd be well-known to activists in Israel (many of whom were his students, or influenced by him). But he was only a serious, intelligent, dedicated and honourable person with an important and influential role, not a 'public intellectual,' so he is unknown. These are again the kinds of facts that never make it [into] intellectual history" (31 Mar. 1995). Another professor at the University of Pennsylvania who read Chomsky's B.A. thesis when Chomsky was still an undergraduate was Henry Hoenigswald, "a very good scholar of historical linguistics who also knew file:///D|/export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_54.html [4/16/2007 3:05:12 PM] Document Page 55 the Indic tradition, and was a committed Harrisian structuralist, also knowledgeable in European structuralism" (31 Mar. 1995).

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And he was not a Mao or a Lenin who promised to show faithful followers the way to a workers' paradiseand to exact from the unfaithful the price of dissent. He was a scientist who had rational ideas that had made him famous in his field, and a social conscience that gave him the courage and the confidence to recognize that rationality could also be employed to a greater social end: encouraging people to think for, and believe in, themselves. Public Intellectuals and Radicalism The fact that Chomsky was immersed, primarily, in a scientific environment had a profound impact on his perception of the role of the intellectual, the way that institutions in this society function, and the value to society file:///D|/export3/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_133.html [4/16/2007 3:20:48 PM] Document Page 134 of science.

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There is no simple rationale for this dichotomy that Chomsky embodies, but somewhere in the ongoing debate about science versus nonscience, self-aggrandizement versus serious work, the knowable versus the unknowable, we may discover some answers. Chomsky and Irving Howe By contrasting Chomsky's views with those of Irving Howe we may reach a better understanding of the public intellectual. Chomsky knew Howe personallythey were next-door neighbors for a few years. Howe was the founder of the magazine Dissent, and functioned as a kind of guiding light in "left-ish" circles for decades. In the end, however, he may have done more harm than good to genuinely left-wing causes because he became an acceptable version of a left-winger.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

These “transatlantic enrichments” opened a new chapter in Austrian School history, helping the school survive and thrive in the troubled decades to follow.2 The End of Empire and the Rise of the Public Intellectual Wieser was not alone among Austrian School economists in decrying the demise of the Habsburg monarchy. After all, they were almost all members of the German-educated middle class, a class that was famously kaisertreu (loyal to the emperor). Schumpeter and Mises also appealed to the general public on behalf of liberal economic and political policy in the hope of mitigating the deleterious outcomes of the war, especially the empire’s dissolution. Setting aside the jargon of economic theory, they embraced the role of public intellectual, a status that gained in importance in postwar Vienna.

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Over a dozen school members traveled to the English-speaking world during the 1920s and 1930s. They brought new theoretical ideas with them to the United States and carried back cutting-edge empirical approaches. Their connections to business elites in the International Chamber of Commerce and the Rockefeller Foundation helped them attract global allies. They also took on roles as public intellectuals, writing for popular audiences and creating institutions to disseminate their work. They extended their influence into policy and business affairs, playing roles in the Ministry of Finance, the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, and the Austrian National Bank. Yet the Austrians were more than economists: they conducted freewheeling salons, wrote drinking songs, debated Goethe and Shakespeare, and took ski trips and Alpine summer vacations together.18 As European politics took an authoritarian turn and the worldwide depression deepened in the early 1930s, the Austrians took center stage with their defenses of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy.

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This chapter narrates the reinvention of the Austrian School in the post–World War I Austrian Republic. Out of the crisis of the war years, a new iteration of the collective emerged—with new members, intellectual interests, ideological strategies, and institutions. The ascendancy of the Mises-Schumpeter generation as public intellectuals, policy insiders, and seminar leaders assured the continued relevance of the tradition. The chapter tracks the changing of the guard at the University of Vienna, where Hans Mayer and Mises replaced Menger, Böhm, and Wieser, training new students, including the future luminaries Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich von Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, and others.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Dawkins’ contribution to a new understanding of the relationship between the human genome and society is that both the gene and the meme are replicators that mutate and compete in parallel and interacting struggles for their own propagation.” The prize ceremony was followed by a brilliant acceptance speech by Richard, who never fails to deliver in his role as a public intellectual (the number one public intellectual in England, according to Prospect magazine) and spokesperson for the public understanding of science. This is not what most impressed me about Richard, however, since any professional would be expected to shine in a public forum, especially with a six-figure motivator hanging around his neck.

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I could see it in their eyes as I looked out over the audience – I’ve been a professional speaker for over twenty-five years and have an intuitive sense of whether or not an audience is with me, and these folks were definitely agin me, especially in Texas, where I privately suspected (and publicly joked about) half the audience packing heat. They probably were! As for Lott himself, he has turned out to be one of the more curious characters I have ever met in my career as a public intellectual. (See Figure 17.1.) In our Altoona debate, for example, I sat in the front row while Lott delivered his twenty-five-minute opening statement, but when it came my turn to deliver my opening statement, Lott just sat there on stage next to me, which, with the arrangement of the podiums right next to each other, would mean I could not walk around on stage as is my custom.

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And when the dust settled, you’d be paying mandatory taxes to that country’s government.”6 Either way, we’re paying taxes, so we might as well concede the point and get on with the business of determining with the best analytics available where, when and how much we should be taxing ourselves to solve these assorted market shortcomings. Robert Frank is a gifted economist and a skilled rhetorician whose regular commentaries in the New York Times, coupled to his blogs, podcasts, radio and television interviews, and popular books, make him a formidable and influential public intellectual who well represents those who tend to favor top-down government solutions to social problems in a manner most closely aligned with the economic policies of John Maynard Keynes. Given the resurgence of Keynesian economics during the financial crisis and subsequent recession, Frank’s ideas deserve thoughtful consideration and response, which I shall endeavor to do here from the perspective of someone who has also written extensively on evolutionary economics – what I called evonomics – in my book The Mind of the Market.7 I too start with Darwin, but with a very different outcome from Frank’s analysis.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

The Bank of Sweden Prize winner Robert Lucas was always good for a quote: “I think Keynes’ actual influence as a technical economist is pretty close to zero, and it has been close to zero for 50 years. Keynes was not a very good technical economist. He didn’t contribute much to the development of the field.”37 This should prove significant for our subsequent purposes, because some public intellectuals like Paul Krugman and Robert Skidelsky had misleadingly asserted back in 2008–9 that Keynesian theory still enjoyed broad-based theoretical legitimacy within the orthodox economics profession. By 2012 we can observe just how fleeting were Keynes’s allotted fifteen minutes of comeback fame.

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We will take that proposition as given here, because we aim to explore one of its most important implications: namely, that it sets up a treacherous dynamic interplay between the economics profession and the general public, awkwardly brought closer to the surface by the crisis. In a word, neoliberal theory in the context of economic crisis creates problems for economists’ self-image as public intellectuals. In the neoliberal playbook, intellectuals are inherently shady characters precisely because they sell their pens-for-hire to private interests: that is their inescapable lot in life as participants in the marketplace of ideas. It is the market as superior information processor that ultimately sorts out what the masses should deem as truth, at least in the fullness of time.

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The purpose of the next chapter is to document how some elements within the economics profession have sought to sustain this impossible straddle, mainly by cooperating with new arbiters of public discourse such as think tanks, banks, and corporations, in order to modulate between the two opposed horns of the dilemma. The fallout from trying to have it both ways is that it is no longer possible for the heroic public intellectual to personally embody a shining beacon of rationality amid the rough and tumble of political discourse, at least in economics. Instead, orthodox economists tend to waver between two incompatible positions, depending upon which appears more convenient for the entity that provides their institutional identity (as explored in this chapter); but the only way they can manage to accomplish this is by fostering greater ignorance among the public, their primary audience.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

She gave Adeline the magazine, which appeared as it does on the next page. Fareed Zakaria was one of the many best selling authors and public intellectuals who supported George Bush II’s War in Iraq. He had a decent amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. Back during the War in Iraq, Fareed Zakaria had believed that bringing something like Jeffersonian Democracy to a country with no history of participatory politics would be a net good. He believed it would stabilize the Middle East. This opinion had been very popular with public intellectuals in the run-up to the War. Most private intellectuals, who were people without best selling books or prominent media positions, had opposed the War.

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Most private intellectuals, who were people without best selling books or prominent media positions, had opposed the War. If you were from California and the year was 2013, and you were discussing the consensus amongst public intellectuals who supported the War in Iraq, you might say, “It was, like, so ironic¸ because, you know, like, all of America’s, like, public intellectuals supported a total, you know, disaster of a war and, like, thought, that there could be, like, you know, democracy in Iraq.” You’d be wrong. There was nothing ironic in the wrongness of a bunch of dumb assholes who offer bogus opinions for money. Dumb assholes who offer bogus opinions for money don’t need to be right.

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

France was still in the midst of a period of never-ending revolutions, and the trial was actually a foil for battles between the still competing parties. So obvious was the miscarriage of justice that when Dreyfus was found guilty and unceremoniously stripped of his rank, Émile Zola (the famed French novelist, journalist, and public intellectual) wrote his now classic letter, J’Accuse, accusing the government of both flagrant anti-Semitism and of unfairly jailing Dreyfus. Though it is commonly said that it was the Dreyfus trial that spurred Herzl’s engagement with the “Jewish question” in Europe, historians now believe that that was not the case.

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What both the statist and nonstatist visions had in common was that for either to be realized, no small number of Jews would have to pick themselves up and move to an Ottoman province. In that regard, at least at this stage, the realization of either vision seemed entirely unlikely. OTHER IMAGES OF ZIONISM were also emerging during this time. Max Nordau, a highly regarded public intellectual, had become wrapped up in the Zionist cause at around the time of the Dreyfus affair. Nordau had been born into an Orthodox family in Pest, was a correspondent in Paris for the Vossische Zeitung, a liberal German paper based in Berlin, and had left the Jewish world to become a German intellectual.

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Not even the democratically elected government of Israel, he continued, had the right to withdraw from the territories.6 Rabbi Kook’s confidence that he had the right to warn the government about what it did and did not have the right to do was an ominous warning of things to come. Most Israelis missed the signs completely. Not all religious Jews saw matters that way, however. A notable exception was one of Israel’s most important public intellectuals, an Orthodox Jew, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz. For Leibowitz, the principal religious obligation that flowed from the victory in June 1967 was for Israel to save its soul. To do that, he insisted, Israel needed to withdraw from the territories it had captured, so Israelis would not be imposing their rule on a foreign population.

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

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

Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.2 If this quote strikes even the faintest chord, then there is a case to be made that the question of progress, and particularly the myth behind it, deserves to be revisited. This is more pertinent given the recent emergence of a group of public intellectuals who would consider Lasch’s inquiry to be so empirically unfounded as to be nothing short of ludicrous. The world, they claim, is better than ever. Much better. And rather than argue the point on philosophical or historical grounds as Lasch and other critics have done, today’s generation of optimists offer a barrage of facts and figures to prove it, along with a standard set of talking points highlighting humanity’s ongoing victory over things like poverty, war and violence, disease, and all the other factors that once made human life “nasty, brutish, and short”.3 Although a few of these people were known to me long before the idea for this book materialized, the knowledge that there was a growing ecosystem behind this narrative came after reading a 2017 Guardian long read by author and columnist Oliver Burkeman titled “Is the World Really Better than Ever?”

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Thankfully there is no shortage of thinkers and movements questioning whether, say, capitalism will avoid the social upheaval of mass unemployment caused by automation, or whether liberalism can survive in the age of social media-driven radicalization. That artificial intelligence is now up there with nuclear extinction and climate change in the ranks of existential risks to the human species means at least some people (mostly scientists and public intellectuals — sadly not so many politicians) are taking these issues seriously. But tackling these issues in isolation risks missing the ulterior point. What kind of progress do we really want for humanity? The Right Kind of Progress Before asking ourselves what kind of progress we really want, it is necessary to define what we mean by progress.

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These arguments preclude an honest comparative discussion of economic models in mainstream discourse, which further reinforces the fear factor when policies that go against the prevailing orthodoxy are proposed. More worryingly, this fearmongering is also creeping into the rhetoric of the “New Right” that is so popular among younger people, something that will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Eight. For example, Canadian psychologist and public intellectual for the YouTube generation, Jordan Peterson, rarely discusses socialism outside the context of twentieth-century communism (particularly its Stalinist and Maoist varieties), essentially priming his fanbase to assume an inevitable coalescence between the ideology of people like Sanders and the communist dictators that murdered millions: What young people know about 20th century history is nonexistent, especially about the history of the radical left.

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

The writers I loved, whom I sought to emulate, were mostly unconcerned with “hope.” But moreover—what if there was no hope at all? Sometimes, I said as much and was often met with a kind of polite and stunned disappointment. By then the title “public intellectual” had been attached to me, and I saw that what came with it was not just the air of the dilettante but the air of the solutionist. The black public intellectual need not be wise, but he had better have answers. There were dissenters in the tradition. There was Derrick Bell, for instance. But mostly I felt the expectation that if I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an immediately actionable way out—preferably one that could garner a sixty-vote majority in the Senate.

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But mostly I felt the expectation that if I was writing or talking about problems, I should also be able to identify an immediately actionable way out—preferably one that could garner a sixty-vote majority in the Senate. There was a kind of insanity to this—like telling doctors to only diagnose that which they could immediately and effortlessly cure. But that was the job of the black public intellectual—not to stimulate, not to ask the questions that kept them up at night, not even just to interpret the drums but to interpret them in some way that promised redemption. This was not work for writers and scholars, who thrive in privacy and study, but performance-prophets who live for the roar of the crowd.

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The point here is that reparations are not reserved for the unimpeachably virtuous and cannot solve the problems of human morality, and this has never been, nor should it have been, the criterion for past reparation efforts. But that point is not made in the essay. Moreover, the entire section about Israel is the least informed part of the essay. I was writing about a region I had never visited and people I did not know from the luxurious position of my armchair. In short, I was behaving like the very “public intellectuals” whom I so despised. After the publication of “The Case for Reparations,” I could feel the world reacting differently to me. This was writer fame, not George Clooney fame. But it was disturbing. People began stopping me on the street, and others, too embarrassed to speak to me directly, would look over and whisper, then tweet out something later.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

I attended the progressive Putney School in Vermont for high school, where I farmed maple syrup, drove oxen, and debated practical topics like epistemology (the nature of knowledge) with my teachers. In college and graduate school, I studied cognitive science, philosophy, and politics. I formed a conviction that I wanted to try to change the world for the better. Initially, my plan was to be an academic and public intellectual. At the time, I got bored easily (still do), which made me distractible and not great at making the trains run on time. Academia seemed like an environment that would keep me perpetually stimulated as I would think and write on the value of compassion, self-development, and the pursuit of wisdom.

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My significant operating experience at scale differentiates me from other VCs with finance backgrounds or limited operational backgrounds. This gives me a meaningful advantage in how I can partner with entrepreneurs and help them succeed. And since I can work with entrepreneurs whose companies build and define massive human ecosystems, I can help improve society at large scale, which meets my aspirations as a public intellectual. The three pieces fit. All Advantages Are Local: Pick a Hill That Has Less Competition The most obvious way to improve your competitive advantage is to strengthen and diversify your asset mix—for example, learn new skills. That’s certainly smart. But it’s equally effective to place yourself in a market niche where your existing assets shine brighter than the competition’s.

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So it feels right to thank all of my network, because they all helped develop the ideas herein. In particular, I’d like to call out three of my teachers whose early gifts of time and insight changed my life: Lisa Cox and Tom Wessells from the Putney School, who set me on my initial path of being a public intellectual, and Jonathan Reider at Stanford University, who amplified that path. —RGH I’m grateful to the many people who supported me in this project. A special tip of the hat to Jessie Young, Stephen Dodson, Chris Yeh, and Cal Newport for going beyond the call of duty. And heartfelt thanks to my parents for everything they do.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

This was the glorious era in the history of the meritocratic idea: an era in which the left and the right could agree on the importance of giving everybody a chance to develop their natural abilities; an era in which opportunities were expanding in the form of university places and white-collar jobs; an era in which society as a whole celebrated the power of intelligence, as represented by scientists, engineers and even public intellectuals. Chapter Thirteen re-examines the story through the lens of sex. The story of the rise of women is often written in terms of collective struggle for group rights. This chapter argues that it is just as important to recognize the role of liberal intellectuals such as J. S. Mill (and his wife, Harriet Taylor), who argued that the meritocratic revolution could not be complete until women were given a fair chance.

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Macaulay was the quintessential Victorian: confident where we are self-doubting and multi-talented where we are specialized. Being a great historian was only part of his CV – indeed his greatness as a historian depended on the fact that he did so much more than just write history. He was a great public intellectual: the mere rumour that Macaulay had produced another essay in the Edinburgh Review was enough to set London society alight. He was also a great politician-cum-administrator. One of his earliest essays in the Edinburgh Review advocated the abolition of slavery. He championed parliamentary reform as Member of Parliament for Lord Lansdowne’s pocket borough of Calne (he understood that you have to enter the system in order to reform it) and later served as both secretary at war and paymaster-general.

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Part Five * * * THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY 14 Against Meritocracy: The Revolt on the Left We have seen that the meritocratic revolution was largely driven by the left: by left-wing political parties that wanted to open up opportunities to members of the working class; by left-wing intellectuals who wanted to introduce a scientific method for allocating social positions; and by feminists, who wanted to extend opportunities to girls as well as boys. Yet from the 1930s onwards the left gradually turned against its intellectual offspring. The anti-meritocratic revolution came in three waves: first, academics questioned the idea that you can measure merit with any precision; second, public intellectuals questioned the idea that meritocracy is worth having at all; and, third, progressives embraced the alternative values of ‘equality’ and ‘community’. The revolt against meritocracy had a profound influence on social policy across the rich world: the British abolished grammar schools and introduced mixed-ability teaching; the Americans introduced affirmative action and waged war on elite secondary schools; several continental countries went further still and introduced open admission to universities.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

The experts and technocrats discussed in this book are not academic researchers; they are policy experts, public intellectuals, aid agency and philanthropic foundation staff, the odd billionaire, and think tankers—the already mentioned “development community.” Academia is far from perfect, but here I have mainly good things to say about academic social-science research. In my experience, most academic researchers have exceptional integrity and rigor. Of course, some academics are also public intellectuals (including this author) and others become government officials. But it is only in the latter roles that they could fit the definition of technocrat. Only as public intellectuals or officials do they participate in the big debate about autocracy versus freedom.

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The desperation with which the one extreme is avoided makes the other extreme seem closer to a reasonable, middle-ground position and therefore less of a straw man. This book sometimes refers to a “consensus” of the self-described development community. The development community includes policy experts, public intellectuals, economists, and other social scientists. Its limits are defined as those who work for the aid agencies of rich-country governments, international aid agencies like the World Bank, think tanks like the Brookings Institution, and philanthropies like the Gates Foundation, or as consultants or advisers to any of the above.

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He was alarmed at those who would not learn from history by “adding to or improving the existing machinery,” whose approach was based instead on “completely scrapping and replacing” such machinery.29 Gunnar Myrdal early in his career had already provided an example of this Blank Slate mind-set that Hayek was criticizing in the rich countries. After Myrdal launched his successful academic career, which saw him get a prestigious chair at the University of Stockholm by 1933, he was eager for a new role as what today we would call a “public intellectual.” Both Gunnar and his wife Alva had great ambitions to remake their own society at home. In the summer of 1934, they retreated to a cabin in the mountains of Norway to write a book, The Population Problem in Crisis. They were addressing what at the time seemed a crisis: the drastic slowdown in population growth in Sweden.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Unlike other classes that emerged in times of upheaval with strong senses of identity, they could not organize to improve their lot. To that end, he called on the creative class to ‘grow up‘ and take control of its own destiny – essentially, form a class-consciousness. As Florida’s role as a public intellectual grew throughout the 2000s, he continued to push the creative-class notion and travel to cities around the world, but in particular found an attentive audience in rust-belt cities and other economically depressed centres, places similar to Windsor, Detroit or Pittsburgh, the latter where he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon.

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Florida’s message resonated in cities large and small that had seen their economic foundations collapse but that had untapped creative capacity in their un- and under-employed population, which, if unleashed, could be their salvation. These were, after all, cities where people knew how to make actual things. There were critics, though. The risk a public intellectual takes is allowing her message to get watered down and communicated broadly in sound-bite chunks that miss some of the conceptual and evidence-based underpinnings, perhaps at no fault of their own, and Florida was sometimes called a carpetbagger or huckster, selling ideas in desperate places.

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

As the earnings of non-college-educated workers declined significantly under deregulation and antiworker policies that undermined the minimum wage and degraded working conditions, the trajectories of those with and without bachelor’s degrees diverged significantly—and so did the trajectories of their children. Our social circles constricted and our shared experiences evaporated. This tightening of class hierarchies made it hard for those who shape our public debate—journalists, policymakers, public intellectuals—to relate to the lives and struggles of the majority of their fellow citizens: those without college degrees. For those who make policy and shape the news, their social circle has increasingly become more elite, drawn from privileged families and elite private colleges on the two coasts that bracket the nation.

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It’s a touchstone far too few of our power brokers have today, creating a blind spot that profoundly skews our cultural and political landscape. The cocoon bias operates by making the working class invisible, but perhaps worse than invisibility is the hostility that far too many privileged people so easily indulge toward people who are struggling. There’s a noxious tradition of elites, whether public intellectuals or pundits, pathologizing people who toil for marginal wages, live in old, decaying neighborhoods, and all too frequently hit the official line designated as poverty. Punishing and Pathologizing Struggle and Strife Blaming people who struggle to get ahead for their predicament is something of an American tradition, one that stretches from the beginning of our nation to our current political debate.

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And just to set the record straight, 80 percent of people who are counted as poor are children, the elderly, the disabled, students, or the involuntarily unemployed.17 Fox News may be the go-to channel for pathologizing individuals who work hard but can’t get ahead, but the tendency to portray struggle as the result of personal failings extends far beyond the conservative media channel. Indeed, it is an analysis that enraptures many public intellectuals and academics. The inability of millions of people to get ahead—usually defined as meeting the norms and lifestyles of the white middle class—has far too often been blamed on an erosion of individual morals. This assignment of blame to the individual, as opposed to structures of exclusion created by the state, has a very long tradition in America, too long to cover here.

Locke: A Very Short Introduction by John Dunn

Isaac Newton, means of production, public intellectual

The attack was especially damaging, not merely because the charge of Socinianism (unlike that of atheism) was an extremely plausible one to level at Locke’s religious views, but also because Stillingfleet elected to press it not on the grounds of the Reasonableness, a text which Locke was by now most unlikely to acknowledge as his own, but rather on those of the Essay, a text which he could hardly in principle have repudiated since it was published under his own name, and which in any case he keenly desired to defend. He duly replied to Stillingfleet too, in three further works in 1697. Apart from the amendments to the fourth edition of the Essay which appeared in 1700, these replies in effect constituted his last public intellectual appearance in his lifetime. By this stage of his life Locke’s concerns were beginning to narrow and it becomes possible to pick out more clearly the strategy and tactics of his own custody of his intellectual legacy. We must postpone until the next two chapters a detailed assessment of the scope and limits of his intellectual achievement.

