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Ohana reportedly objected to vaccinating Palestinian prisoners convicted of attacks on Israelis. He instructed only prison staff to be vaccinated for the time being, excluding all Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, Herbst says.

"Preventing life-saving medical treatment from people in prison — whether due to a sentence imposed on them by the court or due to detention before reaching a verdict — is inconsistent with our values, the values of the Jewish and democratic state,"

"The normal policy of every country is to vaccinate its own citizens. That's what they pay taxes for," Edelstein said.

Vaccines are expected to arrive in the Palestinian territories in the coming months.

if taking action now to prevent a future disaster involves a difficult hurdle—such as bureaucratic red tape or high financial, social, or political costs—we will tend to focus on the immediate (avoiding public resistance to increased taxes) versus the future (preventing a catastrophe)

it’s best if decision makers don’t prepare for future consequences only by looking at objective risks and vulnerabilities. Instead, planners should be encouraged “to think first about how individuals in hazard-prone areas are likely to perceive risks and why they might not adopt different preparedness measures.

The challenge is how to get the public to adopt these principles

Branko Milanovic, a former economist at the World Bank, called it “one of the watershed books in economic thinking.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” with its title echoing Marx’s “Das Kapital,” is meant to be a return to the kind of economic history, of political economy, written by predecessors like Marx and Adam Smith. It is nothing less than a broad effort to understand Western societies and the economic rules that underpin them.

he said, are his generation’s “founding experiences”: the collapse of Communism, the economic degradation of Eastern Europe and the first Gulf War, in 1991.

Those events motivated him to try to understand a world where economic ideas had such bad consequences. As for the Gulf War, it showed him that “governments can do a lot in terms of redistribution of wealth when they want.” The rapid intervention to fo

The reason that postwar economies looked different — that inequality fell — was historical catastrophe. World War I, the Depression and World War II destroyed huge accumulations of private capital, especially in Europe. What the French call “les

In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Piketty, father of three daughters — 11, 13 and 16 — is no revolutionary. He is a member of no political party, and says he never served as an economic adviser to any politician. He calls himself a pragmatist, who simply follows the data.

Net wealth is a better indicator of ability to pay than income alone, he said. “All I’m proposing is to reduce the property tax on half or three-quarters of the population who have very little wealth,” he said. Write A Comment Published a year ago in French, the book is not without critics, especially of Mr. Piketty’s policy prescriptions, which have been called politically naïve. Others point out that some of the increase in capital is because of aging populations and postwar pension plans, which are not necessarily inherited.More criticism is sure to come, and Mr. Piketty says he welcomes it. “I’m certainly looking forward to the debate.”

A recent study by Aston University forecast a further 10% drop in sales this year and estimated that diesel cars will account for less than a third of the market by 2020.

Striking the right balance between markets and government is the central issue in policy debates over economic developmen

What is the role of governments in promoting economic growth?

What can governments do to seize the opportunities of globalization, while minimizing its downsides?

we have to recognize that the tension between markets and government is not new. In fact, it has been the central issue in the evolution of political economy over the last 200 years.

There have been three distinct phases in this evolution.

Phase One: The rise of the market

The “rise of the market” began in the late 18th century, shaped by the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The “invisible hand” of the market guided supply and demand toward equilibrium and efficiency.

This phase came to an end in the 1930s, when the concept of self-correcting markets collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression.

Falling prices, instead of bringing demand and supply into equilibrium,

Phase Two: The rise of government

markets were inherently unstable. Left on their own, they may not always self-correct

Government intervention was necessary to boost aggregate demand during periods of high unemployment.

The 1940s also saw the advent of the welfare state.

The welfare state was enabled through redistributive taxation and government regulation.

Phase Three: The return of the market

This phase began with growing disenchantment with government’s ability to deliver and was driven forward mainly by U.S.-based economists

The stagflation of the 1970s — persistently high inflation and unemployment — called into question the ability of governments to fine-tune the economy. Meanwhile, the welfare state began to impose an unsustainable fiscal burden,

Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman led the charge against “Big Government.” They argued eloquently how an overreaching government dulled the fundamental human instincts that power the capitalist system:

In the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reduced taxes, deregulated industries, privatized state-owned enterprises, curbed union power, and scaled back welfare programs. The global economy boomed.

