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The second notable takeaway is that even children of parents from very poor countries like Nigeria and Laos outperform the children of the U.S.-born raised in similar households. The children of immigrants from Central American countries—countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua that are often demonized for contributing to the “crisis” at the southern border—move up faster than the children of the U.S.-born, landing in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada).

To conduct our analysis, we needed data that links children to parents. For the historical data, we used historical census records to link sons living in their childhood homes to census data collected 30 years later when these young men had jobs of their own.

Our modern data is based on federal income tax records instead. The tax records allow researchers to link children to their parents as tax dependents, and then observe these children in the tax data as adults.

The first striking takeaway is that, as a group, children of immigrants achieve more upward mobility than the children of U.S.-born fathers. We focus on the children of white U.S.-born fathers because the children of Black fathers tend to have lower rates of upward mobility. So, the mobility advantage that we observe for the children of immigrants would be even larger if we compared this group to the full population.

Children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic today are just as likely to move up from their parents’ circumstances as were children of poor Swedes and Finns a hundred years ago.

Today, we might not be that surprised to learn that the children of past European immigrants succeeded. We are used to seeing the descendants of poor European immigrants rise to become members of the business and cultural elite. Many prominent leaders, including politicians like President Biden, regularly emphasize pride in their Irish or Italian heritage. But, at the time, these groups were considered the poorest of the poor. In their flight from famine, Irish immigrants are not too dissimilar from immigrants who flee hurricanes, earthquakes, and violent uprisings today.

One question that arises with our work is: what about children who arrive without papers? Undocumented children face more barriers to mobility than other children of immigrants. Fortunately, this group is relatively small even in recent years: only 1.5 million (or five percent) of the 32 million children of immigrant parents are undocumented today. Indeed, this number is small because many children of undocumented immigrants are born in the U.S. and thus are granted citizenship at birth.

What enables the children of immigrants to escape poor circumstances and move up the economic ladder? The answer we hear most often is that immigrants have a better work ethic than the US-born and that immigrant parents put more emphasis on education.

U.S.-born parents who were raised down the block, or in the same town. This pattern implies that the primary difference between immigrant families and the families of the U.S.-born is in where they choose to live.

Ironically, J.D. Vance (who is now running for Senate in Ohio on an anti-immigration platform) poses this question in his bestseller Hillbilly Elegy,aboutgrowing up in Middletown, Ohio, only 45 minutes from the border with Kentucky, the state where his family had lived for generations. For Vance, moving up the ladder meant moving out of his childhood community, a step that many Americans are unwilling to take. He went on to enlist in the Marines, and then to Ohio State and Yale Law School—“Though we sing the praises of social mobility,” he writes, “it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something.”

Adapted from Abramitzky and Boustan’s new book Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success

Serious psychological distress and suicide-related thoughts or actions also rose by 70 percent in young adults, from 7.7 percent to 13.1 percent

The percentages for older adults remained stable over the same period, indicating that whatever is driving the changes is disproportionately affecting those who are young

“cultural trends in the last 10 years may have had a larger effect on mood disorders and suicide-related outcomes among younger people

found the greatest upticks in young people who were wealthier and female.

they occurred during a period of economic expansion and at a time when drug and alcohol use among young people has been unchanged or decreasing.

the increases may be linked to increased time spent on social media and electronic communication, along with a decrease in the sleep young people are getting

“Social media has moved from being something that about half of teens were using every day to something almost all teens are doing every day,”

“It used to be an optional thing, and now, especially among girls, it’s virtually mandatory,”

she called social media “the perfect place to be verbally aggressive,” which can contribute to depression and low self-esteem.

Jared Roseman, 20, a German and linguistics major at Georgetown, who described himself as “a generally kind of anxious person,” said constantly viewing the curated images of friends’ lives can skew one’s sense of self. “It creates a false sense of reality so that many people start to doubt themselves.”

Social media plays into an innate human and animal preoccupation with hierarchy, said Joshua Coleman, a psychologist in Oakland, Calif., and a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families. “It offers almost a minute-to-minute update on your social status,” he said. “Every interaction you have is rated, and that’s basically what life is like for young people these days.

“the message being transmitted by parents is that the world is a dangerous place.”