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(E 180: and see LC IV 609) If men will only use their minds and their senses – the ‘inlets’ of knowledge – carefully and sincerely, they will find themselves compelled to know and believe what they should and thus compelled to agree with those of their fellows who make an equally sober and honest use of their faculties. A key element in achieving and sustaining such agreement is a recognition of the limitations, what Locke himself calls the ‘mediocrity’, of human understanding. As elsewhere, at the centre of his thinking there lay a fine balance between scepticism and faith. 12. Locke’s official public intellectual debut, the first edition of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. The salience of the faith is hardest to miss when he itemizes what men do in fact know, or sketches how they have good reason to live their lives. The most important single item of possible knowledge is the existence of God: ‘we more certainly know that there is a GOD, than that there is any thing else without us’ (E 621; and see 619, 628–31, 638).

A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

Some four hundred miles to the southeast, engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign perfected a graphical plasma display screen for their computing system, a network that would soon connect p ­ eople across the United States with communications options we recognize ­today as instant messaging and screen sharing. 1 2 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States Public intellectuals called for computing as a public utility, comparable to electricity or ­water. The year was 1968. When I began researching this book, dozens of vignettes like t­ hese appeared on the pages of newsletters, grant proposals, research reports, and newspaper and journal articles, and I was stunned.

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By 1961 Greenberger had worked with computers for nearly a de­cade; he was an expert at a time when the computer industry burgeoned and transformed. IBM employed Greenberger before he became a professor at MIT, and as an IBM employee, Greenberger helped establish the MIT Computation Center, the centerpiece of which was an IBM computer. During the 1960s Greenberger deployed his industry experience and computing expertise as a prominent public intellectual. The program for MIT’s lecture series presented a who’s who of the American scientific and computing elite. Vannevar Bush directed the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II; he had invested in American science at an unpre­ce­dented rate to support the war effort.

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., The Compatible Time Sharing System (1961–1973), 50th Anniversary Commemorative Overview (Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society, 2011), http://­multicians​.­org​ /­t hvv​/­compatible​-­t ime​-­sharing​-­system​.­pdf; Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010). 12. John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Audra J. Wolfe, “Speaking for Nature and Nation: Biologists as Public Intellectuals in Cold War Culture” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002); Audra J. Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War Amer­i­ca (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Jamie Cohen-­Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of ­Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Christopher J.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

The young intellectual will see such six-figure celebrities as Henry Louis Gates, the entrepreneurial Harvard professor who also hosts documentaries for PBS, writes for the New Yorker and Talk, and seems to spawn an infinite variety of conferences, encyclopedias, and other projects; Henry Kissinger, who emigrated from studies of Metternich to politics to economic consulting; Duke’s Stanley Fish, who is often off on a lecture circuit road show with a conservative counterpart; E. J. Dionne, who serves as a public intellectual from the ever expanding world of think tanks; and Esther Dyson, who spins out her theories at expensive technology conferences. In the 1970s a group of conservative intellectuals developed the theory of the New Class, which posited that a small and politically liberal intellectual class had gained disproportionate influence over American culture by controlling the commanding heights of academia, media, and culture.

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Still, this buttboy stage in the career is very important because it is during this period that the young intellectual learns about the various players in the field, who is important and who is not. Thanks to the position of her famous boss, the young intellectual has access to places and people that would be closed to her if she were unaffiliated. She will be making contacts with all of the editors and other gatekeepers she will need to know if she is to forge her own career as a publicity intellectual. The difficult moment comes a few years hence, when she is, say, 28 and must break away from her front person and start to make herself a front person. If she does not perform this difficult self-weaning, she will find herself reduced to perpetual valet status. Her ability to think independently will deteriorate.

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Therefore, many millionaires think it would be neat to be a writer whose opinions are queried on The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer. Look at Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News, U.S. News and World Report, and goodly chunks of Manhattan and Washington. He’ll drive out to New Jersey to do a taping for the cable channel CNBC. It’s not enough to have more money than some countries. Zuckerman wants to be a public intellectual. The intellectuals react in diverse ways to Status-Income Disequilibrium. Some try to pass for members of the money wing of the educated class. They buy those blue shirts with white collars. They polish their shoes daily. The women in this category save up enough money to buy a Ralph Lauren or Donna Karan suit.

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

Maynard would later reflect proudly on his chosen profession that the economist “must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher.”5 He would never display a rare gift as any one of these alone, but he amalgamated them with a genius that no economist has ever matched. It is a long-standing matter of contention among Keynes’s chroniclers the degree to which his personal life should be held to inform his development as a public intellectual, scholar, and statesman. Famed economist Joseph Schumpeter, for example, cuttingly pronounced Keynes’s famous aphorism “in the long run we are all dead” to be a natural perspective for a childless thinker. Keynes and his future wife, it should be noted, had tried to have a child in the late 1920s; but more to the point, to dismiss important elements of Keynes’s thinking on the grounds that they were artifacts of alleged hidden impulses is to fail to give his reasoning its due.

…

In any case, the tremendous international success of The Economic Consequences of the Peace owed little to Keynes’s technical apparatus and much to his uncanny ability to capture the narrow and grotesque political shortsightedness behind the treaty terms. Although much of his early profits from the book would be dissipated in his new hobby of foreign exchange speculation, he had now become a celebrity public intellectual and lived like one. In 1925 he married acclaimed Russian ballerina and divorcée Lydia Lopokova, whom he had first met at a party in London during her tour in 1918. (It had not been love at first sight: “She is such a rotten dancer,” he said to financier Oswald Falk, “she has such a stiff bottom.”)40 Lydia was charmingly ingenuous and free-spirited in Keynes’s eye, but too jarringly undereducated for his literati circle.

…

(It had not been love at first sight: “She is such a rotten dancer,” he said to financier Oswald Falk, “she has such a stiff bottom.”)40 Lydia was charmingly ingenuous and free-spirited in Keynes’s eye, but too jarringly undereducated for his literati circle. Though the seemingly curious marriage added to Keynes’s popular cachet, it injected a permanent irritant into his Bloomsbury friendships. He loved her truly and deeply, all the same, for the remainder of his days. Almost all who achieve the status of noted scholar and public intellectual make their names as scholars first. Not Keynes. He would not produce a truly great work of economic theory until 1930, the year he turned forty-seven. Yet by 1923 he was publishing fifty-one newspaper articles in a year (his highest output), and turning a very handsome living from it. He lived well, and became a generous patron of the arts.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

He was also a ferocious debater, prompting one colleague to observe it was best to argue with Friedman when he was not in the room.6 He listened to opponents with a Cheshire cat’s smile, waiting for them to stop talking so he could help them understand why they were wrong. During the first half of his career, Friedman produced the majority of his significant academic research. During the second half, he emerged as “the most creative social political thinker of our age,” in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York senator and public intellectual who was well equipped to judge Friedman, since they worked in the same line.7 Even those who disagreed with Friedman found themselves unable to ignore his broadsides. “Only a small minority of the profession is persuaded by his opinions,” the liberal economist Robert Solow said in the 1960s, but “around any academic lunch table on any given day, the talk is more likely to be about Milton Friedman than about any other economist.”8 A half century later, economists still were talking about Friedman — but many more of them had come to agree.

…

The critique of conscription was the eleventh item on a list of fourteen misguided public policies that also included national parks, the postal service, and public housing. Friedman said the government was “interfer[ing] with the freedom of young men to shape their lives.”27 Rose Friedman took that speech and several others and turned them into Milton’s first book, Capitalism and Freedom. Its publication in 1962 marked Milton’s emergence as a public intellectual. It became one of the most important books of the twentieth century, not least because Ronald Reagan numbered among its fans. The royalties covered the cost of the Friedmans’ Vermont summer home, which they named “Capitaf.” But first, Capitalism and Freedom helped to connect Friedman with Senator Barry Goldwater.

…

“He thought he was going to change the world,” said his longtime colleague Ronald Coase.24 The real difference was that Stigler focused on winning over his fellow economists. He continued to produce significant work, and to battle academic opponents with gusto, long after Friedman had turned to a life as a public intellectual. “A scholar is an evangelist seeking to convert his learned brethren to the new enlightenment he is preaching,” Stigler wrote in his memoirs. “A new idea proposed in a halfhearted and casual way is almost certainly consigned to oblivion.”25 Fittingly, Stigler launched his defense of markets in 1948 with a scathing attack on a fellow economist delivered in a series of lectures at the London School of Economics.

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

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

Quite strikingly, in both of the world’s leading democracies there was a growing awareness of the need to “apply the lessons” of the highly successful propaganda systems of World War I “to the organization of political warfare,” as the chairman of the British Conservative party put the matter seventy years ago. Wilsonian liberals in the United States, including public intellectuals and prominent figures in the developing profession of political science, drew the same conclusions in the same years. In another corner of Western civilization, Adolf Hitler vowed that next time Germany would not be defeated in the propaganda war, and he also devised his own ways to apply the lessons of Anglo-American propaganda to political warfare at home.6 Meanwhile the business world warned of “the hazard factoring industrialists” in “the newly realized political power of the masses,” and the need to wage war and win “the everlasting battle for the minds of men” and “indoctrinate citizens with the capitalist story” until “they are able to play back the story with remarkable fidelity”; and so on, in an impressive flow, accompanied by even more impressive efforts.7 To discover the true meaning of the “political and economic principles” that are declared to be “the wave of the future,” it is of course necessary to go beyond rhetorical flourishes and public pronouncements and to investigate actual practice and the internal documentary record.

…

Not too surprisingly, the tale has followed a unique course in the world’s most powerful state, where “the men of best quality” declare themselves the champions of freedom, justice, human rights, and—above all—democracy. Media leaders have surely known all along about the MIA and its broad implications, as have public intellectuals and the standard experts. As already noted, the business world was both aware and actively involved. But in a most impressive show of self-discipline, with exceptions that amount to statistical error, the free press has succeeded in keeping those who rely on it in the dark—no simple task in a complicated world.

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

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

But all this changed in the late nineteenth century, when secular academics began to take over American universities. As the avante garde intelligentsia turned against religion, Evangelicals increasingly responded by rejecting the life of the mind in favor of dogma and raw emotion. The supply of religious minds did not dry up completely. Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Nor did demand disappear. During the 1950s students scandalized their secular professors by turning up to lectures by Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Fulton Sheen and Billy Graham.1 Nevertheless, both supply and demand for divine education went into long-term decline.

…

But even before the twin towers fell there were growing signs that faith was reviving as a force for the mind as well as the soul. Religious-minded thinkers formed associations such as the Society of Christian Philosophers (in 1978) and founded journals such as First Things (1990). The churches found their intellectual sap rising. A few far-seeing public intellectuals began to grasp the importance of religion, most notably Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. Meanwhile, other intellectuals, not just on the right, began to realize that moral problems, such as family breakdown, might have huge social consequences.

…

Its Trinity Forum Academy gives young Evangelicals a chance to spend nine months on Maryland’s eastern shore meditating on great works of theology and philosophy. Socrates in the City holds discussions on “the unexamined life” for the Manhattan smart set. The C. S. Lewis Institute, which is based in Washington, DC, sponsors year-long study groups in theology. Charles Colson’s Centurions Program tries to forge public intellectuals who are steeped in the biblical worldview. The World Journalism Institute in New York holds seminars for Evangelicals who want to mix holiness with hackery. The revival goes deeper than the Ivy League and posh symposiums. Enrollment in Evangelical colleges grew by 60 percent in 1990-2002 at a time when the general college population was static.22 Many conservative-minded Americans are reluctant to send their children to the sort of institution that Tom Wolfe portrays in I Am Charlotte Simmons, with their coed dormitories and unrelenting performances of The Vagina Monologues.

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

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

Mill had no use for aristocratic patrons like the Cavendishes. His father, James, himself a notable thinker, raised his son to be a prodigy who could make his own way in the world. He pursued a relatively modern career—as a company man (for the East India Company), a member of parliament (representing Westminster), and a public intellectual (writing in most of the great journals of the day). Mill had no experience of civil war or exile: He began his autobiography by apologizing for telling the story of “so uneventful a life as mine.”1 The only battles Mill wrote about were the ones he fought to master Greek by the time he was three and Latin by eight.

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LEFTWARD HO By the time that Mill died in 1873, the high-Victorian liberalism of On Liberty was under fire from every direction—from politicians who worried about national greatness, churchmen who worried about compassion, philosophers who worried about justice, pragmatists who worried about the drains, and, of course, socialists who worried about capitalism. There were still a few pure liberals left. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was arguably the most prominent public intellectual of the 1870s and 1880s, a regular contributor to leading periodicals (including The Economist, which provided him with a home for many years), and the author of best sellers such as The Man Versus the State (1884). Spencer was not just an uncompromising defender of the free market: He believed that any intervention in the market, even passing laws to prevent eight-year-olds from being sent up chimneys, would inevitably lead to socialism.

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., 1906), 72 Medicaid, 242 Medicare, 120, 123, 242 Medisave, 243 mercantilism, 40 Merkel, Angela, 12, 16, 230, 231 Mettler, Suzanne, 121 micro-powers, 260, 266 middle class, 124 entitlements and, 11, 17 government spending and, 11 as primary beneficiary of welfare state, 122 welfare state and, 17, 88 Middle East: China and, 152 failure of democracy in, 253 local government in, 217 Miliband, Ed, 114, 153 Milken, Michael, 129 Mill, James, 47, 48–49, 53, 140 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 9, 21, 27–28, 69, 80, 85, 135, 136, 219, 251, 255 background of, 47 expanded role of government embraced by, 56–57 freedom as overriding concern of, 47–48, 55, 222, 224, 226, 228, 250, 256, 268 free trade promoted by, 55 intellectual freedom as tenet of, 55 meritocracy promoted by, 53, 237 as public intellectual, 47 Mindlab, 220 Mises, Ludwig von, 83 Mississippi, 111 Modi, Narendra, 218 Moïsi, Dominique, 166 money politics, 256–58 Montefiore Medical Center, 209 Monti, Mario, 259 Mont Pelerin Society, 83, 85 Moody’s, 119 Morrill Act (U.S., 1862), 62 Morsi, Mohamed, 253 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 89 Mubarak, Hosni, 144, 253 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 67 Mughal Empire, 36 Mulgan, Geoff, 132 Musacchio, Aldo, 153 Muslim Brotherhood, 144, 253 Mussolini, Benito, 252 Myrdal, Alva, 169, 170 Myrdal, Gunnar, 37, 169, 170 Naím, Moisés, 186, 260, 266 Nanjing, 35 Napoléon I, Emperor of the French, 46 Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, Bangalore, 201 National Audit Office, British, 199 National Education Association, 114 National Front, French, 259 National Health Service, British, 62, 82, 109, 183, 199, 205 spending on, 130–31 National Health Service Act (British, 1948), 75 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), 243 National Insurance Act (British, 1946), 75 National Journal, 256 National Labor Relations Board, 73 national minimum, 68, 69 National Statistics Office, British, 19, 177 nation-state, 6, 8, 221 commerce and, 33 democracy and, 259, 262 globalization and, 259–60, 262 government efficiency in, 37 innovation and, 37, 39 legitimacy of, 33 local-government resistance to, 260 minimal welfare vote of, 33 representative institutions in, 38 rights of citizens in, 30, 43–44 rule of law in, 37–38 security as primary duty of, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 181, 222, 268 Navigation Acts, 50 Nazis, 71, 232 neoconservatives, 89 Netherlands, government spending in, 75 New Brutalism, 89 New Deal, 72, 82, 192, 236 New Digital Age, The (Schmidt and Cohen), 210–11 New Labourites, 94–95, 99 Newnham College, 58 New Republic, 71 New Statesman, 67 Newsweek, 86 New York Daily News, 227 New Zealand, 239 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 265 Nigeria, 234 night-watchman state, 7, 9, 48, 61, 80, 86, 101, 136, 140, 181, 232 1984 (Orwell), 71 Nixon, Richard, 77 Nobel Prize, 82, 86, 91 Nock, Albert Jay, 177 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Chinese, 158 Northcote, Stafford, 52–53 Norway, 1990s financial crisis in, 176 Novey, Don, 112–13, 181 Nye, Joseph, 3, 198 Obama, Barack, 100, 126, 192, 236, 241, 255, 256 big-government ideology of, 98 health-care reforms of, 20, 98, 117, 199, 208, 217 pragmatism of, 98, 220 Obama administration, 220, 231 regulation and, 117 occupational legislation, 117–18 O’Donnell, Christine, 227–28 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), 186 Office of Social Innovation and Participation, U.S., 220 “Old Corruption,” 6, 49, 51, 58, 149, 185, 227, 256, 268, 269 Oldham, John, 195 Olivares, Count-Duke, 37 Olson, Mancur, 109–10, 111 Olson’s law, 111–15, 117, 124, 237 On Liberty (Mill), 55, 59, 69 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 83 Open University, 180 opinion, freedom of, 224 Orban, Viktor, 254 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 186 Ornstein, Norman, 125–26, 227 Orwell, George, 71 Ottoman Empire, 35 Our Enemy, the State (Nock), 177 Packard, David, 105 Paine, Thomas, 21, 43–44 Pall, Niti, 206 Palme, Olof, 170, 175 Palo Alto, Calif., 105, 106 Papademos, Lucas, 259 Parag, Khanna, 218 Parliament, British, 31, 43 Party, The (McGregor), 151 Party for Freedom, Dutch, 259 patronage, 50, 52–53, 222, 237, 240 Paul, Ron, 34 payroll withholding tax, 82 Peace Corps, 216 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 38 Pearson, Karl, 68 Peel, Robert, 51, 54 pensions, 16, 267 Asian expansion of, 141–42 in Brazil, 18 in California, 113, 115, 119–20, 130 in China, 156, 183 defined-benefit vs. defined-contribution systems of, 184 as entitlements, 79, 184, 243 in Scandinavia, 171, 173, 184 spiking of, 184 as unfunded liabilities, 14, 119 People’s Action Party, Singapore, 134, 137–38 Peterson, Pete, 131 Peterson Foundation, 255 Peterson Institute for International Economics, 154 PetroChina, 152, 154, 155 Philippines, health insurance in, 141 Philippon, Thomas, 239 philosophical radicals, 48, 49, 85, 181 physician’s assistants, 204 Plato, 250, 255, 260, 264 pluralism, 211–14 police, technology and, 181–82 Political Economy (Mill), 57 political parties, declining membership in, 11, 261 politics: government bloat and, 10–11 money in, 256–58 polarization of, 11–13, 100, 124–27, 164, 255, 256 talent flight from, 127 Pomperipossa effect, 170 poor, poverty: failure of welfare state programs for, 87–89 public spending as biased against, 122–24 welfare state and, 68 Popper, Karl, 83 population: aging of, 15, 122–23, 124, 165, 174, 178, 183–84, 232, 241–42 urban shift of, 149, 218 Porter, Michael, 131 Portugal, public spending in, 99–100 Potter, Laurencina, 65–66 Potter, Richard, 65 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 55 Pritchett, Lant, 147 private life, freedom of, 224 privatization, 8, 94, 96, 234–37 Procter & Gamble, 190 productivity, 178 Baumol’s disease and, 110 in public vs. private sectors, 18–20, 177, 285 state capitalism and, 154 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 148, 206–7 Progressive Party, 72 progressivism, 240 as self-defeating, 229–30 property rights, 40, 43, 224 Proposition 13, 91, 92, 107 Protestants, 38 public sector, 76, 89, 115, 177, 180 technology and, 180 Pudong, China, 1–5, 8 Pune, India, 218–19 Pure Food and Drug Act (U.S., 1906), 72 Putin, Vladimir, 144, 153, 253 Pythagorean theorem, 31 Qianlong, Emperor of China, 41 racism, 88 Rauch, Jonathan, 231 Reagan, Ronald, 8, 28, 88, 91–92, 97, 198 Friedman and, 86 small-government ideology of, 95 see also Thatcher-Reagan revolution reason, religion as opponent of, 48 Reform, 203 Reformation, 48–49 Reinfeldt, Fredrik, 184 religion: freedom of, 224 reason as opponent of, 48 rent control, 82 rent seeking, 239 “Report on Manufacturers” (Hamilton), 150 Republic, The (Plato), 250 Republican Party, U.S., 123, 236–37 increased taxes opposed by, 100, 255 tax rises approved by, 12 Reshef, Ariell, 239 retirement age, 184–85, 242 Reykjavik City Council, 261 Ricardo, David, 49 Richelieu, Cardinal, 37 Right, 82, 93 government bloat and, 10–11, 98 government efficiency and, 187 and growth of big government, 10, 95, 98, 228, 230–31 privatization and, 234, 236–37 welfare services opposed by, 88, 185 rights: Fourth Revolution and, 270 liberal state’s expansion of, 7, 48, 49, 51 in nation-state, 30, 43–44 of property, 40, 43, 224 protection of, as primary role of liberal state, 45 see also freedom Rights of Man, The (Paine), 44 Ripley, Amanda, 206–7 road pricing, 217 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 10, 83, 86 Rodrik, Dani, 262 Romney, Mitt, 217 “Roofs or Ceilings” (Friedman), 82 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 72–73, 252 Roosevelt, Theodore, 71–72, 258 rotten boroughs, 51, 125, 227, 251, 257, 269 see also gerrymandering Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 44, 45 Rousseff, Dilma, 153 Royal Society, 42 Rumsfeld, Donald, 77, 253 Russia, 71 China and, 152 corruption in, 186 failure of democracy in, 253, 262 privatization in, 96 Singapore model admired by, 144 state capitalism in, 153, 154 Russian Revolution, 45 Rwanda, 144 Sacramento, Calif., 105, 106, 127 Sahni, Nikhil, 200 St.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

In my teens, I witnessed the message spread out across widening circles of people, starting with the active dissidents, who had voiced it for half a century at great cost to themselves, proceeding to the artists and literati, and ending up among the party members and politicians who had switched sides. This new elite comprised an eclectic mix of people: those original dissidents who had managed to survive the repression, public intellectuals, and (to the great annoyance of the surviving dissidents) even former Communists. The remaining dogmatists—even the prominent ones—were eventually marginalized, some of them retreating to Russia. Interestingly, as the message propagated from one group to the next, it evolved. It started in pure and uncompromising form (“The occupation must end!”)

…

among the dissidents who considered the truth more important than their personal freedom. The mainstream groups, who had more to lose, initially qualified and diluted the message, taking positions like “It would make sense in the long term to delegate control over local matters.” (There were always exceptions: Some public intellectuals proclaimed the original dissident message verbatim.) Finally, the original message—being, simply, true—won out over its diluted versions. Estonia regained its independence in 1991, and the last Soviet troops left three years later. The people who took the risk and spoke the truth in Estonia and elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc played a monumental role in the eventual outcome—an outcome that changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people, myself included.