Phase Four: Balancing markets and governments

The financial crisis has revealed significant imperfections in market mechanisms: information asymmetry, moral hazard, systemic risks and behavioral or nonrational motivators of choice.

In a more globalized and complex economy, governments have fewer levers to pull

It has also revealed the inherent limitations of governmen

Neither market fundamentalism nor central planning has worked.

Yet one thing is certain: The choice is not between big government and small government. It is about creating effective government. What matters is what governments do, not how big they are.

"For as long as we have citizens willing to follow their example, to carry on their burden, to continue their legacy, then America's cause will never fail and American freedom will never, ever die."

But that doesn't mean it isn't jarring, as the most wrenching moment so far approaches in the nation's battle against a pandemic that while ebbing in terms of total deaths is trending up in 18 states, is steady in 22 and easing in 10 more. More than 98,000 people in the US have now died from the coronavirus and more than 1.6 million have been infected. More than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels.

There was little evidence of a deeper meaning to his presidency at this stage than personal and political grievances.

No White House could have been fully prepared for the disaster and subsequent economic hollowing of this year's pandemic

Trump spent much of Memorial Day, fulminating against Cooper, complaining that the North Carolina governor was "unable to guarantee" the arena for the convention in August can be filled to capacity. The President is determined to deploy the full pageantry of convention season to portray a nation and economy in the full throes of what he calls a "transition to greatness."

Yet such a spectacle as the Republican convention seems utterly incongruous with real-world events. Sports teams that use such arenas are expecting to play without fans for at least months in a bio-secure environment. The prospect of thousands of delegates pouring into convention cities from all over the country, including coronavirus hotspots, is a huge headache for organizers.

"In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space."

It was not immediately clear whether Trump and the Republican National Committee are serious about pulling the convention from Charlotte.

Trump has used federal resources multiple times to fly to his resorts and golf courses. Trump's two rounds this weekend struck critics as inappropriate during a national crisis and on a weekend when American remembers its war dead.

"Nearly 100,000 lives have been lost, and tens of millions are out of work. Meanwhile, the president spent his day golfing," Biden wrote in a tweet accompanying an online ad Saturday.

Trump may not come under such criticism had he not been so dismissive of Obama's afternoons on the golf course -- and saying he wouldn't have time to play golf if he was elected president.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour

Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists

why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women

I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended i

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility

ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said: ‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.

the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens

The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.

From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive

It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class.

It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.

the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’

I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it

I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces

The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

Did Federalists just use the specter of the Illuminati to tar their rivals? Or did they mean it? Did the Jeffersonians really think the Federalists were conspiring to bring back monarchy as they alleged? Or were they just trying to win elections? The answer depends on who and when, but it’s safe to say that some did believe these theories.

Conspiracy theory after theory, Americans cast a paranoid eye on their partisan opponents throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “conspiracy theory” first appeared in the early 20th century United States, in the context of political histories of the 19th century.

Democrats’ anxieties about Russian conspiracies to interfere in the 2016 campaign cannot be extricated from this historical context of paranoia just because they have a significant basis in fact. As Joseph Heller wrote, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”

The republican political theory underlying the American paranoid style had its origin in the writings of opposition politicians in 18th-century Britain. Since then, conspiratorial thinking, has remained most attractive to opposition parties seeking to discredit their establishment rivals. This is the nature of Trump’s criticism of Democratic investigations of Russian conspiracies to hack the 2016 campaign. They’re just whining because they lost, Trump has said repeatedly.

If Trump’s embrace of the Ukraine conspiracy doesn’t sink his political future by leading to impeachment, it may nonetheless signal that his political future is bleak.

Instead, it is their contribution to the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.

digital platforms, since the marginal cost of serving additional consumers is essentially zero. Because the initial costs of producing a platform’s content are substantial, and because any company’s first goal is to remain solvent, it cannot just give stuff away. Even so, when price exceeds marginal cost, competition relentlessly pressures rival publishers to cut prices — eventually all the way to zero. This, in a nutshell, is the publisher’s dilemma in the digital age.