“Children aren’t really being allowed to be exposed to the idea that you can survive stress . . . so all of this could be affecting children’s ability to feel resilient and be resilient to everyday stressors,”

The increase in adolescent depression was higher among wealthier people, rising 79 percent between 2010 and 2017 in the highest income bracket, to 14.1 percent, while increasing 55 percent, to 15.3 percent, in the lowest income group during the same period.

“Maintaining your parents’ standard of living is harder than it was 20 years ago,” she said. “They feel, ‘I have to get into that top university that my parents attended, and if I don’t, I have no life, I will be left behind, I won’t be able to support myself.’ ”

Lydia Turnage, 23, who graduated from Georgetown last year and is now a law student at Columbia University, said among her peers a bachelor’s degree is so common these days that getting one feels less momentous than it might have a generation or two back.

“All this work to try to get to this place, and then it feels like you’re just checking a box; it doesn’t really get you anything meaningful,” she said. “It’s caused a feeling — I don’t want to say hopelessness, but cynicism.”

That feeling is compounded by the pressure to already have a job lined up after college, she said. “It’s definitely a conversation that students are having a lot more.

Despite the increase in distress indicators, he said, the overall percentages are still low.

I’m not willing to say that we have a widespread problem on our hands when it’s only 13 percent of the population.”

“We are living at a time of massive inequality, where the key to social mobility in our country is higher education, but access to higher education has not expanded,” he said. “Kids sense that their futures are very uncertain, and that’s also anxiety-producing.”

Turnage said she wishes there were a better solution to stress than “just Band-Aid fixes.”

“A lot of students feel like that’s not really helpful at the end of the day, like figuring out a way to stop it from happening is more important than trying to do something about it as it’s happening,”

One solution she came up with for herself was quitting Instagram a couple of months ago. “I just felt like every time I went on it, it just made me unhappy,” she said. “I just took it off my phone. And I can tell there’s a big difference in just day-to-day mood. It really does make a difference.”

Pinker refuses to do this. In his new book, “Enlightenment Now,” he argues that this pose is dishonest toward the facts.

Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all.

Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent.

There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent

“When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by 90 percent since 1960,” Pinker writes

Our numbers look bad because so much of our health care spending is funneled through employers, but when you add this private social spending to state social spending, America has the second-highest level of such spending of the 35 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, after France.

He calls himself an Enlightenment man, but he’s really a scientific rationalist. He puts tremendous emphasis on the value of individual reason. The key to progress is information — making ourselves better informed. The key sin in the world is a result either of entropy, the randomness that is built into any system, or faith — dogma clouding reason.

The big problem with his rationalistic worldview is that while he charts the way individuals have benefited over the centuries, he spends barely any time on the quality of the relationships between individuals.

Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness.

It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres.

today’s situation reminds us of the weakness of the sort Cartesian rationalism Pinker champions and represents. Conscious reason can get you only so far when tribal emotions have been aroused, when existential fears rain down, when narcissistic impulses have been given free rein, when spiritual longings have nowhere healthy to go, when social trust has been devastated, when all the unconscious networks that make up 99 percent of our thinking are aflame and disordered.

At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”

As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families

The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken.

The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease

s a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care.

What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy.

The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society.

That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat.

Most interestingly, Americans still don’t care that much. Sure, two-thirds say they are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed, according to Gallup. Still, more than three out of five — compared with just over half six years ago — are satisfied with “the opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard.”

As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.

Unequipped to cope with the demands of a labor market in furious transformation, they will give “social mobility” a new, all-American meaning: the tendency to move in and out of prison. It’s hard to believe any country could waste so many resources and prosper.

Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.

The impact of the nation’s fundamental paradox mostly fails the nonwhite and the poor. Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.

The children of poverty who survive will most likely hobble through life with mediocre educations — lagging their more affluent peers even before their first day in school and then falling farther behind, deprived of the resources that disadvantaged children in other advanced nations routinely enjoy.

Or let’s measure our progress in terms of infant deaths. Scientists in the United States invented many of the technologies used around the world to keep vulnerable babies alive. So how come our infant mortality rate is higher than that of every nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the exceptions of Mexico, Chile and Turkey?