…

Throughout his career, whether studying language, advocating a realistic biology of mind, or examining the human condition through the lens of humanistic Enlightenment ideas, psychologist Steven Pinker has embraced and championed a naturalistic understanding of the universe and the computational theory of mind. He is perhaps the first internationally recognized public intellectual whose recognition is based on the advocacy of empirically based thinking about language, mind, and human nature. “Just as Darwin made it possible for a thoughtful observer of the natural world to do without creationism,” he says, “Turing and others made it possible for a thoughtful observer of the cognitive world to do without spiritualism.”

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

Many of them are, but they are not able to pursue that goal due to the tyranny of academic publishers and professional norms that encourage obsequiousness and exclusion. The academic publishing industry seems poised to collapse before it changes. But some scholars are writing about the current crisis. Last month, an article called “Public Intellectuals, Online Media and Public Spheres: Current Realignments” was published in the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. I would tell you what it says, but I do not know. It is behind a paywall. —Originally published October 2, 2012 Note: Aaron Swartz unfortunately committed suicide in January 2013.

…

Sometimes the reader bypasses your byline and accidentally respects you, culminating in an email of praise. But other times you find what political scientist Charli Carpenter described, in the midst of a blogging controversy, as a “power dynamic to engage in actual, deliberate, blatant, sexist, sexualized, public disparagement of me and other female scholars and public intellectuals over the years as a way of dismissing our ideas when we dare to make a mistake or are simply politically unpopular.” On the Internet, everyone knows you are a woman. The online atmosphere Carpenter depicts has been commented upon by many female writers, but endured quietly by more. To discuss how you are negatively perceived forces people to see you through your detractor’s eyes.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

CHAPTER 4 Public and scientific intellectual: Brockman (1995) offers presentations by the “who’s who” in the new scientific intellectual tradition. See also his website, www.edge.org. For a physicist’s position on the culture wars, Weinberg (2001). For a presentation of a public intellectual, see Posner (2002). Note that Florida Atlantic University offers a Ph.D. to become a public intellectual—literary, since scientists need no such artifice. The hoax: Sokal (1996). The Selfish Gene: Dawkins (1989, 1976). Hegel: In Popper (1994). Exquisite cadavers: Nadeau (1970). The generator: www.monash.edu.au. Language and probability: There is a very large connection between language and probability; it has been studied by thinkers and scientists via the sister methods of entropy and information theory—one can reduce the dimensionality of a message by eliminating redundancy, for instance; what is left is measured as information content (think of zipping a file) and is linked to the notion of “entropy,” which is the degree of disorder, the unpredictable that is left.

…

. ———, 1992, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 5th ed. London: Routledge. ———, 1994, The Myth of the Framework. London: Routledge. ———, 2002, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 15th ed. London: Routledge. ———, 2002, The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge. Posner, Richard A., 2002, Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rabin, Mathew, 2000, “Inference by Believers in the Law of Small Numbers.” Economics Department, University of California, Berkeley, Working Paper E00-282, http://repositories.cdlib.org/iber/econ/ E00-282. Rabin, M., and R.

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/ip_2003_11.pdf Baker, Dean. 2004. “Financing Drug Research: What Are the Issues?” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/intellectual_property_2004_09.pdf Baker, Dean. 2009a. “The Housing Crash Recession and the Case for a Third Stimulus.” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/intellectual_property_2004_09.pdf Baker, Dean. 2009b. “Job Sharing: Tax Credits to Prevent Layoffs and Stimulate Employment.” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/job-sharing-tax-credit-2009-10.pdf Baker, Dean. 2011.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

Tommy felt at home in the world of think tanks, and he experimented with the idea of straightaway becoming a writer and critic; indeed, he became obsessed with the academic pedigree of public intellectuals and writers, wondering just how early one could get off the meritocracy escalator, stop one’s advanced schooling, and still be taken seriously as an essayist and intellectual. Before we lost him, we were convinced that he would add a philosophy degree to his JD studies and then spend his career as a professor of law and/or philosophy. But he also could just as well have graduated from law school and become an activist public intellectual, following in my dad’s post–law school footsteps and never practicing law.

…

But his perception of things was piercingly accurate and, compared to him, I may as well have been Mayor Richard Daley. My son and I shared all the most fundamental and essential values, but he was on a different path from his father’s; he was on a path of engagement much closer to that of his grandfather, my dad, Marcus Goodman Raskin, not a politician but a public intellectual. Tommy’s bond with my father grew over the years into an intimate channel of political thought and emotion between lively kindred spirits, two ebullient humanitarians who had profound libertarian questions about society and radical moral answers for the world. Each was, in some deep ways, the other’s alter ego.

…

My dad’s effort to mobilize both law and public sentiment against violence and war, the idea that criminal defendants would stand together in the face of unjust prosecution (instead of rushing out to get their own lawyers and pointing fingers at one another, like the right-wingers do), and the collision between freedom of political expression and the criminal law would enthrall Tommy from high school through law school. Tommy saw in his Baba the promise of a public intellectual’s career defined by old-fashioned integrity and courage, a model for acting justly in an unjust world. He was drawn at a young age to Oxfam and Amnesty International and sent them large chunks of whatever money he earned. In college, he wrote blistering essays for antiwar.com on the folly and lies of America’s warmakers.

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

Media elites gather each July at the Allen & Company Sun Valley conference in Idaho. Central bankers gather in August at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming, conference sponsored by the Kansas City Federal Reserve. Military and intelligence elites gather at the Munich Security Conference in early February. Thought leaders and public intellectuals can take their pick from among the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, and the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Vancouver. These super-elite venues are not run-of-the-mill industry conventions. They are by invitation only, or come with admission and sponsorship conditions that self-select for power elite participation.

…

Bilderberg has a core group of about forty regular attendees, and a larger group of about one hundred invitees who vary from year to year depending on topical urgency or political ascendancy. The core group are mostly financial and industrial elites; the broader group leans toward policymakers and public intellectuals. When I privately briefed the head of Bilderberg in Rockefeller Center a few years ago, he was polite and intensely interested in my views on the euro. I assured him and his associates the euro was here to stay at a time when many economists were shrieking about its imminent demise. At the conclusion of our discussion, he kindly gave me a gift, a Swedish vase designed in a deep blue translucent vortex, which I keep in sight in my writing studio.

…

The ratchet ensures that elite gains are not soon surrendered. The process goes into remission until the next shock. Thus the global elite’s true typology: a structure of floating, intersecting spheres. Communication courses through conferences and supercarriers who channel concepts between spheres. Content comes from public intellectuals. Their glue is like-mindedness. Their strength is patience. Their method is piecemeal social engineering. Their scalpel is the shock doctrine. Their final success is ensured by the ratchet. This is all employed in obeisance to the agenda: one money, one world, one order. CHAPTER 3 Desert City of the Mind Keynes asked me what I was advising my clients.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

Rescuing the Anglosphere But, far from collapsing under the weight of this dramatic history, the political idea of the Anglosphere was rescued and then revived in the post-Iraq War years, re-emerging as a leading paradigm for parts of the political and foreign policy communities. The first, and perhaps most ingenious, attempt to give Anglo-America a new ideological foundation after Iraq came from the public intellectual and foreign policy strategist Walter Russell Mead, in his book God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World (2007).12 Mead set American economic and political power in an unbroken Anglo-American lineage, one that could be traced back to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 which had established the basis for parliamentary and Protestant rule in Britain.

…

This was an important ideological pivot for British Conservative Eurosceptics, whose primary interest now shifted from foreign policy to the construction of a new horizon of possibility for the UK outside the European Union. After the 2010 general election, when Labour's long stretch in government was finally brought to an end, discussion of the Anglosphere as a serious alternative to the EU began to intensify in the Conservative Party and the penumbra of think-tanks, political magazines, lobbying groups and public intellectuals surrounding it. This intensification of interest was stimulated in part by the rise in support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which had seen significant electoral gains in European parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2009, and which was starting to win increased support (if not seats) at Westminster elections.

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

Now.” —Andrew McAfee, MIT scientist, author of More from Less, and coauthor of The Second Machine Age “The Upswing is a revelation—tailor-made for this polarized age and destined to be a central reference point for urgent debates and determined activism. Here, one of America’s most renowned public intellectuals gives us a new understanding of our history and a profoundly insightful roadmap for a future we can only create together. Squarely facing race and gender inequity, Putnam and Garrett shed new light on the moral awakening and collective action that a diverse group of Americans sparked more than a century ago—and show how we can build on their example, but also learn from their blind spots, today.”

…

Dean became an instant cultural icon, representing disillusionment and social estrangement to young people growing up in the 1950s. The decade’s best works of fiction were dark reflections of youthful anxiety and hinted at seismic cultural shifts to come. Increasing numbers of scholars and public intellectuals in the late 1950s and early 1960s were also concerned about the growing “we-ness” of America and decried the trend toward conformity. The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman’s 1950 runaway best-seller, contrasted (unfavorably) the “other-directed” American of the mid-twentieth century with the “inner-directed” American of the nineteenth century.47 The “inner-directed” personality emphasized individual drive, initiative, and competition, while the “other-directed” personality took his cues from friends, bosses, and peers, seeking to “get along with others.”

…

Over the years we developed the habit of spending several days together nearly every summer, exchanging candid, critical thoughts about the evolution of our respective intellectual interests. Having this sort of partnership with someone widely acknowledged to be among the most creative social scientists of his generation has been of inestimable value and pleasure to me. Two of America’s leading public intellectuals, Michelle Alexander and Nannerl Keohane, offered incisive critiques of early, private formulations of my arguments about race and gender. I have no idea what either will think about our revised formulation, but I want to record publicly my indebtedness to each of them. Their forthrightness forced me to think much more deeply about what racial and gender justice requires.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

If, for instance, we were to say that goodness is synonymous with whatever gives people pleasure, it would still be possible to worry whether a specific instance of pleasure is actually good. This is known as Moore’s “open question argument.” And while I think this verbal trap is easily avoided when we focus on human well-being, most scientists and public intellectuals appear to have fallen into it. Other influential philosophers, including Karl Popper,15 have echoed Hume and Moore on this point, and the effect has been to create a firewall between facts and values throughout our intellectual discourse.16 While psychologists and neuroscientists now routinely study human happiness, positive emotions, and moral reasoning, they rarely draw conclusions about how human beings ought to think or behave in light of their findings.

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It also seems that, given the relative poverty of science, wealthy organizations like the Templeton Foundation (whose endowment currently stands at $1.5 billion) have managed to convince some scientists and science journalists that it is wise to split the difference between intellectual integrity and the fantasies of a prior age. Because there are no easy remedies for social inequality, many scientists and public intellectuals also believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated by pious delusions. Many assert that, while they can get along just fine without an imaginary friend, most human beings will always need to believe in God. In my experience, people holding this opinion never seem to notice how condescending, unimaginative, and pessimistic a view it is of the rest of humanity—and of generations to come.

…

My agents, John Brockman, Katinka Matson, and Max Brockman, were extremely helpful in refining my initial conception of the book and in placing it with the right publisher. Of course, JB, as his friends, colleagues, and clients well know, is much more than an agent: he has become the world’s preeminent wrangler of scientific opinion. We are all richer for his efforts to bring scientists and public intellectuals together through his Edge Foundation to discuss the most interesting questions of our time. I have been greatly supported in all things by my family and friends—especially by my mother, who has always been a most extraordinary friend. She read the manuscript of The Moral Landscape more than once and offered extremely valuable notes and copyedits.

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

Or consider social scientists studying the causes of gun violence: from 1996 to 2017 the Centers for Disease Control were literally forbidden to fund research into firearm injuries and deaths. So what’s a would-be scholar to do? One response is to ignore the political heat and just keep doing your research. That’s a choice I can respect, and for most scholars, even in economics, it’s the right choice. But we also need public intellectuals: people who will understand and respect the research, but are willing to jump into the political fray. This book is a collection of articles, mostly written for The New York Times, in which I tried to play that role. I’ll talk later about how I got into that position, and what I’m trying to do with it.

…

PUNDITRY IN A TIME OF POLARIZATION Suppose that you’re someone who knows a fair bit about a technical subject like economics, but also wants to have an effect on public discourse—that is, the way people who don’t know or care about the technical issues discuss that subject. Obviously that describes my status, but it also applies to a number of other people. There are other economists who have moved into the public sphere—people like Joseph Stiglitz, a great economist who has reinvented himself as a public intellectual, or Britain’s Simon Wren-Lewis. There are also a growing number of journalists with good backgrounds in economics, like the Times’s David Leonhardt or The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell. What does it take to play that role effectively? The final section of this book contains an essay I wrote in 1991, “How I Work,” that lays out four rules for research.

…

I wish the world weren’t like this. There are times when I long for the naïveté of my professional youth, when I was simply trying to get the right answer and could normally assume that the people I was debating with were engaged in the same enterprise. But if you’re going to be an effective public intellectual, you deal with the world you have, not the one you want. ABOUT THIS BOOK I began writing for the Times in 2000. For several years prior I had written monthly columns for Fortune and Slate, but I was still mainly a research economist. In fact, I wrote what I personally consider possibly my best academic paper, “It’s Baaack: Japan’s Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap,” in 1998.

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, glass ceiling, hindcast, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), LNG terminal, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, profit motive, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method

Life magazine reported in January 1970 that, because of particles emitted in the air by burning fossil fuels, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support . . . the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . .”11 To quote Paul Ehrlich again, as he may have been the most influential public intellectual of the decade (and is still a prestigious professor of ecology at Stanford University): “Air pollution . . . is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” he said in 1970.12 And then there’s the prediction we hear most today: the supposedly scientifically indisputable claim that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels will cause a true climate catastrophe within a couple of decades.13 Reading back in time, I saw that many of the leaders who make that prediction now had, decades ago, predicted that we’d be living in catastrophe today.

…

Those whose models fail but still believe their core hypothesis right still need to acknowledge their failure. If they believe that their hypothesis is right and that complete lack of dramatic warming is just the calm before the storm, they should state all the evidence pro and con. Unfortunately, many of the scientists, scientific bodies, and especially public intellectuals and media members have not been honest with the public about the failure of their predictions. Like all too many who are attached to a theory that ends up contradicting reality, they have tried to pretend that reality is different from what it is, to the point of extreme and extremely dangerous dishonesty.

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order by Bruno Maçães

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Admiral Zheng, autonomous vehicles, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, cloud computing, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, global value chain, high-speed rail, industrial cluster, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, one-China policy, Pearl River Delta, public intellectual, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, trade liberalization, trade route, zero-sum game

Already with the notion of a “harmonious world” introduced by President Hu Jintao in 2005, it was difficult or impossible to reduce its meaning simply to propaganda. It was an ideal concept—thus existing at some distance from everyday politics—but that did not mean it was not taken seriously and often firmly defended by public intellectuals and officials. The Chinese authorities are obviously right that a win-win solution is always possible in the sense that cooperation between two or more states can leave both better off. Where the model breaks down is at the level of different political concepts because these are always defined in opposition to one another.

…

In September 2017, it was reported that Yang Jian, a leading member of parliament from the National Party in New Zealand, had a military intelligence background in China that he failed to disclose when he immigrated to New Zealand and that he has pursued close ties with the Communist Party in Beijing. Faced with similar cases of heavy-handed interventions in local politics, Australia approved a wide-ranging package of foreign interference laws designed to force new levels of disclosure from people acting for other countries. At the end of 2017 one of Australia’s most prominent public intellectuals, Clive Hamilton, argued that the Chinese Communist Party was inserting “agents of influence” at all levels of Australian political life. Damagingly, the book containing his claims was initially cancelled by its publisher amid fears Beijing would bankroll endless legal suits against it. These controversies were bound to contaminate public perceptions of the Belt and Road.

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

It wouldn’t do anything for access to healthcare or legal protection, and yet we hear the same narrative today: If only the poor would earn more and spend less money, then they wouldn’t be so poor. The essay was influential but it took a while to become mainstream. Four decades later, in 1977, Duane Elgin, a trend forecaster and public intellectual, who might now be called a “futurist,” revived the concept of voluntary simplicity in a report of the same name written with Arnold Mitchell. He later turned the report into a bestselling book called Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. It was the ’70s equivalent of Marie Kondo—the Wall Street Journal called it the “bible” of the simplicity movement and it has been reissued multiple times, most recently in 2010.

…

In 1936, a Jewish student of Husserl and Heidegger named Karl Löwith wrote Kuki a letter requesting a position in Japan in order to escape Nazi Germany; he found Löwith a temporary post at Tohoku University. Under nationalist ideas of racial superiority, Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria and installed a puppet government. In 1937 the Japanese military perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre, which resulted in the hundreds of thousands of Chinese dead; two years later Kuki still played his role as a public intellectual and toured the area. Ambiguity only goes so far in the face of such absolutes. Violent nationalism, after all, makes use of the same connection between aesthetics and ethnicity that Okakura proposed and Kuki drew out in “The Structure of Iki”: One people must preserve one orthodox way of being in the world that excludes all others for the sake of purity.

Undoing Border Imperialism by Harsha Walia

Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, degrowth, emotional labour, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Internet Archive, mass incarceration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, telemarketer, women in the workforce

Institute for Anarchist Studies The IAS, a nonprofit foundation established in 1996, aims to support the development of anarchism by creating spaces for independent, politically engaged scholarship that explores social domination and reconstructive visions of a free society. All IAS projects strive to encourage public intellectuals and collective self-reflection within revolutionary and/or movement contexts. To this end, the IAS awards grants twice a year to radical writers and translators worldwide, and has funded nearly a hundred projects over the years by authors from numerous countries, including Argentina, Lebanon, Canada, Chile, Ireland, Nigeria, Germany, South Africa, and the United States.

…

Given that anarchism has become the dominant tendency within revolutionary milieus and movements today, it is crucial that anarchists explore current phenomena, strategies, and visions in a much more rigorous, serious manner. Each title in this series, then, features present-day anarchist voices, with the aim, over time, of publishing a variety of perspectives. The series’ multifaceted goals are to cultivate anarchist thought so as to better inform anarchist practice, encourage a culture of public intellectuals and constructive debate within anarchism, introduce new generations to anarchism, and offer insights into today’s world and potentialities for a freer society.

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State by Paul Tucker

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, conceptual framework, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, Greenspan put, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Northern Rock, operational security, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, seigniorage, short selling, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Nor, bigger picture, is it an exploration of whether the modern state is compromised by the way its tentacles reach into so many parts of our everyday lives and how that has gradually transformed who we are, individually and collectively. It does not remotely have the range, let alone ambition, of the work of the Continental European public intellectuals who have taken on that vast subject, perhaps most famously Michel Foucault and Juergen Habermas. Nor is it a broad examination of shortcomings in the modern democratic state of the kind recently pursued by Francis Fukuyama.19 Rather, it looks at just one corner of the state apparatus and its position in democratic society—independent agencies—albeit one of great importance for understanding the role and legitimacy of the state more generally.

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Moreover, as we shall see in part III, notions of a dichotomy (deep conceptual and strict separation) between politics and administration—or between ends and means—were embedded in German conceptions of government by Max Weber’s famous early-twentieth-century writings on bureaucracy as the rationalist executor of rules-based policies.40 While that has not stood in the way of debate, led by Germany’s leading public intellectual, Juergen Habermas, about the broader legitimacy of the state’s administrative reach and methods, political insulation has not been a central issue.41 Most likely, that is because the constitution expressly puts administration under the control of ministers (chapter 13). Compared with Habermas’s neighboring work on legitimation conditions for the state’s legal monopoly of coercive power, developments in the structure of French governance can appear to have sparked less intellectual engagement.

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It is a legitimation story that appeals to economic ideas that emerged over the middle of the twentieth century, and so depends on their robustness for its validity. In fact, those ideas were contested. While at the beginning of the century economists were promoting regulation as a fix for problems in markets and as a shield against power, from mid-century onward the concern with power was sidelined, and economists, public intellectuals, and political parties waged a war of ideas around whether “market failure” or “government failure” was the bigger problem. Often, especially in the US and most notably in the field of competition policy, statutory regimes persisted even as ideas and doctrine shifted, leaving technocrats and judges to reconstruct high policy without any obvious democratic imprimatur.

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

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

It takes the world as it is, accepts it, and assesses it on those terms. This research is necessary and can have considerable value—I cite some of it herein—but it is not asking the central questions, so it is not set up to produce the answers we need. For the big questions, the way to start is by reviewing the body of work produced by public intellectuals and scholars from a wide range of disciplines that has assessed the Internet over the past two decades, attempting to locate it in a broad historical perspective. Going back to the early 1990s—from George Gilder’s Life after Television and Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital to Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil and Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, numerous writers have provided their assessment of the digital revolution.

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The amount has increased, perhaps exponentially, in the past decade, becoming a veritable publishing genre. In view of how the Internet affects nearly every aspect of our lives, that is to be expected. Even if the work does not always stand the test of time, and if some of it may seem superficial, it is of tremendous importance. These efforts by public intellectuals to make sense of the digital revolution, more than anything else, define how Americans—including scholars, concerned citizens, activists, journalists, and policy makers—view the Internet and lay out what many of the relevant issues are. It is a discussion I wish to join. Robin Mansell has analyzed this Internet literature as falling into two broad camps, the “celebrants” and the “skeptics.”

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But I think it is a similarly reasonable position to think that a good society will have progressive taxation, widespread free trade unions, high-quality mass transit, universal free health care, guaranteed employment, and high-quality universal public education. Yet all of these points are debatable if not controversial among American scholars and pundits. There is no valid reason why American scholars should bow down to capitalism in general and corporate power specifically. In the end, this is not a left-right issue. Some of the finest public intellectuals of the past century who ruthlessly criticized capitalism and its relationship to democracy were also advocates of capitalism as well as political conservatives. The most famous was Joseph Schumpeter, but the tradition lives on. Kevin Phillips wrote a series of thoughtful books in this vein over the past two-plus decades.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Elliott thought Hazlitt’s views “antediluvian” and set about finding a distinguished economist who would reflect the Keynesian thinking of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.20 The obvious candidate was John Kenneth Galbraith,21 the Canadian-born Harvard economics professor, who through a series of best-selling books, such as The Affluent Society,22 had become America’s best-known left-leaning public intellectual and most celebrated economist. Galbraith’s ambition to see his progressive ideas put into practice had led him to work for Democratic presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and John F. Kennedy.23 He was tall and slim, with a pronounced drawl and lofty manner that echoed his patrician views.

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And, like Hayek, Friedman allied himself closely with the leading lights of the Chicago School—the Old School, which predated Friedman, was led by Frank Knight, Henry Simons, and Paul Douglas, as well as more recent members, such as Robert Lucas Jr.,45 George Stigler, Gary Becker,46 Robert Fogel,47 and Theodore Schultz—and he had become the School’s most dashing and well-known public intellectual. Samuelson was mostly unimpressed by Friedman’s ideological heroes. He thought little of “Ayn Rand’s absurd religion of the selfish.”48 But as a distinguished graduate of Chicago’s economics department, Samuelson was well placed to confront the theoretical basis of Friedman’s thinking. And it was his intimate knowledge of the Chicago School that gave him the confidence to tweak Friedman’s nose in argument by calling in evidence Friedman’s home team.