These firms make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.

The algorithms that choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform

As the developers concede, Facebook’s algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.

the subscription model isn’t fully efficient: Any positive fee would inevitably exclude at least some who would value access but not enough to pay the fee

a conservative think tank, says, for example, that government has no business second-guessing people’s judgments about what to post or read on social media.

That position would be easier to defend in a world where individual choices had no adverse impact on others. But negative spillover effects are in fact quite common

individual and collective incentives about what to post or read on social media often diverge sharply.

There is simply no presumption that what spreads on these platforms best serves even the individual’s own narrow interests, much less those of society as a whole.

a simpler step may hold greater promise: Platforms could be required to abandon that model in favor of one relying on subscriptions, whereby members gain access to content in return for a modest recurring fee.

Major newspapers have done well under this model, which is also making inroads in book publishing. The subscription model greatly weakens the incentive to offer algorithmically driven addictive content provided by individuals, editorial boards or other sources.

Careful studies have shown that Facebook’s algorithms have increased political polarization significantly

More worrisome, those excluded would come disproportionately from low-income groups. Such objections might be addressed specifically — perhaps with a modest tax credit to offset subscription fees — or in a more general way, by making the social safety net more generous.

Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher widely considered the father of economics, is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which describes conditions under which market incentives promote socially benign outcomes. Many of his most ardent admirers may view steps to constrain the behavior of social media platforms as regulatory overreach.

But Smith’s remarkable insight was actually more nuanced: Market forces often promote society’s welfare, but not always. Indeed, as he saw clearly, individual interests are often squarely at odds with collective aspirations, and in many such instances it is in society’s interest to intervene. The current information crisis is a case in point.

Smaller publishers, and those with communities with low resources themselves, are much more dependent. A withdrawal from Facebook could be a galvanising moment for Australia, and beyond.

Last week alone, though, 1.6 million people newly applied for unemployment benefits. That’s the equivalent of 2,300 Carrier plants

Somehow, for years, the four tragic deaths in Benghazi consumed the agenda of six GOP-controlled congressional committees and the programming of the most-watched cable news channel. But today, a deadly shock magnified by government ineptitude that has led to 46,000 times as many lives lost “is what it is.”

the coronavirus death toll is about 46,000 Benghazis

According to congressional investigators, Navarro negotiated a contract that resulted in the government overpaying for ventilators by $500 million. (The contract was canceled Monday.) He also championed a $765 million federal loan to Eastman Kodak to transform it into a drugmaker. (The loan has since unraveled and is the subject of a securities investigation.)

So how many taxpayer dollars was Navarro involved in wasting through these two deals alone? Measured in units that should be familiar to consumers of right-wing news, it’s roughly two Solyndras.

The debt increase under Trump during a single term is on track to surpass that under Obama across two terms.

For each Hillary Clinton private email scandal (one), there are at least eight senior Trump officials who have reportedly used private email to conduct official business

For every Obama-era incident involving supposed retaliation against political opponents, there are literally dozens of instances of Trump trying to use the power of his office to punish perceived enemie

The faith of those who believed in Progress was based on the assumption that one could discern a purpose to the human enterprise, even without the theological scaffolding that supported the Christian edifice of belief. Science and technology were the chief instruments of Progress, and · i.Lac_cumulation of reliable in orma on a out nature _1b_n, would bring ignorance, superstition, and suffering to an end.

In T ~chnopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quesUo "accesTinformation.

But the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver. It solved the problez:n of information scarcity, the disadvantages o_f wh~s~ious. But it gave no wami g_ahout the dan_gers of information7rttn,

!:ion of what is called a_ curriculum was a logical step toward 1./ organizing, limiting, and discriminating among available sources of information. Schools became technocracy's first secular bureaucracies, structures for legitimizing some parts of the flow of infgrmatiQD and di"s.ci.e.diling other earts. School;;ere, in short, a ~eans of governing the ecology of information.

it is why in _a TechnoE,.oly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence.