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The author of the definitive economics textbook, named simply Economics. The New York Times dubbed him the “foremost academic economist of the 20th century.” 26.Interview with Samuelson, New York Times, October 31, 1993. 27.Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger (October 15, 1917–February 28, 2007), historian, social critic, and public intellectual. 28.John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (Ballantine, New York, 1982), pp. 389–90. 29.Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2005), p. 416. 30.Letter from Elliott to Samuelson, May 17, 1966. Duke Samuelson archive. 31.Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912–November 16, 2006), conservative economist who advised presidents Nixon and Reagan and British prime minister Thatcher.

Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

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

For the masses promised to become king,” a tendency fortunately reversed—so it has been hoped—as new methods “to mold the mind of the masses” were devised and implemented.6 Quite strikingly, in both of the world’s leading democracies there was a growing awareness of the need to “apply the lessons” of the highly successful propaganda systems of World War I “to the organization of political warfare,” as the chairman of the British Conservative Party put the matter seventy years ago. Wilsonian liberals in the U.S. drew the same conclusions in the same years, including public intellectuals and prominent figures in the developing profession of political science. In another corner of Western civilization, Adolf Hitler vowed that next time Germany would not be defeated in the propaganda war and also devised his own ways to apply the lessons of Anglo-American propaganda for political warfare at home.7 Meanwhile the business world warned of “the hazard facing industrialists” in “the newly realized political power of the masses,” and the need to wage and win “the everlasting battle for the minds of men” and “indoctrinate citizens with the capitalist story” until “they are able to play back the story with remarkable fidelity” and so on, in an impressive flow, accompanied by even more impressive efforts, and surely one of the central themes of modern history.8 To discover the true meaning of the “political and economic principles” that are declared to be “the wave of the future,” it is of course necessary to go beyond rhetorical flourishes and public pronouncements and to investigate actual practice and the internal documentary record.

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The material and ideological outcome helps explain the understanding that “democracy” abroad must reflect the model sought at home: “top-down” forms of control, with the public kept to a “spectator” role, not participating in the arena of decision making, which must exclude these “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders,” according to the mainstream of modern democratic theory. I happen to be quoting the essays on democracy by Walter Lippmann, one of the most respected American public intellectuals and journalists of the century.19 But the general ideas are standard and have solid roots in the constitutional tradition, radically modified, however, in the new era of collectivist legal entities. Returning to the “victory of democracy” under U.S. guidance, neither Lakoff nor Carothers asks how Washington maintained the traditional power structure of highly undemocratic societies.

The Rise of Carry: The Dangerous Consequences of Volatility Suppression and the New Financial Order of Decaying Growth and Recurring Crisis by Tim Lee, Jamie Lee, Kevin Coldiron

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, currency risk, debt deflation, disinformation, distributed ledger, diversification, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, global reserve currency, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, market bubble, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, negative equity, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, risk/return, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, yield curve

Cumulative Advantage Is What Perpetuates Itself Cumulative advantage is implicated in all forms of fads, fashions, crazes, trends—even market bubbles. As illustrated by the example of movie stardom, cumulative advantage is behind “superstar effects” across all cultural products: music, books, success as a “public intellectual,” and more. Cumulative advantage is likely behind the virulence of modern social media—Twitter mobs, disinformation, polarization—where visible numbers of likes, shares, and retweets show us collectively what is right (or safe) to say (or think), and thereby produce powerful feedback effects.

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See also specific currencies alternative, 211 asset bases for, 211 availability of, 4 in carry regime, 108–113 creation of, 109 INDEX defining, 109 Divisia, 111 statistical measures of, 109 US household holdings of, 117, 117f VIX and value of, 100, 122 volatility and value of, 98–101, 122 money market funds, government guarantee for, 113 money supply, 20, 21 business cycle and, 125–126 carry crashes and, 122–123 monopoly power, 176 natural, 186 moral hazard central banks and, 195, 200 globalization of, 195–200 monetary policy and, 208 mortgage bubble, 36 movie stars, 184–186 multiple equilibria, 183 natural monopolies, 186 negative yields, 70 net claims Australia, 40, 40f currency carry trade measurement and, 41 Turkey, 43, 43f net foreign assets, 14, 16, 29 network effects, 185 New Zealand, interest rate spreads and, 60–61 New Zealand dollar, capital flows into, 62 nonbank financial sector, 137 nonmonetary assets carry bubbles and, 169 carry regime and, 112, 114, 122 Norway, sovereign wealth fund, 75 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 115 oil carry trade, 128–133, 132f oil prices, 129f, 131 oil producers, debt levels of, 130 “The Optimal Design of Ponzi Schemes in Finite Economies” (Bhattacharya), 142 optionality buying, 146 227 selling, 152, 153 volatility and, 93–95 options delta hedging, 149–151 delta of, 149 gamma of, 149–150 pricing of, 149 unhedged, 150 volatility and, 146–148 volatility bets with, 89 volatility implied by, 57 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 115 output gap, 125 Panic of 1907, 218 personal net worth, 137, 138f photosynthesis, 189 pi Economics, 27–29 Piketty, Thomas, 219 poker, 182–183 Polish zloty, 34 Ponzi schemes, 140–143 Pope, Alexander, 179 popularity, 181–182, 184 populist political movements, 1 portfolio insurance, 155 portfolio volatility, 159 power, carry as, 191–192 pricing kernel, 99 private equity leveraged buyouts, as carry trades, 78–80 productivity, 115 profit share, 82, 137, 138f, 139 proprietary trading, compensation incentives and, 77 public intellectuals, 186 put options, 34, 89 selling fully collateralized, 156n4 QE. See quantitative easing QE3, 101, 103 quantitative easing (QE), 101, 105, 127, 136, 196, 209, 219 BOJ and, 31 real economic activity, measures of, 56 real estate booms, currency carry trades contributing to, 13 228 realized volatility, 90, 164, 167–168 anti-carry regime and, 172 implied volatility relationship to, 158 recessions, carry and consequences of, 6 recipient currencies, 10–11, 13, 65 crashes in, 23 volatility in, 215 regulatory capture, 176 rent-seeking carry as, 175–177 defining, 175 reporting horizons, 70–71 reserve balances, 109–110 resource allocation, carry regime and, 114–115 return, risk and, 99 risk carry trade profit explanations and, 48 of carry trades, 3, 5 of CDOs, 36–37 currency, 12 exchange rate, 12–13 market, 99 mispricing of, 21, 35–37, 132, 134–140, 142 return and, 99 ruin, 65, 72 selling optionality and, 153 socialization of, 136 spreading, 35 risk controls, 65 risk premium, 148, 152 portfolio volatility and, 159 roll yield, 91 rubisco, 189 ruin risk, 65, 72 sawtooth patterns, 96–97, 97f shadow banks, 137 Shin, Hyun Song, 22, 80–81 short squeezes on liquidity, 165 short-term reporting horizons, 70–71 social hierarchies, 187 social networks, 187 social realities, 184 socialization of risk, 136 South Africa, 55n6 sovereign bonds, 162 equity indexes correlation to, 161 Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, 75 INDEX sovereign wealth funds, 75–76 growth of, 83 S&P 500, 53–55, 55n6, 56, 95 carry regime importance of, 86–87, 87f as carry trade, 160–162 equity risk trade correlation with, 99 gamma for, 154, 154f liquidity premiums for, 161 market corrections and, 79 mean reversion of, 154f, 155 quantitative easing and, 103 selling volatility on, 98 volatility of, as global volatility risk factor, 99 volatility selling in, 89–92 volatility trading on, 85, 86 S&P 500 front e-mini future, 159 stagflation, 217 stochastic discount factor, 99 stock buybacks, 82, 83f stock market crashes, of 1987, 155 stock markets carry and structures of, 7 emerging currency stability compared with, 55 performance of, 1 recessions and crashes in, 6 volatility bets in, 89 stocks, put options against, 34 stopped out, 94 structured finance, 135 subprime mortgages, 36 superstar effects, 186 Swiss franc, 29, 31, 33, 34 taxi licensing, 175 Thai baht, 25 Thailand, balance of payments current account deficit, 25 Theron, Charlize, 185 trading frequency, 74 tulip bulbs, 133 Turkey, 19, 20, 23, 39, 202 balance of payments, 45 carry bubble and bust, 42–46 consumer price index, 44 credit and claims data for, 43, 43f GDP growth, 45 interest rates, 12–13 INDEX Turkish lira, 11, 13, 20, 21, 23, 44, 55n6 carry crash of 2018 in, 45, 65 Twitter, 186 uncovered interest rate parity (UIP), 47, 48 United States capital flows into, 18 carry trade funding and, 17–20 current account deficit, 17 personal net worth in, 137, 138f savings rates, 18, 19 US Federal Reserve, 14, 26 balance sheet of, 101–102 carry crashes limited by, 127 carry regimes and, 107, 208 carry trades by, 103 creation of, 218 interest rates and, 14, 137, 208 liquidity swaps by, 104–105, 196–198 quantitative easing and, 101, 105 US household financial assets, 117–120, 117f–120f valuation metrics, 204 vanishing point, 116, 195, 209–210 variance, 94 VIX, 85, 95, 99 forward curve average, 92, 92f money value and, 100, 122 shorting, 96 spikes in, 98 VIX futures, 90–92 selling volatility using, 156, 158 shorting, 148, 157 VIX futures rolldown, 59, 96 VIX index, 53n5 volatility, 3 currency, 62 currency carry trade collapse signs from, 215 direct bets on, 89 equilibrium structure of premiums for, 156–160, 157f equity, 59 financial crises and spikes in, 52 in funding currencies, 215 global, 99, 101 implied, 57, 90 market making as premium for, 158–159 229 negatively priced liquidity and, 166 optionality and, 93–95 options and, 146–148 portfolio, 159 realized, 90 in recipient currencies, 215 selling, as short position, 156 selling, by receiving implied and paying realized, 148–150 selling, by receiving realized and paying realized, 151–156 short, 4 signs of carry regime ending and, 214–218 spikes in, 98 time horizons of, 152, 153f, 154, 154f value of money and, 98–101, 122 of volatility, 90 volatility carry, 86 volatility selling, 86, 96 central banks and, 101–105 in S&P 500, 89–92 volatility shock, 161 volatility-selling trades, 33–35, 57, 69 Volcker Rule, 77 Volmageddon, 98, 161 VXO index, 53, 53n5, 54, 55n6, 90n2 VXX, 92 wealth distribution, carry and, 2 wealth inequality, central bank stabilization actions and, 6 “What Explains the Persistence of Global Imbalances?”

The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, backpropagation, British Empire, Brownian motion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Drosophila, epigenetics, finite state, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, language acquisition, phenotype, public intellectual, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, trolley problem

[It makes it seem that] there is no moral barrier against it. Well, what are intellectuals? They’re managers. They’re economic managers, political managers, doctrinal managers. That's basically their role; we call certain kinds of managers “intellectuals.” We don’t call corporate executives intellectuals, but that's just terminology. Public intellectuals are just other kinds of managers. We happen to use the word intellectuals for them, and not for economic managers; but they’re all basically trying to control actions, attitudes, beliefs, and so on. And for people in a managerial role, it's highly convenient to think there's no moral barrier to controlling people.

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Take Mill's article today and just change a few words, and it's the main literature on humanitarian intervention. Is there any better basis than his? Take a look at the cases. The argument is very simple, and it's the foundation of modern political science – that's Lippman, Lasswell, and the other influential founders of the public intellectual tradition. Not everyone, of course, but it's a very powerful mainstream tradition, and it goes way back in intellectual history, and it's understandable. How do you justify it? Always the same way. We’re somehow different from them; they are malleable, or maybe they have barbaric instincts, or something; and for their own good, we have to control them.

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S. 51, 53 Hale, Kenneth 17, 62 Halle, Morris 21 Hamilton, William D. 104 Harman, Gilbert 100 Harris, Zellig 38, 80, 81, 86 Hauser, Marc 100, 109, 286evolution of communication 12, 58 faculty of language 60, 170, 172, 268, 269 hearing 48 Helmholtz, Hermann von 73, 97 Herbert of Cherbury 181 Higginbotham, Jim 129, 130 Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy 196 homunculus 37, 290 Hornstein, Norbert 29, 183, 265 human behavior 138–151, 286 human evolution 2, 13, 71developmental constraints on 41 ‘great leap forward' 13, 70, 77 human nature 95–102, 108–112 and biological capacities 95 Chomsky on 95–102 determined and uniform 95, 99 distinctiveness of 176–179 enlightenment conception of 142 and evolution 103–107 ‘great leap forward' 179 moral agency 101 plasticity of 121 humanitarian intervention 121, 122, 287 humans, genetic variation 13 Hume, David 26, 90, 99, 106, 179color problem 247–248, 286 theory of moral nature 63, 99, 109 Huxley, Thomas 23 I-beliefs 153–156 definition of 156 I-concepts 153–156 definition of 155 I-language 81, 153–156, 164, 239, 258, 266intensional specification of 167 imagination 70, 161 inclusiveness 62, 281 induction 88, 90, 95 inference 73, 165, 221 information 208, 213, 218, 228, 229, 254pragmatic 30 semantic 29, 260 innateness 39–45, 60, 89, 91, 255, 267, 284 innatism 123 innovation 71, 74, 95, 177, 178, 185, 282technological 145 insects, study of 147 instinct 96, 143, 178, 181, 247, 248, 287 instrumentalism 211 intention (see also nativism) 163 internalism 6, 228, 248, 262–263, 269, 287and concepts 188, 190, 209, 255–257, 260, 272 intuitions 125, 126 island sentences 50 Jackendoff, Ray 170, 172 Jacob, François 24, 53, 60, 243 Joos, Martin 145 justice 120 Kahneman, Daniel 140 Kant, Immanuel 90 Kauffman, Stuart 21, 22, 266 Kayne, Richard 55, 84, 241 Keller, Helen 45 Kissinger, Henry 101, 107, 113, 287 Klein, Ralph 111 knowledge 70, 193See also information Kripke, Saul 126 Kropotkin, Peter 103, 111 languageand agency 124–128 as an animal instinct 178 and arithmetical capacities 16 and biology 21–30, 80, 235, 284 biophysical explanations of 208 and brain morphology 46 capacity for 70, 164 characteristic uses of 11–12 cognitive benefits of 2 competence and use 63 and complex thought 1 complexity of 52, 146 compositional character of 37 computational theory of 174, 272 and concepts 71, 198 conceptual resources of 212 displacement property 16 distinctive features 22 domination 232–238 expectations for 54 externalization of 52, 78, 79, 153, 222, 278 flexibility 95, 162, 197, 210, 224, 227 formal languages 16, 17, 289 formal theory of 21–30 functions of 11–20, 164, 165 generative capacity 49 head-first 240 hierarchical structure 232–238 I-language 153–156, 164, 239, 258, 266 interface conditions 25 internal 37 internal, individual and intensional 37, 154, 167 internal use of 52, 69, 124, 153, 160, 197, 262–263, 272–274 a ‘knowledge' system 187, 193 localization of 46, 59, 69–74 and mathematics 181 modularity of 59 movement property 16, 85, 108, 264–265 as a natural object 2, 7 nominalizing languages 155 open texture of 273 and other cognitive systems 271 phonetic features 42 phonological features 42, 57 precursors of 43, 77 properties of 22, 37, 60, 62 public language 153, 288 purposes of 224 and reason 181 result of historical events 84 rules of 165, 221, 223, 224, 225, 283, 284 and science 124–128 sounds available in 282 structural features of 42 structure of 236, 277–278 study of 36, 76, 79, 154See also linguistics theories of 164, 193, 239, 243, 285 unboundedness 177, 262 uniqueness to humans 150 variation in the use of 164, 239–242 language faculty 74, 172, 177, 243, 260, 261, 270adicity requirements of 198, 199 perfection of 50 language of thought 27, 71, 189, 190, 220, 230, 269 Lasnik, Howard 85 learning 95, 180, 200, 226, 281, 282empiricism and 173, 179 learning a language 187, 225, 226 Lenneberg, Eric 21, 43, 47, 59 Lepore, E. 195 Lewis, David 153, 165, 220, 222, 223, 224 Lewontin, Richard 58, 157, 170, 172, 173, 175, 231 lexical items 62categories of 234 origin of 46 liberalism 98 linguistic communities 222 linguistic development 39See also development linguistic practices 221, 223 linguistic principles 237, 276 linguistics 19, 36, 82, 145and biology 150 first factor considerations 45, 96, 148 and natural science 38 and politics 152 procedural theories in 149 second factor considerations 148, 277 structural 80 theories of 87, 265 third factor considerations:separate entry Locke, John 26, 125, 267personal identity 31, 271 secondary qualities 256 logic, formal 251 Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory 84–85 Lohndal, Terje 57 Lorenz, Konrad 21 Marx, Karl 122 mathematics 127, 165, 214, 215, 266capacity for 15, 136 formal functions in 166–169 and language 181 semantics for 251, 252 Mayr, Ernst 174 meaning 29, 98, 199, 206, 250, 252, 270, 273computational theory of 213 construction of a science of 226–230 externalist science of 209–220 methodology for a theory of 226, 227 study of 261 theories of 221 theory of 212, 214, 217, 226 Mehler, Jacques 55 Merge 16, 77, 91, 181, 236, 243, 263, 279–280 centrality of 41, 60, 62, 176, 245 consequences of 17 and edge properties 17, 41 Merge, external 17, 166, 201, 238, 263 Merge, internal 16, 25, 29, 85, 201, 238, 264 mutation giving rise to 43, 52 origin of 14, 15 Pair Merge 201, 264 and psychic identity 28 uniqueness to humans 25, 200, 205 metaphor 195 metaphysics 125, 157 Mikhail, John 63, 99, 100, 109, 129, 286 Mill, John Stuart 121, 122, 287 Miller, George 81 mindas a causal mechanism 138 computational sciences of 247 computational theory of 280 philosophy of 186, 255 place of language in 69–74 representational theory of 162, 188 science of 138–151, 212, 288 theory of 14 Minimalist Program 24, 83, 84, 233, 235–236, 237, 245, 246, 264and adaptationism 172 aim of 42, 199 simplicity and 80, 243, 285 modes of presentation (MOPs) 187, 190, 217, 219, 275roles of 218 morality 99, 100, 109, 287character of 110 conflicting systems 114 generation of action or judgment 110 moral truisms 101, 102 theories of 110, 135 trolley problems 109 and universalization 113–117 Moravcsik, Julius 164 morphemes 81, 149 morphology 52, 54, 195distributed 27 and syntax 200 Morris, Charles 250 Move 108 mutations 14, 43, 170, 171survival of 51, 53 mysterianism 97 Nagel, Thomas 98 Narita, Hiroki 57 nativism 187, 217, 283 natural numbers 204 natural sciences 18, 38 natural selection 58, 76, 104, 143, 157 Navajo language 277 neural networks 225 neurophysiology 74 Newton, Isaac 66, 67, 72, 88, 127, 134alchemy 67 nominalism 87, 91 non-violence 114 Norman Conquest 84 objective existence 169 optimism 118–123, 288 parameters 39–45, 54, 239–242, 277, 282, 283and acquisition of language 241 choice of 45, 83 developmental constraints in 243 functional categories 240 head-final 55, 240 headedness macroparameter 241, 276 linearization parameter 55 macroparameters 55 microparameters 55, 84, 241 polysynthesis 55 and simplicity 80 Peck, James 288 Peirce, Charles Sanders 96, 132, 184, 250abduction 168, 183, 246, 248 truth 133, 136 perfection 50–58, 172, 175, 263–264, 279 person, concept of 125, 126, 271, 284‘forensic' notion of 125 persuasion 114, 116 Pesetsky, David 30 Petitto, Laura-Ann 48, 78 phenomenalism 211 philosophers 129–131, 282, 283contribution of 129 contribution to science 129 philosophy 181accounts of visual sensations 255–257 of language 35, 273 of mind 186, 255 problems in 286 and psychology 140 phonemes 81 phonetic/phonological interfaces 161, 194, 253, 278 phonology 28, 40, 52, 54, 57, 109, 208 physicalism 187 physics 19, 65, 106, 144and chemistry 65 folk physics 72 theoretical 18, 65, 73, 100 Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo 140, 246, 279 Pietroski, Paulconcepts 47, 199, 200, 209 semantics 198, 211, 223, 229, 254 Pinker, Steven 166, 170, 172, 176 Pirahã language 30 Plato 115 Plato's Problem 23, 195, 236, 244, 246, 266 Poincaré, Henri 65 politics 116, 119, 145, 146, 152 poverty of the stimulus observations 5, 23, 40, 177, 200, 227, 233, 262 power 120 pragmatic information 30 pragmatics 36, 130, 250–254, 289definition of 250 and reference 253 principles and parameters approach to linguistic theory 24, 53, 235, 236, 240, 245, 276language acquisition 60, 82, 83, 149 and simplicity 246 progress 118, 145, 183 projection problem 83, 89 prosody 37 psychic continuity 26, 205, 207, 271 psychology 219of belief and desire 138, 141 comparative 21 evolutionary 103–107, 111 folk psychology 72, 141 and philosophy 140 rationalistic 255 scientific 140 psychology, comparative 21 public intellectuals 122 Pustejovsky, James 164, 195 Putnam, Hilary 95, 126, 138 Quine, W. V. O. 32, 68, 89, 153, 215, 273, 288 rationalism 5, 178, 181, 260, 283 rationality 114, 140, 142, 178, 180, 181, 265scientific 105, 123 Rawls, John 129 realism 209, 211 reality, psychological 73 recursion 51, 62, 64, 77, 167, 176, 179, 204, 267See also Merge reference 28, 29, 34, 160, 215, 220, 250Chomsky's views 188, 253, 268, 269–270, 273 and concepts 206, 219 and truth 191, 207, 230, 251 Reinhart, Tanya 79 relation R 207 relativism 121 religious fanaticism 123 representation 31–32, 160, 162, 187, 257, 259discourse representation theory 207 internal 32 phonetic 32 Republican Party 119, 140 responsibility to protect 287 Rey, Georges 32, 273 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 142 Russell, Bertrand 65, 134 Salazar-Ciudad, J. 279 Schlegel, A.W. 63 science 18, 38, 75, 124–128, 165, 183, 211, 290achievements of 74, 183, 184 best explanation in 96 capacity to do 19, 72, 90, 128, 133, 134, 246 Chomsky's views on 183–185 cognitive faculties 127 concepts in 184 concepts of 279 data-orientated character of 65–68 evidence for theories of 66 experimental method 147 formal functions in 166–169 formal theories in 18–19, 289 goal of 88, 183 ‘great leap forward' 72 history of 108 innovation in 74 limits of 105, 106 Machian tradition in 65 methodology of 243 of the mind 280 problems in 65–68 rationality in 116, 123 regulative ideal of 90 and simplicity 88, 246, 285 social implications of 98 syntax of 72 theories in 73, 167 and truth 184 second factor considerations 148, 277 Sellars, Wilfrid 153, 179, 220, 284behaviorism 180, 222, 284 concepts 279, 284 linguistic practices 223, 224, 239 meaning 220 mind 186, 283 semantic features 164, 211, 228, 253lexical 193 science of 190 semantic information 29, 189 semantic interface (SEM) 54, 189, 191, 194, 255, 258, 259, 270, 272, 278features at 161, 257 information provided at 29, 161, 260, 270, 285 production of concepts at 278 status and role of the information provided at 270 and syntax 40, 79 semantics 35, 36, 160, 193, 206–229, 250–254, 287Chomsky's views on 206 definition of 250 dynamic 207 externalist 208, 212, 215, 220–231 Fregean 216 functionist theory 229 internalist 208, 212, 227, 270 mathematical 251, 252 mental models 207 science of 210 as the study of signs 251 and syntax 207 theoretical aim of 208 senses 187, 215, 251 sensory experience 255–257 adverbial account of 256, 260 configuration by the mind 258 sensory-motor systems 14, 42, 48, 51, 78, 203adaptations of 77 and parameters 54 ship of Theseus 125, 271, 288 simple recurrent networks, Elman 283 simplicity 59–64, 86, 89, 243–246, 265, 281in Chomsky's work 80–85 different notions of 87 internal 80, 82, 285 internal notion of 87 in the language faculty 61 theoretical 80 Skinner, B.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

However, the Marine Corps demanded a three-year commitment, and so he decided to enlist in the army after graduating. ROTC “summer camp” was in Seattle. Brand planned to attend with Jeff Fadiman, a classmate and friend who also intended to join the army. Fadiman, who was a nephew of Clifton Fadiman, the public intellectual and early television personality, was a couple of years older than Brand, but the two became close friends and drinking buddies. Fadiman was a larger-than-life figure who had spent several years abroad. Although he was an anti-Soviet, unlike Brand he considered himself a leftist. Like Brand he was thinking about becoming a writer.

…

In getting away from the Catalog, Brand would travel to the continent’s eastern extreme, almost four thousand miles away from the San Francisco Peninsula, to Nova Scotia, Canada. Getting to Canada had been relatively easy: head east and then north. Other challenges he was facing were more complicated. He was casting about for what to do with his life. Brand fantasized that perhaps he could reconstitute himself as a “private statesman” or public intellectual like Buckminster Fuller, Ralph Nader, or David Brower. But how? Robert Frank had been Brand’s guide for understanding where photography was heading. Earlier, Frank had told him that he had stopped being a photographer because “I noticed that when I made an exposure my eyes closed.” He confided in Brand that he believed that photography was stopping him from seeing the world.

…

* * * In December of 2018, Brand paused to rest at a switchback near the end of a steep trail just a quarter of a mile short of a vertical cliff face on the side of a six-thousand-foot-high mountain in southern Texas. He showed few of the physical limitations of someone his age. Intellectually and physically active, he remained a public intellectual engaged in crusades that in some cases stretched back throughout much of his life. As he paused on the path, leaning forward hand on knee, he was exhausted from a three-hour hike that would end just ahead at a tunnel that looked like the entrance to some historical mining operation. The opening in the rock face instead leads to the clock of the Long Now, housed in a five-hundred-foot-tall cylindrical space hollowed out inside the mountain thanks to the largesse of the Long Now Foundation’s largest benefactor, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people.

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 class reflects Karl Polanyi’s notion that many people act not primarily to protect their money but “to safeguard” their “social assets” and their status. But the Clerisy still help to confirm the position of the new Oligarchs, much as the bishops and parish priests did for the rulers of medieval Europe, or as the public intellectuals, university dons, and Anglican worthies of early nineteenth-century Britain justified the ruling classes of their day. The attempts by the Clerisy to distill today’s secular “truths” often appear to restrict discussion on the matters they address, such as gay marriage, climate change, and race and gender issues.

…

Rather than the unique bearers of celestial order, the Protestant clergy served, as one historian noted, “as a group of professional men not unlike lawyers and doctors.” But like their medieval counterparts, Coleridge’s more broadly based clerisy also played an important social role; in this case, they helped defend and justify, but at times also challenged, the emerging capitalist order.16 In the Victorian era, public intellectuals, university dons, and Anglican worthies not only espoused ideals supportive of the values of emergent capitalism, but they also provided theological support for colonialism and even in some cases the expansion of slavery. The late nineteenth-century clergymen Josiah Strong, for example, embraced what he described as “a race of unequaled energy”—that is, the white Anglo-Saxon—to conquer lesser races and bring with them the blessings of Christianity.17 Yet as the vestiges of the feudal order collapsed, new, more secularly derived ideas emerged to take the place of the divinely based ones.

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

This neoreactionary hero was everything writers like Moldbug wanted in a king—wealthy, cunning, ruthless, conservative, white, and nerdy. He was the PayPal founder, Facebook board member, major shareholder in a CIA-funded company, Donald Trump delegate, distinguished Stanford alumnus, venture capitalist, and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Here was a rich, powerful man, regarded by many as a public intellectual, who, three years before White House adviser Steve Bannon declared war on “the administrative state,” was willing to say, regarding the “monolithic monstrosity” of government, that “breaking it down is probably an improvement.” Tech’s most dangerous billionaire was born in Germany to conservative Christian evangelicals.

…

Yarvin booster Patri Friedman led an organization called the Seasteading Institute, which was also funded by Thiel, with the outlandish goal of building privately owned countries on large offshore platforms. Fortune magazine in 2014 described Thiel, the aggrieved chess club president and Tolkien obsessive, as “perhaps America’s leading public intellectual.” His admirers were willing to overlook certain quirks, such as his claim that American democracy deteriorated as a result of women’s suffrage and his reported interest in a procedure called parabiosis that involved receiving transfusions of young people’s blood for the purpose of hopefully extending his own lifespan.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

We know that innovations that involve users and developers from the outset are far more likely to succeed than those that do not. Many other approaches to sharing knowledge for medical development are emerging. Chinese research is leading the way, making available genetic data on rice, cotton and basic crops vital for subsistence farming (as well as spawning a growing biotech private sector). The Public Intellectual Property Research for Agriculture initiative, launched by a group of 14 US universities, pools their patents and makes their research freely available to the developing world. A new generation of public-private partnerships is taking shape in medicine, bringing together social entrepreneurs, scientists and foundations to develop medicines for the poor that otherwise would have been left on the shelf.

…

WikiHistory counter.li.org/ english.ohmynews.com/ www.fark.com www.ige.com www.plastic.com portal.eatonweb.com www.slashdot.org www.technorati.com/about www.worldofwarcraft.com INDEX 42 Entertainment 10, 11 A ABC 173 academia, academics 6, 27, 48, 59 Acquisti, Alessandro 210 Adam, James 95 adaptation 109, 110, 121 advertising 104, 105, 129, 173, 180, 219 Aegwynn US Alliance server 99 Afghanistan 237 Africa broadband connections 189 mobile phones 185, 207 science 196 use of Wikipedia 18 Aids 193, 206, 237 al-Qaeda 237 Alka-Seltzer 105 Allen, Paul 46 Altair BASIC 46 Amadeu, Sérgio 202 amateurism 105 Amazon 86 America Speaks 184 American Chemical Society 159 anarchy cultural 5 Wikipedia 16 Anderson, Chris: The Long Tail 216 Apache program 68 Apple 42, 103, 104, 135, 182 iPhone 134 iPods 46 Arendt, Hannah 174, 176 Argentina 203 Arrayo, Gloria 186 Arseblog 29, 30 Arsenal Football Club 29, 30 Arsenal.com 29 arXiv 160 Asia access to the web 5, 190 attitude to open-source 203 and democracy 189 mobile phones 166, 185 and open-source design communities 166–7 Ask a Ninja 57, 219 assembly line 93, 130 assets 224 astronomy 155, 162–3 authority 110, 115, 233 authorship and folk culture 57, 58 and mapping of the human genome 62 Azerbaijan 190 B bacteria, custom-made 164 Baker, Steve 148 Banco do Brazil 201 Bangladesh 205–6 banking 115, 205–6 Barber, Benjamin: Strong Democracy 174 Barbie, Klaus 17 Barbie dolls 17 Barefoot College 205 barefoot thinking 205–6 Barthes, Roland 45 Batchelor, Charles 95 Bath University 137 BBC 4, 17, 127, 142 news website 15 beach, public 49, 50, 51 Beach, The (think-tank) xi Bebo 34, 85, 86 Bedell, Geraldine x, xii–xiii Beekeepers 11, 15 Benkler, Yochai 174 The Wealth of Networks 194 Berger, Jorn 33 Bermuda principles 160 Billimoria, Jeroo 206 BioBrick Foundation 164 biology 163 open-source 165 synthetic 164–5 BioMedCentral 159 biotechnology 154, 163–4, 196–7, 199 black fever (visceral leishmaniasis) 200 Blackburn Rovers Football Club 29 Blades, Joan 188 Blizzard Entertainment 100 Bloc 8406 191 Blogger.com 33 blogs, blogging 1, 3, 20, 29–35, 57, 59, 74, 75, 78, 86, 115, 159, 170, 171, 176, 179, 181–2, 183, 191, 192, 214, 219, 229 BMW 140 Bohr, Neils 93 bookshops 2 Boulton, Matthew 54–5 Bowyer, Adrian 139, 140, 232 Boyd, Danah 213, 214 Bradley, Bill 180 Brand, Stewart 39–40, 43, 63 brands 104, 109 Brazil 201–2 Brenner, Sydney 62–5, 70, 77, 118, 231 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking) 163 Brindley, Lynne 141, 142, 144–5 British Library, London 141, 142, 144, 145 British Medical Journal 159 British National Party 169 Brooks, Fred 77–8 Brooks Hall, San Francisco 38 BT 112 bugs, software 70, 72, 165 bulletin boards 34, 40, 68, 77 Burma 190, 191 Bush, President George W. 18, 33–4, 180, 183 business services 130, 132, 166 C C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) 62–5 Cambia 197 Cambridge University Press 159 camcorders 11 Campbell, Anne 176 Cancer Genome Atlas 160 capital 224 capitalism 224 commune 121, 125 managerial 24 modern 91, 121 social dimension of 90 Carlson, Rob 164 Carnegie Mellon University 210 cars manufacture 135–6 sharing 153 CBS 173 Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT 139 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) 30–31, 159 Chan, Timothy 106, 107 chat rooms 165 Chavez, President Hugo 203 Cheney, Dick 180 Chevrolet 105 Chicago: Full Circle council project 184 China based on privileged access to information 236 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 hackers 234 Internet connection 190, 204 makes available genetic data 199 motor-cycle production 136–7 online games market 106 open-access scientific data 159–60 open-source designs 141 politics 171, 192 power struggle in 235 spending on R & D 96, 159 web censorship 190–91 Chinese Communist Party 171, 235 Chongquing, China 136 Cisco 190 Citibank 207 Citizendium 14 climate change 170, 239 Clinton, Bill 174, 188 Clinton, Senator Hillary 181, 182, 183 CNN 15 co-operatives 121, 122, 123, 188 co-ordination 109, 110–11 coffee houses, London 95 Coke 109–10, 239 Cold War 169, 235 Coles, Polly xiii collaboration 9, 22, 31, 32, 36, 67, 79–80, 81, 82 collaborative innovation 65, 70, 75 and commerce 227 computer game 99, 100 Cornish tin-mining 55 and healthcare 150 and the library of the future 145 new technologies for 227–8 open 126, 128 peer 239 public services 145, 146, 152, 153 scientific 154, 155–6 We-Think 21, 23, 24, 146 Collis, Charles 134 Columbia University 212 commerce 25, 38, 48, 52, 57, 98, 227 commons 49, 50, 51–3, 79, 80, 124, 191, 226 communes 39–40, 46, 90, 121, 122, 128 communication(s) 130, 168, 174, 206, 239 mobile 186 Communism, collapse of 6 communities collaborative 117 and commerce 48 and commons 52 conversational 63 Cornish tin-mining 55 creative 70, 95 diverse 79–80 egalitarian 27, 48, 59, 63, 64 hacker 232 healthcare 151, 152 independence of 23 of innovation 54 libertarian, voluntaristic 45 Linux 65, 227 and loss of market for local newspapers 3 meritocratic 63 open-source 45, 68, 75, 80, 83, 95–6, 102, 109, 110, 111 open-source design 166–7 of scientists 53, 228 self-governing 59, 79, 80, 97, 104, 232 sharing and developing ideas 25 web 21, 23 worm-genome researchers 62–5 community councils 77, 80, 82 Community Memory project 42–3 companies computer-games 128 employee-owned 121, 122 shareholder-owned 122, 123, 125 see also corporations; organisations computer games 60, 127, 218 children and 147 created by groups on the web 7, 23, 87 modularity 78 multi-player 7, 204 success of World of Warcraft 98–9 tools for creating content 74 and We-Think 23 computer-aided design 134 computers democratising how information is accessed 139 distrust of 39 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 laptop 5, 36, 82, 155 mini- 135 personal 39, 46, 203 punch-cards 38 and science 154, 155 viruses 3, 4 connect 67, 75–9 Connectiva 201 consumer spending 131 consumers 98–108 consumer innovators 101–3 consumption constraints 25–6 engaging 89 fans 103–4 freedom 218 and innovation risk 100–101 participant 98–108 urban 124 contribute 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74–5 conversation 53, 54, 63, 69, 77, 93, 95, 113, 118, 174 Copernicus, Nicolaus 162 copyright 124, 157, 196 core 66, 67, 68–9, 70 Cornell University 233 ‘Cornish’ engines 55–6, 136, 229 Cornish tin-mining industry 54–6, 63, 125, 136 corporations centralisation of power 110 closed 128 and collaborative approaches to work 109 the cost of corporate efficiency 89–90 difficulty in making money from the web 7 hierarchies 88, 110 industrial-era 88 leadership 115, 117–19 loss of stability 122 restructuring and downsizing 88–9 see also companies; organisations counter-culture (1960s) 6, 27, 39, 45, 46, 59 Counts, David 183 Craigslist 3, 40, 118, 128, 218 Creative Commons 124 creative sector 129–30 creativity 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 67, 82–3 collaborative 7, 20, 58, 86, 154 collective 39, 57–8 consumers 89 corporate 91–2 emergence of 93, 96 enabled by the web 1–2, 3, 5, 19, 26, 218–21, 222, 227 freedom to create 218–21 and interaction 119 and open innovation 93 origin of 112–13 social 5, 7, 58, 59, 82, 83, 86 tools for 218, 219 Crick, Francis 52, 62, 76 crime 153, 169, 183 criminality 1, 3 crowds 23, 61, 70, 72, 77 Crowdspirit 134 cultural élite 2 cultural sector 129–30 culture academic 38 anti-industrial 27, 28 basis of 4 collaborative 135 consumerist 172 corrosion of 4 cultural anarchy 5 folk 6, 27, 56–9, 220, 226 hippie 38 individual participation 6 political 171 popular 102 post-industrial 27, 28 pre-industrial 27, 28 We-Think 28, 59, 62, 169, 194, 230, 232–3, 238 Web 2.0 45 web-inflected 27 Western 239 wiki 14 work 114 YouTube cultural revolution 3 Cunningham, Ward 35–6 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Cyworld 34, 85, 86 D Dali, Salvador 105 Darby, Newman 102 Darpa 164 David, Paul 53 de Soto, Hernando 224–5 The Mystery of Capital 224 de Vellis, Phil 182 Dean, Howard 176–7, 178, 180, 185 Dean Corps 177 Debian 66 Debord, Guy 45, 46 decentralisation 7, 13, 39, 46, 59, 78, 226, 232 decision-making 78, 82, 84, 115, 173, 174 del.i.cious 86 democracy 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 16, 24, 170–74, 175, 176–92 basis of 174 conversational democracy at a national level 184 ‘craftsmen of democracy’ 174 Dean campaign 178 democratic advances 184 depends on public sovereignty 172 formal 195 geek 65 Homebrew 176 public debate 170, 171 and We-Think 170, 221, 239 Department for International Development (DFID) 207 Descartes, René 19–20 design 166 modular 136–7 open-source 133–5, 140, 141, 162–3, 166–7 developing world Fab Labs in 166 government attitudes to the Internet 190 impact of the web on 166 mobile phones 185–6 and open-access publishing 166 and open-source design communities 166–7 and open-source software 200–203 research and development 196 and We-Think’s style of organisation 204 diabetes 150 Digg 33 discussion forums 77 diversity 9, 23, 72, 76, 77, 79–80, 112, 121 division of labour 111 DNA description of the double helix (Watson and Crick) 52, 62, 76 DNA-sequencing 164–5 Dobson, John 102, 162–3 Doritos 105 dot.com boom 106 Dupral 68 Dyson (household-goods company) 134 Dyson, Freeman 163, 164 E E-Lagda.com 186 Eaton, Brigitte 33 Eatonweb 33 eBay 40, 44, 102, 128, 152, 165, 216–18, 221, 229, 235 Ebola virus 165 Eccles, Nigel xi economies of scale 137 economy digital 124, 131, 216 gift 91, 226 global 192 global knowledge 239 of ideas 6 individual participation 6 industrial 122 market 91, 221 a mass innovation economy 7 networked 227 of things 6 UK 129, 130 and We-Think 129 Edison, Thomas 72, 93, 95 EditMe 36 education 130, 146–50, 167, 183, 194, 239 among the poorest people in the world 2, 193 civic 174 a more convivial system 44 Edwards, John 181 efficiency 109, 110 Einstein, Albert: theory of relativity 52 elderly, care of 170 Electronic Arts 105, 106, 128, 177 Electronic Frontier Foundation 40 electronics 93, 135 Eli Lilly (drugs company) 77 Ellis, Mark: The Coffee House: a social history 95 enclosures 124 Encyclopaedia Britannica, The 15–18, 126 encyclopaedias 1, 4, 7, 12–19, 21, 23, 36, 53, 60, 61, 79, 161, 231 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) 161, 226 Endy, Drew 164, 165 energy 166, 232, 238 Engelbart, Doug 38–9, 59 engineering 133, 166 Environmental Protection Agency 152 epic poems 58, 60 equality 2, 24, 192–7, 198, 199–208 eScholarship repository, University of California 160 Estonia 184, 234 Estrada, President Joseph 186 ETA (Basque terrorist group) 187 European Union (EU) 130 Evans, Lilly x Evolt 68, 108 F Fab Labs 139, 166, 232 fabricators 139 Facebook 2, 34–5, 53, 142, 152, 191, 193, 210 factories 7, 8, 24 families, and education 147 Fanton, Jonathan 161 Fark 33 Feinstein, Diane 176 Felsenstein, Lee 42, 43, 44 fertilisers 123 Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University 161 file-sharing 51, 58, 135, 144, 233 film 2, 3, 4, 47, 86, 129, 216, 218, 220–21 film industry 56 filters, collaborative 36, 86 financial services 130, 132 Financial Times 118 First International Computer (FIC), Inc. 136, 141 flash mobbing 10, 11 Flickr 34, 85, 86, 210, 218–19 Food and Drug Administration (US) 92 Ford, Henry 24, 93, 96 Fortune 500 company list 122 Frank, Ze (Hosea Jan Frank) 57, 219 freedom 1, 2, 6, 24, 208, 209, 210–21, 226 French, Gordon 41, 42 friendly societies 188 Friends Reunited 34 friendship 5, 233 combinatorial 95 Friendster 34, 35 fundamentalists 232 G Gaia Online 35 Galileo Galilei 154 gambling 169 GarageBand software 57, 135, 148 Gates, Bill 46, 47, 51, 227 Gates Foundation 160 geeks 27, 29–36, 37, 38, 48, 59, 65, 179 gene-sequencing machines, automated 64 genetic engineering 164, 196–7, 235 Georgia: ’colour revolution’ 187 Gershenfeld, Neil 139–40, 166, 232 GetFrank 108 Ghana, Fab Lab in 139 Gil, Gilberto 202 Gjertsen, Lasse 56, 218 Gland Pharma 200 global warming 238 globalisation 202, 228, 239 Gloriad 155 GM 135 Goa School Computers Project 200–201 Goffman, Erving 103–4 Goldcorp Inc. 132–3, 153 Golden Toad 40 GoLoco scheme 153 Google x, 1, 29, 32, 33, 47, 66, 97, 104, 113–14, 128, 141, 142, 144, 212 Google Earth 161 Gore, Al 64 governments in developing countries 190 difficulty in controlling the web 7 GPS systems 11 Grameen Bank 205–6, 208 ‘grey’ sciences 163 grid computing 155 Gross, Ralph 210 group-think 23, 210–11 groups 230–31 of clever people with the same outlook and skills 72 decision-making 78 diverse 72, 80, 231 and tools 76–7 Guthrie, Woody 58 H Habermas, Jurgen 174 hackers 48, 74, 104, 140, 232, 234 Hale, Victoria 199 Halo 2 science fiction computer game 8 Hamilton, Alexander 17–18 Hampton, Keith 183–4 Hanson, Matt xi health 130, 132, 146, 150–52, 167, 183, 239 Heisenberg, Werner 93 Henry, Thierry 29 Hewlett Packard 47 hierarchies 88, 110, 115 hippies 27, 48, 59, 61 HIV 193 Homebrew Computer Club 42, 46–7, 51, 227 Homebrew Mobile Phone Club 136 Homer Iliad 58 Odyssey 58 Homer-Dixon, Thomas: The Upside of Down 238–9 Hubble, Edwin 162 Human Genome Project 62, 64, 78, 155, 160, 161, 226 human rights 206 Hurricane Katrina 184 Hyde, Lewis: The Gift 226 hypertext 35, 39 I I Love Bees game 8, 10–12, 15–16, 19, 20, 69, 231 IBM 47, 66, 97 System/360 computer 77 idea-sharing 37, 94, 237, 239 as the biggest change the web will bring about 6 with colleagues 27 and consumer innovators 103 dual character of 226 gamers 106 Laboratory of Molecular Biology 63 through websites and bulletin boards 68 tools 222 We-Think-style approach to 97 and the web’s underlying culture 7 ideas combining 77 and creative thinking 87 from creative conversations 93, 95 gifts of 226 growth of 222, 239 and the new breed of leaders 117–18 ratifying 84 separating good from bad 84, 86 testing 74 the web’s growing domination 1 identity sense of 229 thieves 213–14 Illich, Ivan 43–5, 48 Deschooling Society 43, 44, 150 Disabling Professions 43 The Limits to Medicine 43, 152 Tools for Conviviality 44 independence 9, 72, 231 India Barefoot College 205 creative and cultural sectors 129–30 Fab Lab in 139 Internet connection 190, 204 mobile phones 207 and One World Health 200 spending on R & D 96 telephone service for street children 206 individuality 210, 211, 215, 216, 233 industrialisation 48, 150, 188 information barriers falling fast 2 computers democratise how it is accessed 139 effect of We-Think 129 large quantities on the web 31–2 libraries 141, 142, 143, 145 looking for 8 privileged access to 236 sharing 94, 136 the web’s growing domination 1 Wikipedia 19 Innocentive 77 innovation 5, 6, 91–3, 94, 95–8, 109 among the poorest people in the world 2 biological 194 collaborative 65, 70, 75, 90, 119, 146, 195 collective 170, 238 and competition/co-operation mix 137 Cornish mine engines 54–6 corporate 89, 109, 110 and creative conversations 93, 95 creative interaction with customers 113 cumulative 125, 238 decentralised 78 and distributed testing 74 and diverse thinking 79 and education 147 independent but interconnected 78 and interaction 119 and Linux 66 local 139 a mass innovation economy 7 medical 194 open 93, 96–7, 125, 195 in open-source communities 95–6 and patents 124 pipeline model 92, 93, 97 R & D 92, 96 risks of 100–101 social 170, 238 successful 69 user-driven 101 and We-Think 89, 93, 95, 125, 126 the web 2, 5, 7, 225 Institute for One World Health 199–200 Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) 179 Institute of Fiscal Studies 131 institutions convivial 44 industrial-era 234 and knowledge 103 and professionals 3, 5 public 142, 145 Instructables site 134 Intel 97 intellectual property 75, 122, 124, 125, 234 law 124–5 intelligence, collective bloggers 33 getting the mix right 23 Google’s search system 32 I Love Bees and Wikipedia examples 8, 10–19 milked by Google 47 the need to collaborate 32 self-organisation of 8 and social-networking sites 35 the web’s potential 3, 5 International Polar Year (IPY) 156, 226 Internet broadband connection 178, 189, 192 combined with personal computers (mid-1990s) 39 cyber cafés 107, 190, 192, 201, 204 Dean campaign 177 in developing countries 190 draws young people into politics 179, 180 an early demonstration (1968) 38 and Linux 66 news source 178–9 open-source software 68 openness 233 and political funding 180 pro-am astronomers 163 used by groups with a grievance 168 in Vietnam 189–90, 191 investment 119, 121, 133, 135 Iran 190, 191 Iraq war 18, 134, 191 Israel 18 Ito, Joi 99 J Japan politics 171 technology 171 JBoss 68 Jefferson, Richard 197, 199 Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, Cheshire 162 JotSpot 36 journalism 3, 74, 115, 170–71 Junker, Margrethe 206 K Kampala, Uganda 206 Kazaa music file-sharing system 144 Keen, Andrew 208 The Cult of the Amateur 208 Kelly, Kevin 211 Kennedy, John F. 176 Kenya 207 Kepler, Johannes 162 Kerry, John 180 Khun, Thomas 69 knowledge access to 194, 196 agricultural 194 barriers falling fast 2 collaborative approach to 14, 69 encyclopaedia 79 expanding 94 gifts of 226 individual donation of 25 and institutions 103 and networking 193 and pro-ams 103 professional, authoritative sources of 222 sharing 27, 44, 63, 70, 199 spread by the web 2, 3 Wikipedia 16, 18, 19, 195 Korean War 203 Kotecki, James (’EmergencyCheese’) 182 Kraus, Joe 36 Kravitz, Ben 13 Kuresi, John 95 Kyrgyzstan: ’colour revolution’ 187 L Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge 62–3, 77 labour movement 188 language 52–3 Lanier, Jaron 16, 210–11, 213 laptop computers 5, 36, 82, 155 lateral thinking 113 leadership 89, 115, 116, 117–19 Lean, Joel 55 Lean’s Engine Reporter 55, 63, 77 Lee, Tim Berners 30–31 Lego: Mindstorms products 97, 104, 140 Lewandowska, Marysia 220, 221 libraries 2, 141–2, 143, 144–5, 227 life-insurance industry (US) 123 limited liability 121 Linked.In 35 Linux 65–6, 68, 70, 74, 80, 85, 86, 97, 98, 126, 127, 128, 136, 201, 203, 227 Lipson Community College, Plymouth 148 literacy 194 media 236 Lloyd, Edward 95 SMS messaging (texting)"/>London coffee houses 95 terrorist bombings (July 2005) 17 Lott, Trent 181–2 Lula da Silva, President Luiz Inacio 201 M M-PESA 207, 208 MacArthur Foundation 161 McCain, John 180 MacDonald’s 239 McGonigal, Jane 11, 69 McHenry, Robert 17 McKewan, Rob 132–3, 153 McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding the Media 45 Madrid bombings (March 2004) 186–7 Make magazine 165 management authoritative style of 117 and creative conversation 118 hierarchies 110 manufacturing 130, 132, 133–7, 138, 139–41, 166, 232 niche 139 Marcuse, Herbert 43 Marin 101 Mark, Paul xi market research 101 market(s) 77, 90, 93, 102, 123, 216, 226–7 Marsburg virus 165 Marx, Karl 224 mass production 7, 8, 24, 56, 96, 227, 232, 238 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 139, 164, 233 Matsushita 135 media 129, 130, 156, 172, 173, 182, 211 literacy 236 Meetup 179, 185 Menlo Park laboratory, New Jersey 95 Merholz, Peter 33 meritocracy 16, 63 Microsoft 46, 47, 51, 56, 75, 109–10, 126, 127, 144, 202, 203, 204, 239 Office 201 Windows 200 Windows XP 66 Middle East 170, 189, 190, 192 Milovich, Dimitry 102 ‘minihompy’ (mini homepage) 204 Minnesota Mining and Materials 121 mobile phones 5 in Africa 185, 207 in Asia 166, 185 camera phones 74, 115, 210 children and 147 in developing-world markets 207–8 with digital cameras 36 flash mobs 10 I Love Bees 11 in India 207 open-source 136, 203 politics 185–9 SMS messaging (texting) 101–2, 185, 187, 214, 215 mobs 23, 61 flash 10, 11 modularity 77, 84 Moore, Fred 41–2, 43, 46, 47, 59, 227 More, Thomas: Utopia 208 Morris, Dick 174 Morris, Robert Tappan 233 Mosaic 33 motivation 109–12, 148 Mount Wilson Observatory, California 162 mountain bikes 101 MoveOn 188–9 Mowbray, Miranda xi music 1, 3, 4, 47, 51, 52, 57, 102, 135, 144, 218, 219, 221 publishing 130 social networking test 212–13 mutual societies 90, 121 MySpace 34, 44, 57, 85, 86, 152, 187, 193, 214, 219 MySQL 68 N National Football League (US) 105 National Health Service (NHS) 150, 151 National Public Radio (NPR) 188 Natural History Museum, London 161 Nature magazine 17 NBC 173 neo-Nazis 168 Netflix 216, 218 Netherlands 238 networking by geeks 27 post-industrial networks 27 social 2–7, 20, 23, 34–5, 36, 53, 57, 86, 95, 147, 149, 153, 159, 171, 183–4, 187, 193, 208, 210, 212, 213–15, 230, 233 New Economy 40 New Orleans 184 New York Magazine 214 New York Review of Books 164 New York Stock Exchange 95 New York Times 15, 182, 191 New Yorker magazine 149 Newmark, Craig 118 news services 60, 61, 171, 173, 178–9 newspapers 2, 3, 30, 32, 34, 171, 172, 173 Newton, Sir Isaac 25, 154 niche markets 216 Nixon, Richard 176 NLS (Online System) 39 Nokia 97, 104, 119, 140 non-profits 123 Nooteboom, Bart 74 Noronha, Alwyn 200–201 Norris, Pippa 189 North Africa, and democracy 189 Nosamo 35, 186 Noyes, Dorothy 58 Nupedia 13, 14 Nussbaum, Emily 214–15 O Obama, Barack 181, 191 Ofcom (Office of Communications) 31 OhmyNews 34, 87, 204, 231 oil companies 115 Oldenburg, Henry 25, 53–4, 156 Ollila, Jorma 119 Online System (NLS) 39 Open Architecture Network (OAN) 133–4 Open Net Initiative 190 Open Office programme 201 Open Prosthetics 134 Open Source Foundation 97 OpenMoko project 136 OpenWiki 36 O’Reilly, Tim 31 organisation commons as a system of organisation 51 pre-industrial ideas of 27, 48 social 20, 64, 165 We-Think’s organisational recipe 21 collaboration 21, 23 participation 21, 23 recognition 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 196 organisations civic 189 open/collaborative vs. closed/hierarchical models 89, 126, 127, 128 public 152 successful 228 see also companies; corporations Orwell, George: 1984 182 Ostrom, Elinor 51–2, 80 ownership 6, 119, 120, 121–6, 127, 128, 225 Oxford University 234 P paedophiles 3, 168, 213–14 Page, Scott xi, 72 Pakistan 237 Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco 40 parallel universes 7 participation 23, 216, 223, 230, 232 consumers 98, 100 public services 145, 146, 150, 152, 153 a We-Think ingredient 21, 24 Partido Populaire (PP) (Spain) 187 patents 55, 56, 92, 97, 102, 124, 154, 196, 197, 199 Paul, Ron 185 Pawson, Dave x–xi Pax, Salam 57 peasants 27, 48, 59 peer recognition 54, 106, 111, 156, 228–9 peer review 53, 54, 156, 165, 236 peer-to-peer activity 53–4, 135, 148, 151 People’s Computer Company 41 People’s Democratic Party (Vietnam) 191 performance art/artists 2, 10 performance management 110 Perl 68 Peruvian Congress 202 Pew Internet & American Life 31, 179 pharmaceutical industry 92–3, 195–6, 197, 199, 200 Phelps, Edmund 114–15, 220 Philippines: mobile phones 185–6 Philips, Weston 105 photographs, sharing of 34, 75, 86, 218–19 Pitas.com 33 Plastic 33 Playahead 35 podcasts 142 Poland 220–21 polar research 156 politics bloggers able to act as public watchdog 181–2, 183 decline in political engagement 171–2 democratic 173 donations 179 funding 180–81 and journalism 170–71 and mobile phones 185–9 online 183 the online political class 179 and online social networks 35, 86 political advocates of the web 173–4 racist groups on the web 169 and television 173, 183 ultra-local 183, 184 US presidential elections 173, 179 videos 182 the web enters mainstream politics 176 young people drawn into politics by the Internet 179 Popper, Karl 155 Popular Science magazine 102 pornography 169, 214 Post-it notes 121 Potter, Seb 108–9 Powell, Debbie ix power and networking 193 technological 236 of the We-Think culture 230 of the web 24–5, 185, 233 PowerPoint presentations 140, 142, 219 privacy 210, 211 private property 224, 225 Procter and Gamble (P & G) 96–7, 98 productivity 112, 119, 121, 151, 227, 232 agricultural 124 professionals, and institutions 3, 5 property rights 224 public administration 130 Public Broadcasting Service 188 Public Intellectual Property Research for Agriculture initiative 199 Public Library of Science 159 public services 132, 141–2, 143, 144–53, 183 public spending 146 publishing 130, 166 science 156–7, 159–60 Putnam, Robert 173, 184 Python 68 Q quantum mechanics 93 ‘quick-web’ 35 R racism 169, 181–2 radio 173, 176 RapRep (Rapid Replicator) machines 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 232 Rawls, John: A Theory of Justice 194 Raymond, Eric 64 recognition 21, 223 peer 54, 106, 111, 156 record industry 56, 102 recycling 111 Red Hat 66, 227 Red Lake, Ontario 132, 133 research 166 market 101 pharmaceutical 195–6 research and development (R & D) 92, 96, 119, 196 scientific 154–7, 159–65 retailing 130, 132 Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil 201 Roh Moo-hyun, President of South Korea 35, 186 Roosevelt, Franklin 176 Roy, Bunker 205 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey 161 Royal Society 54 Philosophical Transactions 25, 156 Ryze.com 34 S Sacca, Chris 113, 114 Safaricom 207 St Louis world fair (1904) 75–6 Samsung xi, 203 Sanger, Larry 13, 14, 16 Sanger Centre, Cambridge 155 Sao Paolo, Brazil 201 SARS virus 165 Sass, Larry 139 satellite phones 11 Saudi Arabia 190 scanners 11 Schumacher, E.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