There were several reasons for the rapid growth of the common school, but none was more obvious than that it was a necessary response to the anxiefies and confusion aroused by information on the loose. The inven-

The milieu in which T echnopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., inf~rmation appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds; and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.

Abetted ~~orm of ed~~on that in itself has been em _lie~any co~e~ent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, p·olitical, historical, mefaphys1cal, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.

There is not a single line written by Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Hamilton, or Franklin that does not take for granted that when information is made available to citizens they are capable of managing it. This is not to say that the Founding Fathers believed information could not be false, misleading, or irrelevant. But they believed that the marketplace of infonpation and ideas was sufficiently ordered so that citizens could make sense of what they read and heard and, through reason, judge ·its μsefulness to their lives. Jefferson's proposals for education, Paine'~ arguments for self-governance, Franklin's arrangements for community affairs assume coherent, commonly shared principles.that allow us to debate such questions as: What are the responsibilities of citizens? What is the nature of education? What constitutes human progress? What are the limitations of social structures?

New forms of public discourse came into being through newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and books.

First Amendment to the United States Constitution stands as a monument to the ideolo_g~~ print. It says: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." In these forty-five words we may find the fundamental values of the literate, reasoning_giind as fostered by the print revolution: a belief in privacy, individuality, intellectual freedom, open criticism, and ~.' adio .

telegraphy created the idea of context-free . 1 informatig_n::= that fs'~the idea that the value of information need ;;~t be ti~ to any function it might serve in social and political

decision-making and action. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a "thing" that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. 2

a new definition qf information came into being. Here was information that rejected the necessit ·of interco~nectedness, proceeded without conte~rgued for instancy against historic continuity, and offere · ascination· in place of corn !exit and cohe ence.

the fourth stage of the information revolution occurred, broadcasting. And then the fifth, computer technology. Each of these brought with it new forms of information, unpre~edented amounts of it, and increased speeds

photography was invented at approximately the same time a~phy, and initiated the Ehi:rd stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it "the graphic revolution," bec~use the photograph and other ico~ogr~phs br~ on a massive intrusion of ima es into the symbolic environment:

~ the beginning of the seventeenth century, an entirely new information environment had been created by_12rint

It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon ex~sed it, has been g~ by the idea of technological progress.

echnopoly is a state of cttlture., It is also a st~te of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in te0,~logy, finds · .atisf~tions in technolo , and takes its orders from technolog-¥,

Th_e relationship between information and the mechanisms ( for its control is fairly simple ~ec · ·ology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, \ control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mech\ anisms ~re needed to cope with new information. When addi1 tional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in tum I further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.

any decline in the force of i~~~ti'?n_s makes people vulnerable to information chaos. 1 To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confu;~n rather than coherence.

T echnop_oly, then, is to say it is what h~pens to society when the defe~ainst informati;~ glut have broken down.

the school as a mechanism for information control. What its standards are can usually be found in, a curriculum or, with even more clarity, in a course catalogue. A college catalogue lists courses, subjects, and fields of study that, taken together, amount to a certified statement of what a serious student ought to think about.

In the West, the family as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject become available, parent_~ were forced int°._the roles of guard-· ians'... protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. \ Their function was to define what it means to be a child by \ excluding from the family's domain information that would 1. undermine its purpose.

all_ theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family's conception of a child. T~~t is the funt!ion _o._Ltheories-_ to o~~~~ip:lp}}_fy, and thus to assist believers in_ organiziDg, weighting, _ _an~_ excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories.

The political party is another.

The most imposing institutions for the control of information are religio!1 ~nd the st~J:f, .. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. The_y m?n~g~__Ji;1formation throug~ creation of mytJ:is and stories that express theories about funq1m1entaf question_s_:_ __ 10:_hy are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed?

any educational institution, if it is to function well in the mana~~nt of information, must have a theory about its purpose and meaning-'. .!n'!::!Sl. have the means to give clear expression to its_ theory, and must do so, to a large extent, by excluding information.

Those who reject the Bible's theory and who believe, let us say, in the theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion.

thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent; narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology.