As we ­will see, neoliberals would aid in the campaign to contain demands for social and economic rights and to institutionalize a parallel global regime in which the investor and the corporation—­and not the citizen or refugee—­was the paradigmatic rights-­bearing subject. 4 A World of Rights Exchange control in time of peace should be considered an act of aggression and a violation of ­human rights in international law. —­p hilip cortney, 1949 M idway through The Road to Serfdom, the book he published in 1944 that made him famous, F. A. Hayek inserted a commentary on ­human rights. His target was specifically the expansive “Declaration of Rights” published by the author and public intellectual H. G. Wells in 1939, a list of eleven articles including the right to education, food, health care, and employment.1 Hayek did not object so much to the material provisions. His own proposal included ele­ments of a basic social safety net and even countercyclical state spending.2 As libertarians l­ater lamented, The Road to Serfdom called for “the security of a minimum income” and “a comprehensive system of social insurance.”3 What galled Hayek was Wells’s combination of the language of rights with a program of centralized economic decision making.

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One of the draf­ters of Wells’s declaration was Hayek’s friend and colleague on the Federal Union’s economists committee Barbara Wootton, whose own article followed his now-­famous 1939 article on “inter-­state federalism” in the New Commonwealth Quarterly.5 Wells published in the same journal himself.6 In the years before and during the war, Hayek participated in the broad effort of public intellectuals in the West to conceptualize what Wells called in 1940 “The New World Order” that would follow global conflict.7 When in 1947 Hayek convened a group of intellectuals in Switzerland to form the Mont Pèlerin Society and initiate the postwar neoliberal intellectual movement, he was operating in this same spirit of visionary globalism.8 Although scholars routinely note Hayek’s inclusion of a safety net in his normative national order, they fail to cast their gaze beyond—or above—­the nation.9 As we saw in Chapter 3, Hayek’s blueprint for world order at the end of The Road to Serfdom prescribed international federation as an antidote, not a complement, to the expanding welfare state.

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Concentrating on private international law would protect what I have called the xenos rights of investors without a need for multilateral inter-­state arrangements of public international law. The most vocal Euroskeptic of the 1950s was the ubiquitous Wilhelm Röpke, who enjoyed both the ear of West German economics minister (and MPS member) Ludwig Erhard and ready access to the press as a public intellectual.12 Röpke feared that the EEC would be an extension of the “bloc solution” of the Eu­ro­pean Coal and Steel Community created in 1952, protecting the continent’s products b ­ ehind a shared tariff wall, sheltered from foreign competition and managed collectively by a supranational bureaucracy.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

However, to use the currency metaphor, academics with relative celebrity now have a stronger exchange rate with mainstream celebrity than ever before. Best-selling academic authors like Richard Dawkins, Jeffrey Sachs, and Steve Levitt made the idea-driven book de rigueur reading, catalyzing a deluge of more best-selling books by academics and public intellectuals. Academics no longer shy away from mainstream media, many of them showing up on TV shows, writing opinion pieces, and hiring agents like anyone interested in becoming a celebrity might do. Two things must happen for a relative celebrity to become mainstream: Mass media needs to report on the individual and the public needs to respond with interest.

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By the mid-1970s, the “academic star system” was in place, and professors began creating what Williams terms “individual professional reputations,” and this recognition was driven initially by their research. By the mid-1980s, academics were attaining mainstream profiles in the New York Times, which had begun to devote coverage to public intellectuals in profiles and news stories. In one such story, “The Tyranny of the Yale Critics” by Colin Campbell, the newspaper profiled the Yale literary stars with full-page photographs of Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, and Jacques Derrida, the latter captured “in a glam pose,” as Williams wrote. Today, some academic stars write features for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine (Spurgin, “The Times Magazine and Academic Megastars”).

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Finally, ‘Dr Dawkins’ contribution to a new understanding of the relationship between the human genome and society is that both the gene and the meme are replicators that mutate and compete in parallel and interacting struggles for their own propagation’. The prize ceremony was followed by a brilliant acceptance speech by Richard, who never fails to deliver in his role as a public intellectual (the number one public intellectual in England, according to Prospect magazine) and spokesperson for the public understanding of science. This is not what most impressed me about Richard, however, since any professional would be expected to shine in a public forum, especially with a six-figure motivator hanging around his neck.

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy by Sudhir Venkatesh

creative destruction, East Village, gentrification, illegal immigration, public intellectual, side project, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, urban renewal, working poor

The pressure cooker of the University of Chicago taught me that I needed a high-stakes environment to motivate me. The department was going through a period of transition. In a bitter struggle between two competing visions of sociology, Herbert Gans represented the discipline’s original aim. A public intellectual who wrote for a wide audience, he carried the mantle of the great old Columbia sociologists, like Robert Merton and C. Wright Mills, who combined vivid storytelling with thoughtful explorations of great national issues. But a genuine respect for this tradition sat uneasily next to the growing belief that sociology should be a science.

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I spent as much time with White and Bearman as I could, learning as much as I could about their approach. At the same time, I knew I was hired because my research spoke to social issues like race, inequality, and the fate of our cities, subjects that fell squarely into Columbia’s legacy of encouraging the public intellectual tradition. In this regard, I had already been schooled by working with Professor William Julius Wilson in Chicago. As my graduate adviser, Wilson always insisted that the scientific method alone was incapable of swaying the opinion of policy makers or the public. You also had to write well.

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The Beats, like the Bohemians who populated Greenwich Village after World War I, also flaunted a self-indulgent hedonism that mirrored the ethic of the consumer culture. Lipton called this “the democratization of amorality.” The Beats in the 1950s aided the dissipation of the intellectual class by abandoning urban centers, where a previous generation of public intellectuals, such as Jane Jacobs or Dwight Macdonald, lived and worked. They romanticized the automobile and movement. Russell Jacoby points out in The Last Intellectuals that the Beats had a peculiarly American “devotion to the automobile, the road, and travel, which kept them and then a small army of imitators crisscrossing the continent,” as well as a populist “love of the American people.”37 The Beats not only bolstered the ethic of consumption and leisure as opposed to work, but also they “anticipated the deurbanization of America, the abandonment of the cities for smaller centers, suburbs, campus towns, and outlying areas.”38 The new ethic of the liberal class, Cowley wrote, was one that embraced “the idea of salvation by the child,” which proposed a new educational system “by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation.”

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Hillis Miller, then of Yale; Gregory Ulmer of the University of Florida; and Marxist cultural historian Frederic Jameson, typified the trend. They wrap ideas in a language so obscure, so abstract, so preoccupied with arcane theory that the uninitiated cannot understand what they write. They make no attempt to reach a wider audience or enrich public life. Compared to the last generation of genuine, independent public intellectuals—Jane Jacobs, Paul and Percival Goodman, William H. Whyte, Lewis Mumford, C. Wright Mills, and Dwight Macdonald—they have produced nothing of substance or worth. Their work has no vision, other than perhaps calling for more diverse voices in the academy. It is technical, convoluted, self-referential, and filled with so much academic jargon that it is unreadable.

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

‘We mustn’t let things get by that we know are wrong,’ it concludes, ‘we must start to raise a little hell.’ Searching the foundation’s site for articles containing the phrase ‘political correctness’ throws up 13,839 results. That’s an average of 512 posts a year, or 1.4 a day. The foundation is churning out anti-PC propaganda on a daily basis. Other organisations practically sponsored public ‘intellectuals’ into being. Dinesh D’Souza, one of the most successful far-right conservative commentators in the US, was positively incubated by them. He started his career as editor of the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s. At the time, the paper harassed an African-American faculty member and published a criticism of affirmative action that was so racist in tone that it pierced the niche academic discourse to capture nationwide attention.

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Not only did my new media colleagues almost all go to Oxford or Cambridge, they often had attended the same colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. White men of a certain class dominate the public debate. This cohort does the job of myth narration with the instinct of a state propagandist. The fixation on pedigree, the hermeticism of the opinion-forming class, has created a group of public intellectuals, from journalists to authors, that are only equipped to do one thing, uphold the status quo. What is valued is not intelligence and inquiry, but regurgitation in order to provide reassurance and comfort. The new stories that need to be told need new narrators. This is not to suggest that whiteness and maleness should disqualify a voice and render it invalid, but rather that the current crop of public voices is not made up of reliable narrators.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

The game is rigged, and the people who rigged it want it to stay that way.”6 While giving the commencement address at The King’s College in the spring of 2019, freshman U.S. senator Joshua Hawley, Republican from Missouri, told graduates that “if you don’t have family wealth, and if you don’t have a four- year degree—and that’s 70 percent of Americans. Seventy percent—the future is far less glowing. These Americans haven’t seen a real wage increase in thirty years.”7 This pessimistic view is pervasive, and it extends to commentators, public intellectuals, and business leaders. For example, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared in January 2019 that “the American Dream is dying,” and referred to “the dark age that we are living through.”8 The economist Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, recently wrote that “the American economy is failing its citizens.”9 Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, wrote a long essay posted on LinkedIn in the spring of 2019, critiquing American capitalism and offering reforms.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

Ana Kasparian, host and executive producer of The Young Turks You don’t know it yet, but this is the book you’ve been waiting for. Reading Michael Brooks’ devastating and insightful account of the IDW feels like a breath of fresh air. He meticulously and expertly challenges the shallow platitudes and certainties of a certain cohort of “public intellectuals”: by pulling away the curtain of “logic and reason” behind which these men (and yes, they are all men) hide their juvenile arguments. Yet Brooks does not just rebut and break down—he offers a humane and compassionate counterargument. He takes seriously the IDW’s vast and hungry audience and suggests that left thinkers offer them camaraderie and not just self-delusion and justification.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

But they emerged earlier in the twentieth century, the spinoff of an unplanned experiment: the massive immigration, social mobility, and diffusion of knowledge of the modern era. Most Victorian gentlemen could not have imagined that the coming century would see a nation-state forged by Jewish pioneers and soldiers, a wave of African American public intellectuals, or a software industry in Bangalore. Nor could they have anticipated that women would lead nations in wars, run huge corporations, or win Nobel Prizes in science. We now know that people of both sexes and all races are capable of attaining any station in life. This sea change included a revolution in the treatment of human nature by scientists and scholars.

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Mead painted a Gauguinesque portrait of native peoples as peaceable, egalitarian, materially satisfied, and sexually unconflicted. Her uplifting vision of who we used to be—and therefore who we can become again—was accepted by such otherwise skeptical writers as Bertrand Russell and H. L. Mencken. Ashley Montagu (also from the Boas circle), a prominent public intellectual from the 1950s until his recent death, tirelessly invoked the doctrine of the Noble Savage to justify the quest for brotherhood and peace and to refute anyone who might think such efforts were futile. In 1950, for example, he drafted a manifesto for the newly formed UNESCO that declared, “Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood, for man is born with drives toward co-operation, and unless these drives are satisfied, men and nations alike fall ill.”45 With the ashes of thirty-five million victims of World War II still warm or radioactive, a reasonable person might wonder how “biological studies” could show anything of the kind.

…

The seemingly innocuous suggestion that the categories of the mind correspond to something in reality became a contentious idea in the twentieth century because some categories—stereotypes of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—can be harmful when they are used to discriminate or oppress. The word stereotype originally referred to a kind of printing plate. Its current sense as a pejorative and inaccurate image standing for a category of people was introduced in 1922 by the journalist Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was an important public intellectual who, among other things, helped to found The New Republic, influenced Woodrow Wilson’s policies at the end of World War I, and wrote some of the first attacks on IQ testing. In his book Public Opinion, Lippmann fretted about the difficulty of achieving true democracy in an age in which ordinary people could no longer judge public issues rationally because they got their information in what we today call sound bites.

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

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

To suppose that “the Internet,” like the Bible or the Koran, contains simple answers to how we should regulate access to news or music or “ads for free futons” is to believe that it operates according to laws as firm as those of gravity. Ironically, this is the position that Lessig the academic has made a career out of opposing. But Lessig the activist and public intellectual has no problem embracing such a position whenever it suits his own activist agenda. As someone who shares many of the ends of Lessig’s agenda, I take little pleasure in criticizing his means, but I do think they are intellectually unsustainable and probably misleading to the technologically unsavvy.

…

Among the “liberal bloggers” Ferguson mentions in his piece are Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, another distinguished economist and former government official, Brad DeLong, and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and prominent journalist James Fallows. To believe that these people share some core identity as “bloggers” and that it should override their other identities—as prominent academics and public intellectuals—just because they used a blog to respond to Ferguson is the height of Internet-centrism. Why not attack them for using a keyboard or sitting in a chair? Even Andrew Sullivan, whom Ferguson also mentions in his response, is a very unconvincing “blogger”: with a PhD from Harvard and a stint as the editor of the New Republic, Sullivan challenged Ferguson as a fellow conservative intellectual, not as a pajama-wearing “blogger.”

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If one thinks that the goal of literature is to maximize the well-being of memes or to ensure that all readers are satisfied (and why wouldn’t they be, given that the books they read already reflect their subconscious inclinations and preferences?), then Amazon should be seen as the savior of literature. But if one believes that some ideas are worse than others, that some memes should be put to rest rather than spread around, that many authors are public intellectuals who serve important civic functions that surely cannot be outsourced to algorithms, and that one of the goals of literature is to challenge and annihilate, not just to appease and amplify—then there is very little to celebrate in Amazon’s fantasy world without gatekeepers. The Rise of Uncritical Critics Solutionists run into the same set of challenges, regardless of whether they want to improve politics or literature.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invisible hand, launch on warning, liberation theology, long peace, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

By Wilson’s day it was widely recognized by elite sectors in the US and Britain that within their societies, coercion was a tool of diminishing utility, and that it would be necessary to devise new means to tame the beast, primarily through control of opinion and attitude. Huge industries have since developed devoted to these ends. Wilson’s own view was that an elite of gentlemen with “elevated ideals” must be empowered to preserve “stability and righteousness.”6 Leading public intellectuals agreed. “The public must be put in its place,” Walter Lippmann declared in his progressive essays on democracy. That goal could be achieved in part through “the manufacture of consent,” a “self-conscious art and regular organ of popular government.” This “revolution” in the “practice of democracy” should enable a “specialized class” to manage the “common interests” that “very largely elude public opinion entirely.”

…

NEW NORMS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW The declaration of the grand strategy was rightly understood to be an ominous step in world affairs. It is not enough, however, for a great power to declare an official policy. It must go on to establish the policy as a new norm of international law by carrying out exemplary actions. Distinguished specialists and public intellectuals may then soberly explain that law is a flexible living instrument so that the new norm is now available as a guide to action. Accordingly, as the new imperial strategy was announced, the war drums began to beat to rouse public enthusiasm for an attack on Iraq. At the same time the midterm election campaign opened.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

See Allan Temko, “Which Guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?” Horizon, 10 (Summer 1968), 25–30. Mumford’s life and work have received serious posthumous treatment—see, for example, Donald Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989) and Agatha and Thomas Hughes, eds., Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), but Fuller’s have not. Partial reconsideration have now been remedied by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). One of the catalog’s essays—by K. Michael Hays—includes a photo of that dome’s construction but doesn’t elaborate.

…

Further Reading 265 Turner, Fred, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Three Twentieth-Century Leading Visionaries Chu, Hsiao-Yun and Roberto G. Trujillo, eds., New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Hughes, Agatha and Thomas, eds. Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Smith, David C., H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Educational Utopias Cuban, Larry, Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Johnson, Marilyn, This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (New York: Harper, 2010).

After Europe by Ivan Krastev

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

It also creates a dynamic in which the European project is seen no longer as an expression of liberal universalism but as a sour expression of its defensive parochialism. Chapter 2 They the People “Had I been cryogenically frozen in January 2005,” writes British historian Timothy Garton Ash, one of Europe’s most prominent public intellectuals, I would have gone to my provisional rest as a happy European. With the enlargement of the European Union . . . the 1989 “return to Europe” dream of my Central European friends was coming true. EU member states had agreed on a constitutional treaty, loosely referred to as the European constitution . . .

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

He studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. He joined the staff at MIT and was appointed Institute Professor in 1976, gaining international renown for his theories on the acquisition and generation of language. He became well known as an activist and public intellectual during the Vietnam War; he became known as a formidable critic of media with the 1988 release of Manufacturing Consent, a book coauthored with Edward Herman. With the publication of 9/11 in November 2001, inarguably one of the most significant books on the subject, he became as widely read and as an essential a voice internationally as other political philosophers throughout history.

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

LOGOS—For educators interested in a very easy programming language to teach elementary school children, visit http://www.terrapinlogo.com for a system to purchase or http://www.softronix.com/logo.html for free resources. For more up-to-date information, see http://rushkoff.com/program. About the Author Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff has written a dozen best-selling books on media and society, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Coercion (winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award), Get Back in the Box, and Life Inc. He has made the PBS “Frontline” documentaries Digital Nation, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool.

Europe old and new: transnationalism, belonging, xenophobia by Ray Taras

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, collective bargaining, Danilo Kiš, energy security, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, North Sea oil, open economy, postnationalism / post nation state, Potemkin village, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, World Values Survey

Whether Houellebecq himself thinks in ethnic and racial categories is less important than his conviction that that is how many western Europeans— as depicted in his many protagonists—think. The author’s exposé of old Europe’s xenophobic proclivities is valuable testimony, then, to a comparative study of xenophobia. THE ANTI-RELIGIOUS VIEWS OF OLD EUROPE’S ESSAYISTS Every country has a stable of journalists, essayists, and public intellectuals who produce commentary on the various malaises afflicting modern society. While it is true that risqué observations about relations between ethnic and religious groups may have more resonance in one country than other, the role of the pundit—an old profession pursued in all societies—is to be iconoclastic, to challenge conventional wisdom, and to draw provocative conclusions.

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Islam is “a mask for a very deep and probably justifiable insecurity . . . not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance.” Regarding the Qur’an, “I simply laugh when I read the Koran, with its endless prohibitions on sex and its corrupt promise of infinite debauchery in the life to come.”132 We can cite other examples of iconoclastic public intellectuals in Europe attacking the norms governing their societies. EU discourse on transnationalism and integration has become an easy target as, in the view of its critics, Europe reels under the weight of a population that often appears to be unintegrated, embraces parochial identities, and speaks in as many languages as on the Tower of Babel.

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

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

Barring any unexpected further increase in the market price of silver, the reset Mint price would remain attractive enough that silver bullion would start to be brought in for coining again, and the coin supply would recover. All in all, it was an eminently sensible and realistic solution, based on sound historical precedent. Unfortunately, it encountered an implacable opponent in the person of the most highly respected public intellectual of the age: the philosopher John Locke. As the leading theorist of the new system of constitutional government, and the chief intellectual guardian of its principles, Locke was invited by Parliament to comment on Lowndes’ report. He responded, in December 1695, with a scathing polemic against the proposal and the ideas underpinning it.

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The structural reform proposals of Volcker and Vickers make a nod to Law’s fundamental idea of realigning the distribution of risks implicit in the current structure of the banking system. There are more aggressive contemporary reform proposals under debate as well. The prominent U.S. economist and public intellectual Laurence Kotlikoff has put forward one of the more important ones: “Limited Purpose Banking.”23 Under Kotlikoff’s radical proposal, banks as we now know them would cease to exist. All economic risk would simply pass unimpeded through an infinitely expandable spectrum of mutual funds from borrowers to savers.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

The route to being a gatekeeper has changed over the years. There was an age when some editors were public intellectuals – think C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, or J.L. Garvin or David Astor of the Observer; or Peregrine Worsthorne at the Sunday Telegraph. In Scott’s famous 1921 essay he speaks of a newspaper having ‘a moral as well as a material existence . . . its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces. It may make profit or power its first object, or it may conceive itself as fulfilling a higher and more exacting function.’ The public intellectual editor placed the greatest value on having a moral influence – chiefly through editorials and commentary.

9-11 by Noam Chomsky

Berlin Wall, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Chomsky placed the attacks in context, marshaling his deep and nuanced knowledge of American foreign policy to trace the history of American political aggression—in the Middle East and throughout Latin America as well as in Indonesia, in Afghanistan, in India and Pakistan—at the same time warning against America’s increasing reliance on military rhetoric and violence in its response to the attacks, and making the critical point that the mainstream media and public intellectuals were failing to make: any escalation of violence as a response to violence will inevitably lead to further, and bloodier, attacks on innocents in America and around the world. This new edition of 9-11, published on the tenth anniversary of the attacks and featuring Was There an Alternative?

Small Change: Why Business Won't Save the World by Michael Edwards

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Bernie Madoff, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, different worldview, high net worth, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Shuttleworth, market bubble, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, subprime mortgage crisis, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs

Through the work of the Fellows Program, Dēmos supports scholars and writers whose innovative work influences the public debate about crucial national and global issues. The program offers an intellectual home and public engagement platform for more than 20 fellows from diverse backgrounds: emerging public intellectuals, journalists, distinguished public figures, and academics whose research can be used to inform the policy world. connect at Demos.org eUpdates | Research, Commentary & Analysis | Special Initiatives & Events Ideas & Action Blog | Twitter, Facebook & News Feeds | Multimedia This page intentionally left blank About Berrett-Koehler Publishers Berrett-Koehler is an independent publisher dedicated to an ambitious mission: Creating a World That Works for All.

Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, colonial rule, corporate personhood, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, invisible hand, liberation theology, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuremberg principles, one-state solution, open borders, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus

In a rare and unusually careful analysis of the domestic influences on U.S. foreign policy, Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page find, unsurprisingly, that the major influence on policy is “internationally oriented business corporations,” though there is also a secondary effect of “experts,” who, they point out “may themselves be influenced by business.” Public opinion, in contrast, has “little or no significant effect on government officials,” they find. As they observe, the results should be welcome to “realists” such as Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual of the twentieth century, who “considered public opinion to be ill-informed and capricious [and] warned that following public opinion would create a ‘morbid derangement of the true functions of power’ and produce policies ‘deadly to the very survival of the state as a free society,’” in Lippmann’s words.

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The “participants in action” are surely aware that, on a host of major issues, both political parties are well to the right of the general population and that their positions are quite consistent over time, a matter reviewed in a useful recent study on foreign policy by Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton; the same is true on domestic policy. It is important, then, for the attention of the herd to be diverted elsewhere.1 The quoted admonitions, taken from highly regarded “progressive essays on democracy” by the leading American public intellectual of the twentieth century (Walter Lippmann), capture well the perceptions of intellectual opinion, largely shared across the narrow elite spectrum. The common understanding is revealed more in practice than in words, though some, like Lippmann, do articulate it: President Wilson, for example, who held that an elite of gentlemen with “elevated ideals” must be empowered to preserve “stability and righteousness,”2 essentially the perspective of the Founding Fathers.

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

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

The BBC announced a more multicultural remake of Kenneth Clark and David Attenborough’s classic Civilisation series from the late 1960s. (The new one was to be called Civilisations.) At one point in 2015, the Washington Post called the black incendiary Ta-Nehisi Coates the country’s “foremost public intellectual”—and it was probably right, since race was getting to be the sum total of what the country’s intellectual life was about. There were columnists in the Post and the New York Times who had the job of sounding off about race morning after morning, not because their readerships had swollen with marginal crackpots but for the benefit of the new establishment, from deputy assistant secretaries in Cleveland Park in the District of Columbia to the trust fund hipsters of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

…

A couple of weeks after: Meg Robbins and Harry Rube, “Students Debate Articles of Impeachment at BSG Meeting,” Bowdoin Orient, March 4, 2016. Uninvolved undergraduates interviewed: Catherine Rampell, “Why Write About Tiny Sombreros?,” Washington Post, March 4, 2016. The BBC announced: Jonathan Jones, “BBC Looks Beyond the West to Retell the Story of Civilisation,” The Guardian, February 24, 2018. “foremost public intellectual”: Carlos Lozada, “The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Washington Post, July 16, 2015. “If blacks would only try harder”: P. J. Henry and David O. Sears, “The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale,” Political Psychology 23, no. 2 (June 2002): 253–83. Quoted in Andrew Hacker, “2014: Another Democratic Debacle?

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

He lived in a rundown house with a tin roof in the center of the capital, Moroni, with his wife and baby; his car, parked outside his home, was broken, and he hadn’t had the means to repair it. Aboubacar Said Salim, the secretary-general of Parliament, was another delegate who’d agreed to take the trip in spite of his initial disgust for the entire project. A self-styled public intellectual, Salim lost his most recent novel to a computer malfunction. He saw the trip as a sort of civic duty, and he was ready to absorb all the information he could and report back. Abdou Mouminé, the president of the Parliamentary finance commission, went along, he says, because he believed in opening up the Comoros to the rest of the world and inviting foreigners to invest.

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

Instead it has become a casualty of the process of relentless rationalization and integration. One of the preconditions of disinterestedness, a certain protected isolation, was thought to encourage independence. Ideals such as academic freedom, isolation of the scientist from the marketplace and from politics, the impartial jurist, and the public intellectual (a Walter Lippmann) were valued as especially necessary to the pursuit of truths in matters where interests and passions ran strong in society at large. Another casualty: the ideal of a civil service, disinterestedly devoted to the public good and a noble calling for college graduates. Its place is now occupied either by the “manager” who is equally at home at the Department of Defense, Halliburton, and the Republican National Committee, or by the party apparatchik who is rewarded for loyal service that he is expected to continue to perform, albeit as a public servant.

…

Throughout the Western world at the time there were wide-ranging discussions of alternatives, especially of governmental planning as the means of reorganizing economic life to serve the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of citizens. From today’s vantage point it is difficult to recognize a time when politicians, public intellectuals, even some businessmen were convinced that capitalism was in mortal danger and in need of serious reform, possibly by some type of “collectivism.” The aftermath of World War II should have witnessed the high tide of liberalism; instead it was as though liberalism became frozen in time, its dynamic spent.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

(In a global economy, these gigs can sometimes go badly wrong, as Hilary Swank discovered when she agreed to attend Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov’s thirty-fifth birthday celebrations in Grozny, in exchange for a six-figure fee. She was roundly—and rightly—denounced for sharing a stage with a warlord notorious for torturing and killing his opponents.) The people a previous generation might have called public intellectuals also make much of their living by leveraging the Rosen effects of mass popularity and the Marshall effect of earning lavish fees from a plutocracy that can afford to pay them. Malcolm Gladwell, the world’s most influential business writer, is an example. He is paid millions to write books.

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Dinkelspiel Award, a yearly honor recognizing two students who’ve made “an exceptional contribution” to undergraduate education. Hoffman arrived in Oxford proud of the prize, excited about what he could learn at that university’s renowned philosophy department, and committed to a life of the mind. “When I graduated from Stanford, my plan was to become a professor and a public intellectual,” he said. “That is not about quoting Kant. It’s about holding up a lens to society and asking, ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Who should we be, as individuals and a society?’” But twenty years later, Hoffman, who went on to become one of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs and investors, told me that the worst risk he ever took was that decision to go to Oxford.

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

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

The shrill self-celebration of the World’s Columbian Exposition, viewed some thirty years later through Fitzgerald’s discerning lens, was an early protest against the prospect of a West in chronic decline. With a Victorian work ethic, the organizers of the fair had struggled to disprove their underlying fear of decadence.16 Race and civilization were scrutinized from a different angle by W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the era’s most original scholars and public intellectuals. The status quo was desperate enough for Du Bois, who wanted progress more than he feared decadence. Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, attended Fisk University, Harvard University and the Kaiser-Wilhelm University in Berlin. He completed his PhD at Harvard in 1895 (at age twenty-seven).

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The formerly communist states of Eastern Europe were in theory no less European than France or Britain. In 1992, the most overt European affirmations of the transatlantic West came from those who had once been anticommunists and dissidents. Vaclav Havel went from internal exile to the Czech Republic’s presidential palace. Adam Michnik exchanged imprisonment for the position of public intellectual and newspaper editor in an independent, postcommunist Poland. Enamored of Europe, enamored of the United States, Havel and Michnik continued to make an eloquent case for “civil society,” for political liberalism as Fukuyama had defined it, after 1989. Civil society realized the liberties codified in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

He was equally concerned with issues closer to home, thanks largely to Constantinos Doxiadis, a Greek architect best known for the planning of Pakistan’s new capital city, Islamabad. After a frustrating conference at the United Nations, Doxiadis decided that a less formal setting would allow for a more productive dialogue on the science of human settlement, which he called “ekistics.” It resulted in the creation of the Delos Symposium, in which an assortment of public intellectuals cruised among the Greek islands aboard the ship New Hellas. Doxiadis invited Fuller to the first session in July 1963, where he met many influencers outside his usual circle, much as he had at Black Mountain. He had trouble following the discussions—he had begun to suffer from the partial deafness that would plague him for the rest of his life, despite a series of hearing aids—and was more comfortable lecturing into the night, but he was still treated as a celebrity.

…

If they would just understand that the earth is really a sphere with a limited amount of surface, resources, and everything else, then they would behave better. After realizing that no image of the entire earth had ever been released by NASA, Brand distributed buttons printed with a simple question: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” He sent them to public intellectuals, including Marshall McLuhan, and the only one to reply was Fuller, who pointed out that it was possible only to see half the earth at once. Brand was encouraged. He was planning an education fair for the Portola Institute, a nonprofit founded by Dick Raymond that consulted on computer and music classes for high schools, and he invited Fuller to attend what he described as an event on “powerful tools technology.”

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In addition, only about a quarter of the book consisted of his own words, although it also featured one of his most memorable lines: “I always say to myself, What is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment?” Despite his status as what the writer Harvey Wheeler called one of the youth culture’s “reigning sex symbols,” Fuller maintained the itinerary of a respectable public intellectual. In recognition of “his contribution to mankind’s environment as probably the world’s greatest living architect,” Francis Warner nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he was honored with the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, which described the dome as “the strongest, lightest, and most efficient means of enclosing space yet devised by man.”

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

The rich of yesterday became the middle class of today, even as tomorrow would mint the newly rich, and the process continued without end, each advance touching everyone throughout society. There were new products, new services, and new forms of communication and transportation, and each seemed to point to a future of peace and prosperity. Such inventions were celebrated in great public spectacles called World’s Fairs. Orison Swett Marden was the public intellectual who made sense of it all. He was a serious journalist, a great thinker, and a wonderful writer. His outlook embodies the ebullient optimism of the Gilded Age. He studied the phenomenon of progress and tried to discern its causes. He located them in the hearts and minds of the men and women who made the difference.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Slavoj Žižek: The Unbearable Lightness of “Communism” 6. Boris Groys: Aesthetics of Utopia Guide to Further Reading Introduction To the disappointment of friends who would prefer to read my fiction—as well as of my literary agent, who would prefer to sell it—I seem to have become a Marxist public intellectual. Making matters worse, the relevant public has been a small one consisting of readers of the two publications, the London Review of Books and n+1, where all but one of the essays here first appeared, and my self-appointed role has likewise been modest. The essays attempt no original contribution to Marxist, or what you might call Marxish, thought.

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

Wilson had won the election in 1916 on the slogan “peace without victory,” but within a couple of months he turned the United States into a country of warmongers who wanted to destroy everything German. The members of Wilson’s propaganda agency included people such as Edward Bernays, who became the guru of the public relations industry, and Walter Lippmann, a leading public intellectual of the twentieth century. And they very explicitly drew on their First World War experience for their work. In their writings from the 1920s, they said that they had learned you can control “the public mind,” you can control attitudes and opinions, and, in Lippmann’s phrase, “manufacture consent.”

Notes to Self by Emilie Pine

financial independence, public intellectual, sexual politics

We all met one February morning in an overheated basement conference room, to learn how to ‘get ahead’. One of the first exercises was for each participant to identify a role model. I thought about who I would pick, and what my choice would mean for the kind of person I wanted to be. I picked a female professor whose work I admire hugely and who is a great public intellectual and speaker. But in the next part of the task, discussing our role models within our small groups, I was amazed, as the discussion moved around the table, that the majority of women in my group had chosen their mothers. Their reasons all centred on the fortitude, moral strength, and selflessness of these women – they were the heroic qualities they wanted to emulate.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Freedom to browse whatever one wants is, of course, worth defending in its own right, but it’s important to remember that, at least from a policy perspective, such freedoms would not necessarily bring about the revolutionary democratic outcomes that many in the West expect. Online Discontents and Their Content Intellectuals Phillip Roth’s 1990 warning to the Czechs was also a perceptive observation that their most treasured public intellectuals—those who helped to bring democracy to the country—would soon no longer command the power or respect they had under communism. It was inevitable that dissident intellectuals would lose much of their appeal as the Internet opened the gates of entertainment while globalization opened the gates of consumerism.

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It’s thanks to their overblown claims about yet another digital revolution that so many Internet gurus end up advising those in positions of power, compromising their own intellectual integrity and ensuring the presence of Internet-centrism in policy planning for decades to come. Hannah Arendt, one of America’s most treasured public intellectuals, was aware of this problem back in the 1960s, when the “scientifically minded brain trusters”—Alvin Weinberg was just one of many; another whiz kid with a penchant for computer modeling, Robert McNamara, was put in charge of the Vietnam War—were beginning to penetrate the corridors of power and influence government policy.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari

Airbnb, centre right, drug harm reduction, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, illegal immigration, low interest rates, mass incarceration, McJob, moral panic, Naomi Klein, placebo effect, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rat Park, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, San Francisco homelessness, science of happiness, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, traveling salesman, vertical integration, War on Poverty

51. 80 Anslinger, Murderers, 82, 86. 81 Anslinger, Protectors, 203–4. 82 Anslinger, Murderers, 83. 83 Anslinger, Protectors, 214–15. 84 Anslinger, Murderers, 87. 85 Carolyn Gallaher, On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement, 140. 86 Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 63. 87 Sloman, Reefer Madness, 207. 88 Valentine, Strength of the Wolf, 64. 89 David Patrick Keys and John F. Galliher, Confronting the Drug Control Establishment: Alfred Lindesmith as a Public Intellectual, 13, 137. 90 See also John F. Galliher, David P. Keys, and Michael Elsner, “Lindesmith v. Anslinger: An Early Government Victory in the Failed War on Drugs,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 88:2, Winter 1998, 661–82. 91 Richard Lawrence Miller, The Case for Legalizing Drugs, 77. 92 Keys and Galliher, Confronting the Drug Control Establishment, 160; King, Drug Hang-Up, 62–63. 93 I spoke with Yolande Bavan, Annie Ross, Eugene Callendar, Bevan Dufty, and Lorraine Feather. 94 Anslinger archives, box 9, file 54, “Musicians.” 95 Ibid.