In the r case of the United States, the great eighteenth-century revolution was not indifferent to commodity capitalism but was nonetheless infused with profound moral content. The U~!ed States was not merely an experiment in a new form of governance; it wai1nefu1fillmenl-oFGocf s plan. True, Adams, Jeffe;son, and Painere1ected-fne supernatural elements in the Bible,· but they never doubted that their experiment had the imprimatur of \ Providence. People were to be free but for a eurp_9se. Their [ God~giv_e~ig[ifs im li~_? obli ations and responsibilities, not L onfytoGod but to other nations, to which the new republic would be a guide and a showcase of what is possible-w~en reason and spirituality commingle.

American Technopoly must rel,y, to an obsessive extent, on technica( ~ethods to control the flow of information. Three such means merit speci attention.

Francis Fukuyama is wrong. There is another ideological conflict to be fought-between "liberal democracy" as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and T echnopoly, a twentieth-century

in at- ~ tempting to make the most rational use of information, bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency

in principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing.

The transformation of bureaucracy from a set of techniques·> designecfto serve social ~tutions to an auton-;;mous metainstitution that largely serves itself came as a result of several developments in the mid-andlate-nineteenth century: rapid ../ industrial growth, improvements in transportation and commu- ·✓ nication, the extension of government into ever-larger realms of V public and business affairs, the increasing centralization of gov- v ernmental structures.

Along the way, it ceased to be merely a servant of social institutions an

became ~ their master. Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our problems are---and they arec!.lways, in the bureaucra!!c view, problems of l . , efficiency.

Th_~-role of t!;_e ~xpert is to concentrate o_l}_one_ .H~ld of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that -.--:-: __ __:~---------which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left !Q. !!§Sist in solving a probl~.

Institutions ca~~aked~cisions on the basis of scores and. sfatistics, and. there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. But unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism-that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience-they are delusionary.

The god they serve does not speak \ of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

“The curriculum covers topics from causal modeling and probability to game theory and cognitive science,” read a website promising teens a summer of Rationalist learning. “How can we understand our own reasoning, behavior, and emotions? How can we think more clearly and better achieve our goals?”

Some lived in group houses. Some practiced polyamory. “They are basically just hippies who talk a lot more about Bayes’ theorem than the original hippies,” said Scott Aaronson, a University of Texas professor who has stayed in one of the group houses.

For Kelsey Piper, who embraced these ideas in high school, around 2010, the movement was about learning “how to do good in a world that changes very rapidly.”

Yes, the community thought about A.I., she said, but it also thought about reducing the price of health care and slowing the spread of disease.

Slate Star Codex, which sprung up in 2013, helped her develop a “calibrated trust” in the medical system. Many people she knew, she said, felt duped by psychiatrists, for example, who they felt weren’t clear about the costs and benefits of certain treatment.

That was not the Rationalist way.

“There is something really appealing about somebody explaining where a lot of those ideas are coming from and what a lot of the questions are,” she said.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab backed by a billion dollars from Microsoft. He was effusive in his praise of the blog.It was, he said, essential reading among “the people inventing the future” in the tech industry.

Mr. Altman, who had risen to prominence as the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, moved on to other subjects before hanging up. But he called back. He wanted to talk about an essay that appeared on the blog in 2014.The essay was a critique of what Mr. Siskind, writing as Scott Alexander, described as “the Blue Tribe.” In his telling, these were the people at the liberal end of the political spectrum whose characteristics included “supporting gay rights” and “getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots.”

But as the man behind Slate Star Codex saw it, there was one group the Blue Tribe could not tolerate: anyone who did not agree with the Blue Tribe. “Doesn’t sound quite so noble now, does it?” he wrote.

Mr. Altman thought the essay nailed a big problem: In the face of the “internet mob” that guarded against sexism and racism, entrepreneurs had less room to explore new ideas. Many of their ideas, such as intelligence augmentation and genetic engineering, ran afoul of the Blue Tribe.

Mr. Siskind was not a member of the Blue Tribe. He was not a voice from the conservative Red Tribe (“opposing gay marriage,” “getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies”). He identified with something called the Grey Tribe — as did many in Silicon Valley.

The Grey Tribe was characterized by libertarian beliefs, atheism, “vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up,” and “reading lots of blogs,” he wrote. Most significantly, it believed in absolute free speech.

The essay on these tribes, Mr. Altman told me, was an inflection point for Silicon Valley. “It was a moment that people talked about a lot, lot, lot,” he said.

And in some ways, two of the world’s prominent A.I. labs — organizations that are tackling some of the tech industry’s most ambitious and potentially powerful projects — grew out of the Rationalist movement.

In 2005, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, befriended Mr. Yudkowsky and gave money to MIRI. In 2010, at Mr. Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse, Mr. Yudkowsky introduced him to a pair of young researchers named Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis. That fall, with an investment from Mr. Thiel’s firm, the two created an A.I. lab called DeepMind.

Like the Rationalists, they believed that A.I could end up turning against humanity, and because they held this belief, they felt they were among the only ones who were prepared to build it in a safe way.

In 2014, Google bought DeepMind for $650 million. The next year, Elon Musk — who also worried A.I. could destroy the world and met his partner, Grimes, because they shared an interest in a Rationalist thought experiment — founded OpenAI as a DeepMind competitor. Both labs hired from the Rationalist community.

Mr. Aaronson, the University of Texas professor, was turned off by the more rigid and contrarian beliefs of the Rationalists, but he is one of the blog’s biggest champions and deeply admired that it didn’t avoid live-wire topics.

“It must have taken incredible guts for Scott to express his thoughts, misgivings and questions about some major ideological pillars of the modern world so openly, even if protected by a quasi-pseudonym,” he said

In late June of last year, not long after talking to Mr. Altman, the OpenAI chief executive, I approached the writer known as Scott Alexander, hoping to get his views on the Rationalist way and its effect on Silicon Valley. That was when the blog vanished.

The issue, it was clear to me, was that I told him I could not guarantee him the anonymity he’d been writing with. In fact, his real name was easy to find because people had shared it online for years and he had used it on a piece he’d written for a scientific journal. I did a Google search for Scott Alexander and one of the first results I saw in the auto-complete list was Scott Alexander Siskind.

More than 7,500 people signed a petition urging The Times not to publish his name, including many prominent figures in the tech industry. “Putting his full name in The Times,” the petitioners said, “would meaningfully damage public discourse, by discouraging private citizens from sharing their thoughts in blog form.” On the internet, many in Silicon Valley believe, everyone has the right not only to say what they want but to say it anonymously.

I spoke with Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a computer science researcher who explores social networks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He was worried that Slate Star Codex, like other communities, was allowing extremist views to trickle into the influential tech world. “A community like this gives voice to fringe groups,” he said. “It gives a platform to people who hold more extreme views.”

I assured her my goal was to report on the blog, and the Rationalists, with rigor and fairness. But she felt that discussing both critics and supporters could be unfair. What I needed to do, she said, was somehow prove statistically which side was right.

When I asked Mr. Altman if the conversation on sites like Slate Star Codex could push people toward toxic beliefs, he said he held “some empathy” for these concerns. But, he added, “people need a forum to debate ideas.”

In August, Mr. Siskind restored his old blog posts to the internet. And two weeks ago, he relaunched his blog on Substack, a company with ties to both Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. He gave the blog a new title: Astral Codex Ten. He hinted that Substack paid him $250,000 for a year on the platform. And he indicated the company would give him all the protection he needed.

It’s a lesson to remember as we watch the crypto space melt down, with ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried

It’s not like perfidy in crypto was some hidden secret. At the top of the market, back in December 2021, I wrote a piece very explicitly saying that crypto was a set of Ponzi schemes. It went viral, and I got a huge amount of hate mail from crypto types

one of the more bizarre aspects of the crypto meltdown is the deep anger not just at those who perpetrated it, but at those who were trying to stop the scam from going on. For instance, here’s crypto exchange Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who just a year ago was fighting regulators vehemently, blaming the cops for allowing gambling in the casino he helps run.