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Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Portugal. Wolfeboro, NH: Merlin Press, 1987. Kerényi, Carl. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Keys, Daniel Patrick, and John F. Galliher. Confronting the Drug Control Establishment: Alfred Lindesmith as a Public Intellectual. New York: SUNY Press, 2000. King, Alexander. May This House Be Safe from Tigers. London: Heinemann, 1960. King, Rufus. The Drug Hang-Up: America’s Fifty-Year Folly. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Kobler, John. Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1992. Kuntz, Joelle.

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

In a 2003 report on offshoring, McKinsey said the institute’s “primary purpose” was to better understand the global economy “for the benefit of McKinsey clients and consultants.” Josh Bivens, an economist and a research director at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, views the McKinsey Global Institute with skepticism. The group wants to portray itself as “neutral public intellectuals, just looking at the evidence, and isn’t it amazing?” Bivens said. When in fact, he added, the group was trying “to provide an intellectual gloss” on a profit-making endeavor. “They love to focus on the winning side while ignoring or pretending there isn’t even a losing side,” Bivens said.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Companies aren’t getting the most”: Michael Bloch, Shankar Narayanan, and Ishaan Seth, “Getting More out of Offshoring the Finance Function,” McKinsey & Company, April 1, 2007. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT as independent and highly regarded: McKinsey said the University of Pennsylvania ranked the firm’s think tank as the best. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “neutral public intellectuals”: Bivens, interview by author. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Congress held hearings on outsourcing: House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Promoting U.S. Worker Effectiveness in a Globalized Economy, June 14, 2007. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Courtney cited one published report: Testimony of Marcus Courtney, representing Washington Alliance of Technical Workers, Committee on Ways and Means, June 14, 2007.

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

Hume is the first person who articulated it clearly, as far as I know. The public does have power, and it’s the task of the powerful and their minions—the priests, the intellectuals, others—to try to marginalize them, to get the public away from power. We have Walter Lippmann, the famous leading public intellectual of the twentieth century, also a progressive, saying that we’ve got to protect the responsible men, the intelligent minority, from the “trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.”25 That’s what the huge public relations industry is devoted to. In late 2011, New York Times columnist David Brooks reported that a Gallup poll showed that in answer to the question “Which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future—big business, big labor, or big government?”

How to Be Human: An Autistic Man's Guide to Life by Jory Fleming

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Isaac Newton, microbiome, neurotypical, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, Skype, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Concerts; specifically loud music concerts. I do like some kinds of music and going to plays and stuff. Those terrible beverages that are sugar-free. Those are just terrible. Actually, the other day at the store I almost made the mistake of buying a zero-sugar Coke. Emotional rhetoric, I’ll put in that one. Public intellectuals/pundits. Anybody whose job it is not to do anything but tell other people what they think. Conversations that don’t mean anything, small talk, I guess. The general mindset of egoisms, especially elitism. Those bother me. People that are not nice to either animals or people whom they think are beneath them in whatever way.

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

Alternatives to Financing Textbook Production in the 21st Century,” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. [http://www.cepr.net/publications/textbook_2005_09.pdf] Baker, D. 2004. “Financing Drug Research: What Are the Issues?” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. [http://www.cepr.net/publications/intellectual_property_2004_09.htm] Baker, D. 2003. “The Artistic Freedom Voucher: An Internet Age Alternative to Copyrights,” Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. [http://www.cepr.net/publications/ip_2003_11.pdf] Baker, D., B. DeLong, and P. Krugman. 2005. “Asset Returns and Economic Growth,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: 289-315.

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

Orwell cannot posthumously be denied his credit for keeping that libertarian and honest tradition alive. The Cold War involved many things, including a vertiginously dangerous arms race, an attempt to keep colonialism on a life-support system, an unguessed-at level of suborning (or persecuting and intimidating) of public intellectuals, and even some overt collusion with former pro-Nazi elements in Eastern and Central Europe. But it also involved a confrontation with the poisonous illusion that the Soviet system had a claim on the democratic Left. In this essential confrontation, Orwell kept his little corner of the Cold War fairly clean. 8 Generosity and Anger The Novels The waiter retired and came back with a folded slip on a salver.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, applied Darwin’s ideas to the human species, formulating what he regarded as the science of eugenics. Herbert Spencer, a journalist at the Economist, elaborated his ideas but, just as importantly, coined the immortal phrases: “survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw.” American intellectuals enthusiastically imported these ideas. Spencer was one of the most revered public intellectuals in post–Civil War America—“a great man, a grand intellect, a giant figure in the history of thought,” in Richard Hofstadter’s phrase.11 William Graham Sumner preached social Darwinism from a chair at Yale University. The country’s great businessmen were particularly keen on social Darwinism.

…

America’s inner-city ghettoes were convulsed by violence and arson. The murder rate climbed to an all-time high of ten per ten thousand in the late 1970s. Richard Nixon worried in private that the United States had “become subject to the decadence which eventually destroys a civilization.”2 Public intellectuals debated whether the 1970s should be called the “time of conflict,” the “era of decline,” or the “age of limits.” Mancur Olson argued that democracies inevitably become the prisoners of powerful interest groups. “On balance,” he concluded, “special interest organizations and collusions reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive.”3 A group of MIT academics, who mysteriously called themselves the Club of Rome, outdid Thomas Malthus by arguing that the world was about to run out not only of food but also of all the basic materials of life, from oil to water; The Limits to Growth (1972) sold more than 12 million copies.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Over the course of the decade she reprinted articles from the newsletter and speeches she had given in two more books, The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Although she occasionally talked of a fourth novel, Rand had abandoned fiction for good. Instead she reinvented herself as a public intellectual. Gone were the allegorical stories, the dramatic heroes and heroines, the thinly coded references to real politicians, intellectuals, and events. In The Objectivist Newsletter Rand named names and pointed fingers, injecting herself directly into the hottest political issues of the day. Through her speeches and articles she elaborated on the ethical, political, and artistic sides of Objectivism.

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The newsletter fulfilled a dream that dated from her days on the Willkie campaign. Back then she had imagined a publication that would serve to unite opponents of the New Deal and inspire them to fight for capitalism. Twenty years later she achieved that goal. The introduction of The Objectivist Newsletter marked Rand’s redefinition of herself as a public intellectual ready to comment on current events. In the first issue she announced the arrival of Objectivism as a philosophical movement with a unique political viewpoint. “Objectivists are not ‘conservatives.’ We are radicals for capitalism,” she declared.15 The newsletter was a slim publication that typically ranged from four to eight pages in length.

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

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

The funniest person I know, Jeanine always cheers me up when I forget that writing history is fun. She has tolerated my reading drafts out loud in the car, made peace with my perfectionism, learned to love economic theory, and taught me to think like a scientist. And somehow she continues to believe that I can become a best-selling public intellectual and regular on The Daily Show despite all evidence to the contrary. Thanks, Jeanine, for taking a chance. Introduction S enator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked, “There is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are.”1 But how many is too many?

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Law professor Marc Linder argues that liberal democracies tend to adopt a laissez-faire approach to procreation—even though an unregulated supply of labor creates economic difficulties—because the alternative would undermine capitalism’s libertarian tenets.15 Yet even though the US has never adopted explicit population targets, like some European states, it has used a variety of population policies to influence demographic trends, from immigration laws to family planning programs to tax credits for children. In the end, the population question in America historically has taken on a chameleon-like quality, colored not only by shifting population expertise but also by changing political and cultural anxieties. At present, a decisive majority of American social scientists, policy makers, and public intellectuals favor domestic population growth. True, a few individuals—some the shipwrecked survivors of an environmental movement that sailed in the 1960s and 1970s—insist that the United States and the planet have too many people and so face ruined economies and ecosystems. Opponents of immigration dip into these arguments when convenient.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

It should be “OK, let’s try to write down a model of it”—meaning let’s be clear about what we’re assuming, what the causal chain is, and what the observable implications are. No sensible social scientist should turn his back on such a line of inquiry. Economists still can aspire to greater ambition as public intellectuals or social reformers. They can be advocates of specific policies and institutions on many fronts—to improve the allocation of resources, unleash entrepreneurial energies, foster economic growth, and enhance equity and inclusion. They have much to contribute to the public debate in all these areas.

I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel by Tom Wolfe

back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, dematerialisation, glass ceiling, public intellectual, stem cell, the scientific method, working poor

We've got two lawyers from Dunning Sponget and Leach, Greg-Dunning Sponget and Leach!-who've vetted it and given the thumbs-up!-it's fireproof!-it's libel-proof!-you'll be the hottest editor who ever worked on a college newspaper and went straight to The New York Times! Now that's Millennial Mutant stuff, Greg! We're always talking about public intellectuals and shit-public intellectual is fucking looking at you in the mirror! Carpe diem, dude!" Pause.Pause."Now, who was the last guy we talked to at Dunning Sponget-the old guy, Button, or-" I think the Fearless Editor's getting over the shakes, Adam said to himself. At least something's going right. 31.

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The idea was to bring bright young American barbarians over to England and make them citizens of the world. He wanted to lift them up to a higher plane and extend the reach of the British Empire with its American cousins in tow. The British Empire is gone, but a Rhodes still lifts you to a higher plane. You're not doomed to being some obscure college teacher. You become a public intellectual. Everybody talks about your ideas." Charlotte said, "There are only thirty-two Rhodes scholarships?" Adam nodded yes. "Well, golly, that's not very many. What if you're a bad-what if that's what you're counting on and you don't get one?" "In that case," said Adam, "you go after a Fulbright.

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature by Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault

new economy, nuremberg principles, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, theory of mind

It was part of a series of debates in which the Dutch thinker Fons Elders invited pairs of philosophers from different, sometimes opposing, strains in twentieth-century thought to confront one another on television.1 Yet neither Chomsky nor Foucault was in fact a philosopher in the narrow academic sense; each had developed a highly original approach to the study of language and had subsequently gone on to assume the role of a political or public intellectual. 1971 is not a bad date for the transition from language-analysis to politics in their work. The events of 1968 were still fresh, providing a new climate of debate, introducing new divisions, and new actors, on an international (or, as it is now said, “transnational”) scale, beyond any particular political or economic regime—in Prague as well as Berkeley, Paris, Mexico City, and Asia.

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

Wright Mills (1958), that the us power elite followed a ‘crackpot realism’ in the conduct of the Cold War. That is, the arms race against the Soviet Union pitted one enemy against the other, but missed the point that building more nuclear weapons would mean that there would be no winners in the event of them ever being used in conflict. In common with many Left-wing public intellectuals of the 1950s and early ’60s, Osborne and Potter loved the flamboyance and energy of American culture but detested the idea of the Americanization of the world. In both of them there is a nugget of opinion that maintains that it would be preferable if the world still followed British values and the British way of life.

Making the Future: The Unipolar Imperial Moment by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Frank Gehry, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, liberation theology, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, precariat, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, working poor

His August 2011 column, “America in Decline,” foreshadows a premise of the Occupy movement: “The resulting concentration of wealth [since the 1970s] yielded greater political power, accelerating a vicious cycle that has led to extraordinary wealth for a fraction of 1 percent of the population, mainly, while for the large majority real incomes have virtually stagnated.” In every sense Chomsky lives up to the title of “public intellectual.” He is constantly on the road, giving talks. (Often on campuses he will speak to an audience on current events and to a smaller gathering on his day-job specialty, linguistics.) A hallmark of a Chomsky talk is the question-and-answer period afterward—which tends to continue, freewheeling, until organizers shepherd him to the next stop on the schedule.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson

Columbine, complexity theory, corporate governance, delayed gratification, edge city, Flynn Effect, game design, Golden age of television, Marshall McLuhan, pattern recognition, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, sexual politics, SimCity, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, the market place

The scholar James Paul Gee has done the most interesting work on the cognitive effects of gameplay-particularly i n his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Many fasci nating experi ments i n using games as educational 201 202 N O T E S ON F U R T H E R R E A D I N G tools have come out of the Education A rcade conso rtium (educationarcade.org) , whose cofounder Henry Jenkins has been the model of the pop culture public intellectual, mak­ ing a number of crucial defenses of games in the media and in the courtroom. Some of the ideas presented here about the logic of gaming a re explored fro m a game designer's point of view in Rules of Play, a textbook coauthored by the designer Eric Zimmerman . The field of video game theory is sometimes cal led " ludology " ; for further reading about this n a scent critical movement, I recommend the Web sites ludology.org and seriousgames.org.

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

by William Marling Intellectual Life The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman Reflections by an Affirmative Action Baby, by Stephen Carter Integrity, by Stephen Carter The Accidental Asian, by Eric Liu Mind Wide Open, by Steven Johnson Socrates Café, by Chris Phillips Self-Renewal, by John Gardner Public Intellectuals, by Richard Posner Psychology Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl Biography/Memoir My Life, by Bill Clinton This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff Swimming Across, by Andy Grove All Over But the Shoutin’, by Rick Bragg Personal History, by Katherine Graham Emerson: Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson In an Uncertain World, by Robert Rubin The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion Religion End of Faith, by Sam Harris The Universe in a Single Atom, by the Dalai Lama APPENDIX C The World’s Religions, by Huston Smith The Bhagavad-Gita Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, by Anne Lamott Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer Politics/Current Affairs Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll Running the World, by David Rothkopf Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell Going Nucular, by Geoffrey Nunberg America at the Crossroads, by Francis Fukuyama Holidays in Hell, by P.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

“Someone who is driving a car on a regular occurrence deals with dynamic pricing all the time: it’s called gas prices,” he told The New York Times, shortly after the New Year’s incident when some customers paid more than $100 for relatively short rides. Bill Gurley, a prolific blogger and the venture-capital industry’s leading public intellectual, a couple years later wrote a 2,500-word treatise defending surge pricing. “The bottom line is that the only real alternative to dynamic pricing is a ton of customers staring at screens that read ‘No Cars Available,’” he wrote. “This is the fact that is least appreciated by Uber’s critics.” He reminded readers of a worse recent outrage than Uber’s price hikes, UPS’s failure one Christmas to deliver packages because its delivery network was overstretched.

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

In all of this intellectuals have played an important role, nowhere in my opinion more crucial and more compromised than in the overlapping region of experience and culture that is colonialism’s legacy where the politics of secular interpretation is carried on for very high stakes. Naturally the preponderance of power has been on the side of the self-constituted “Western” societies and the public intellectuals who serve as their apologists and ideologists. But there have been interesting responses to this imbalance in many formerly colonized states. Recent work on India and Pakistan in particular (e.g., Subaltern Studies) has highlighted the complicities between the post-colonial security state and the intellectual nationalist elite; Arab, African, and Latin American oppositional intellectuals have produced similar critical studies.

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What concerns me is the way in which, generations later, the conflict continues in an impoverished and for that reason all the more dangerous form, thanks to an uncritical alignment between intellectuals and institutions of power which reproduces the pattern of an earlier imperialist history. This results, as I noted earlier, in an intellectual politics of blame and a drastic reduction in the range of material proposed for attention and controversy by public intellectuals and cultural historians. What is the inventory of the various strategies that might be employed to widen, expand, and deepen our awareness of the way the past and present of the imperial encounter interact with each other? This seems to me a question of immediate importance, and indeed explains the idea behind this book.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

With books like Gary Watson’s Free Will and John Perry’s Personal Identity as their backdrop, Hoffman and Thiel sparred over determinism, freedom, and the mind-body problem. They discovered divergent worldviews—but built a lasting friendship. “Peter and I still today have very different goals about what humanity should look like,” Hoffman explained. “But on the value and fundamentals of being a public intellectual, speaking the truth, figuring out the truth, intense discourse… For me, part of the gift of Peter’s friendship is that my thinking has gotten sharper.” In 1987, the two undergraduates ran for seats in Stanford’s student government, the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU). Hoffman’s and Thiel’s respective platforms illustrated common values and starkly contrasting styles: Hoffman: The ASSU has enormous potential for making positive changes in this University.

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That if this position ever appears on my resume, to stand on [my] head and eat 50 copies of the offending document in a public place. I’m running because I believe there is some good and some value in being involved.” Musk did not win his race. * * * After Stanford, Hoffman set off for Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship with a plan to become a professor and public intellectual. But he pivoted, instead opting for a career in software development. He returned to California, worked at Fujitsu and Apple, then launched his own start-up, SocialNet. An early social network, SocialNet struggled to take off. Hoffman shared the trials of start-up life with Thiel on frequent walks around Stanford Dish Loop Trail.

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A. O. Scott

barriers to entry, citizen journalism, conceptual framework, death of newspapers, disinformation, Evgeny Morozov, hive mind, Jacob Silverman, Joan Didion, Marshall McLuhan, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sexual politics, sharing economy, social web, subscription business, TED Talk, the scientific method

The campus is a place of challenge and self-discovery, whose promotional key word is “passion,” our new, touchy-feely term for what used to be called ambition. An acute and early diagnosis of the contradictory state of the modern university came from Lionel Trilling, a Columbia English professor and eminent literary critic who straddled, from the 1930s to the ’60s, the worlds of public intellectual journalism and academic scholarship. In his 1961 essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” he noted a radical disjunction between much of that literature’s “hostility to civilization” and the inherently civilizing mission of liberal-arts instruction. “For some years I have have taught the course in modern literature in Columbia College,” he wrote.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

The ostensible target is Big Media, but the real one is the Big Public, the people deemed sufficiently gullible and ignorant to be easily led astray by wicked press barons and TV or web moguls. This argument is personified by somebody like the American professor Noam Chomsky, a hero of the international Left who has been named as the world’s top public intellectual. Chomsky focuses on how the power of the mass media ‘dulls people’s brains’. He refers to the masses as that ‘80 per cent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think’, typified by the beer-drinking working stiff ‘Joe Six Pack’ whose exposure to the corporate-controlled mass media has ‘reduced [his] capacity to think’ rationally, resulting in totalitarian-style ‘brainwashing’.

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More by Charles Kenny

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, inventory management, Kickstarter, Milgram experiment, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Robert Solow, seminal paper, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, very high income, Washington Consensus, X Prize

And many marched to protest the inability or unwillingness of their leaders to foster global development for the world’s poorest inhabitants, as they had promised. These protesters saw the latest financial crisis as further evidence of the failure of economic development. In so doing, they, too, joined a historied chorus. A host of others, from public intellectuals to the heads of international aid organizations to commentators and politicians on both the left and the right, shared the concerns of world leaders and protesters alike. In a widely accepted version of the recent history of global development, there are two things left to argue over—who is to blame, and what to do about it.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

Reid Hoffman is one of those kinds of entrepreneurs. He is the founder and chairman of the ubiquitous business utility LinkedIn, with over fifty million users, and one of the most extraordinary and prescient of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs—and also an angel investor in Facebook, Flickr, Zynga, and many others. Reid is also a “public intellectual” (his own term) and a dozen other things, including a blacksmith and movie maven. For Reid, the driving force behind entrepreneurship is to do good for the world. Reid Hoffman Reid had a particular view about how he could and would do some good. Although he is an intellectual with ample credentials (he studied symbolic systems at Stanford and earned a master’s of philosophy [MPhil] at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship), he knew that academia would not be his calling.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Capitalist Resistance Fighters It’s all deeply ironic, if you think about it. If there were ever two people who dedicated their lives to building castles in the sky with preternatural certainty that they would someday be proven right, it was the founders of neoliberal thought. I’m an admirer of them both: the slippery philosopher Friedrich Hayek and the public intellectual Milton Friedman. Nowadays, “neoliberal” is a put-down leveled at anybody who doesn’t agree with the left. Hayek and Friedman, however, were proud neoliberals who saw it as their duty to reinvent liberalism.14 “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure,” Hayek wrote.

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, death from overwork, dematerialisation, disinformation, George Santayana, laissez-faire capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nikolai Kondratiev, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, the scientific method

Until the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, agnostics could leave open the possibility that the human species was specially created. After that time another view of things was available, in which humans belonged in the natural world along with their animal kin. John Stuart Mill (1806–73), along with Sidgwick one of the most influential Victorian public intellectuals (whose On Liberty was published, like Darwin’s Origin of Species, in 1859), wrote several essays on religion, published posthumously by his wife Harriet, without ever mentioning Darwin. In a curious way, Mill’s empiricist philosophy enabled him to side-step the issues Darwin had raised. Viewing the material world as a construction of the human mind, empiricism gives consciousness a kind of centrality in the scheme of things.

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Phillip Lopate

Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, David Sedaris, desegregation, fear of failure, index card, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

We can stare at his photographs and guess at the power “the gentle Emerson” had for his contemporaries. Or we can turn to the writing, especially the journals, where his wholeness of being is manifest. In later years he was introduced to President Lincoln, and celebrated as the nation’s foremost public intellectual. Self-mockingly, he said if the people who were honoring his intellect had read the same books he had, they wouldn’t think he was so smart. Facing the indignities of aging, he had a mixed response. On the plus side, he no longer felt the need to prove himself: “It is long already fixed what I can & what I cannot do.”

Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War by Micah Goodman

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, European colonialism, mass immigration, one-state solution, public intellectual, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Samsonov explains that while familial dynasties exist all around the world, there is no precedent for intergenerational political dynasties of this form. 29. For the political dispute among the princes and their ultimate fragmentation, see Samsonov, The Princes, 268ff. 30. As soon as the Six-Day War ended, some Israelis—such as Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir and the public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz—began warning about the demographic problem, but they represented a minority on the margins of public debate. Public awareness of the demographic problem became widespread only in the 1980s, when it first entered the consciousness of many Israelis. See Uriel Abulof, Living on the Edge: The Existential Uncertainty of Zionism (Haifa: Yediot Books and Haifa University Press, 2015), 81–82 [Hebrew]. 31.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

He had a natural affinity to free market economies and individual freedom. Leonard Silk, The New York Times economic writer, observed: “Adam Smith is generally hailed as the father of modern economics and Milton Friedman as his most distinguished son.”11 Fiercely argumentative and a natural debater, Friedman reveled in the role of an influential public intellectual. In a series of popular books, including Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose (based on a TV series of the same name), he argued that governments could only provide a framework of enforceable contracts, secure property rights, fair competition, stable money, and limited protection for the “irresponsible.”

…

Ron Beller, a Goldman Sachs partner, was one of a group of bankers who had more than £4 million stolen from them by Joyti De-Laurey, their secretary. The bankers made so much money that they did not notice the theft of large amounts for many years. Ceasing to be ordinary—anyone with a net worth less than $100 million—elite bankers discovered that they actually had always been art experts, public intellectuals, men or women of letters, or all of these. Their ambition rivaled that of Salvador Dali: “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”1 As poet T.S. Eliot knew: “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”

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

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