FTX.com was an offshore exchange not regulated by the SEC. The problem is that the SEC failed to create regulatory clarity here in the US, so many American investors (and 95% of trading activity) went offshore. Punishing US companies for this makes no sense.

many crypto ‘enthusiasts’ watching Gensler discuss regulation with his predecessor “called for their incarceration or worse.”

Cryptocurrencies are securities, and should fit under securities law, which would have imposed rules that would foster a de facto ban of the entire space. But since regulators had not actually treated them as securities for the last ten years, a whole new gray area of fake law had emerged

Almost as soon as he took office, Gensler sought to fix this situation, and treat them as securities. He began investigating important players

But the legal wrangling to just get the courts to treat crypto as a set of speculative instruments regulated under securities law made the law moot

In May of 2022, a year after Gensler began trying to do something about Terra/Luna, Kwon’s scheme blew up. In a comically-too-late-to-matter gesture, an appeals court then said that the SEC had the right to compel information from Kwon’s now-bankrupt scheme. It is absolute lunacy that well-settled law, like the ability for the SEC to investigate those in the securities business, is now being re-litigated.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in April of 2021 with a deep background in Wall Street, regulatory policy, and crypto, which he had taught at MIT years before joining the SEC. Gensler came in with the goal of implementing the rule of law in the crypto space, which he knew was full of scams and based on unproven technology. Yesterday, on CNBC, he was again confronted with Andrew Ross Sorkin essentially asking, “Why were you going after minor players when this Ponzi scheme was so flagrant?”

it wasn’t just the courts who were an impediment. Gensler wasn’t the only cop on the beat. Other regulators, like those at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, or the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, not only refused to take action, but actively defended their regulatory turf against an attempt from the SEC to stop the scams.

Behind this was the fist of political power. Everyone saw the incentives the Senate laid down when every single Republican, plus a smattering of Democrats, defeated the nomination of crypto-skeptic Saule Omarova in becoming the powerful bank regulator at the Comptroller of the Currency

Instead of strong figures like Omarova, we had a weakling acting Comptroller Michael Hsu at the OCC, put there by the excessively cautious Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Hsu refused to stop bank interactions with crypto or fintech because, as he told Congress in 2021, “These trends cannot be stopped.”

It’s not just these regulators; everyone wanted a piece of the bureaucratic pie. In March of 2022, before it all unraveled, the Biden administration issued an executive order on crypto. In it, Biden said that virtually every single government agency would have a hand in the space.

That’s… insane. If everyone’s in charge, no one is.

And behind all of these fights was the money and political prestige of some most powerful people in Silicon Valley, who were funding a large political fight to write the rules for crypto, with everyone from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to former SEC Chair Mary Jo White on the payroll.

(Even now, even after it was all revealed as a Ponzi scheme, Congress is still trying to write rules favorable to the industry. It’s like, guys, stop it. There’s no more bribe money!)

Moreover, the institution Gensler took over was deeply weakened. Since the Reagan administration, wave after wave of political leader at the SEC has gutted the place and dumbed down the enforcers. Courts have tied up the commission in knots, and Congress has defanged it

Under Trump crypto exploded, because his SEC chair Jay Clayton had no real policy on crypto (and then immediately went into the industry after leaving.) The SEC was so dormant that when Gensler came into office, some senior lawyers actually revolted over his attempt to make them do work.

In other words, the regulators were tied up in the courts, they were against an immensely powerful set of venture capitalists who have poured money into Congress and D.C., they had feeble legal levers, and they had to deal with ‘crypto enthusiasts' who thought they should be jailed or harmed for trying to impose basic rules around market manipulation.

The bottom line is, Gensler is just one regulator, up against a lot of massed power, money, and bad institutional habits. And we as a society simply made the choice through our elected leaders to have little meaningful law enforcement in financial markets, which first became blindingly obvious in 2008 during the financial crisis, and then became comical ten years later when a sector whose only real use cases were money laundering

, Ponzi scheming or buying drugs on the internet, managed to rack up enough political power to bring Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to a conference held in a tax haven billed as ‘the future.’