America is doubling down on its exceptionalism. The rich got a tax break. Bankers got a break from the pesky rules written in the shadow of the financial crisis to protect the little guy. The poor and near poor were freed from their ability to afford health insurance.

populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.

This creates an effect that should be familiar to any economist: the laws of supply and demand raise the value of women’s erotic capital, in particular their beauty, sex appeal and sexual competence. It is happening in Scandinavia as well as Mediterranean countries, in China and the US. The pattern is confirmed even in countries that are sexually “liberated” such as Finland and France. Men are two to ten times more likely to have affairs, buy pornography, seek lap-dancing clubs and erotic entertainments. And call girls’ earnings can exceed wages in nearly all the professions, despite working shorter hours.

This is an implicit rebuttal to feminist thinkers (like Sylvia Walby, Mary Evans, Monique Wittig or most recently Kat Banyard) who argue that men and women are “equal” in their sexual interest, as in everything else. This is obviously not true, which is why it should not surprise us that some women do use sex, and their erotic capital more generally, to get what they want.

The economic benefits of being physically and socially attractive can be substantial, especially in marketing, public relations, television, advocacy in the courts, as well as for actors, singers and dancers. But it’s broader than this: people working in the better-paid parts of the private sector are more attractive than those in the public and non-profit sectors. Tall and attractive people are more likely to be employed in professional jobs, like law or banking. For the ugly and short, it gets worse. Good-looking people can earn 10 to 15 per cent more than the average-looking, who in turn can earn 10 to 15 per cent more than the plain or ugly. The tall earn more than the short; the obese have earnings 10 to 15 per cent below average. Statistical analysis shows this beauty premium is not really just about cleverly disguised differences in intelligence, social class or self-confidence. Studies of lawyers reveal that there is always a premium for attractiveness that varies in size, but is not due to employer discrimination. The most attractive can earn 12 per cent more than the unattractive, and are 20 per cent more likely to achieve partnership in their firm, because they are more effective at pulling in customers.

there is a 25 percentage point difference in average earnings between unattractive and attractive minorities. This impact can be as big as the gap between having a degree and no qualifications at all—although it ranks well below intelligence as a determinant of life outcomes.

erotic capital—if seen as an economic endowment—is an especially important asset for people with few intellectual abilities and qualifications. In Brazil, investing in cosmetic surgery is seen as a sensible way of getting ahead in a culture where looks and sensuality count. In Britain, too, a 2009 survey of teenage girls found that one-quarter think it is more important to be beautiful than clever.

The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it. The way he’s embraced the term socialist has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion

In an age when more and more people are working as entrepreneurs or on short-term projects, and when global competition is requiring all citizens to be better prepared to handle economic turbulence, every nation needs to ensure that its people have the education, health care, and other support structures they need to take risks, start businesses, and build a better future for themselves and for their country. It’s simply a matter of keeping up with the times.

as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism.

the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government.

In the U.S., supporters of not only Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, but also of Donald Trump, are worried about exactly the kinds of problems that universal social policies can help solve: worsening income inequality, shrinking opportunity, the decline of the middle class, and the survival of the ordinary family in the face of globalization. What America needs right now, desperately, isn’t to keep fighting the socialist bogeymen of the past, but to see the future

But the system has come at a cost. To maintain their competitive advantage in the global market, companies held down wages. Though for skilled workers in the export-oriented manufacturing sector pay remained stable, or even rose, less-skilled and low-wage workers suffered. This was made possible by decentralizing collective bargaining in the 1990s, which greatly weakened the power of unions

the erosion of the German social model in recent decades. Though never as socially inclusive as the Scandinavian countries, postwar Germany had a comprehensive welfare state and robust labor unions, ensuring that citizens from the lower strata could achieve a decent living standard and a bit of wealth through full-time employment.

full-time employment served as the foundation of social integration. The classic metaphor to describe this arrangement was coined by the sociologist Ulrich Beck in the 1980s: the “elevator effect.” It implied that though social inequality still existed, everyone was rising in the same social “elevator,” meaning that the gap between rich and poor wouldn’t widen.

Thirty years later, this society has vanished. Average real incomes declined for nearly 20 years beginning in 1993. Germany not only grew more unequal, but the standard of living for the lower strata stagnated or even fell. The lowest 40 percent of households have faced annual net income losses for around 25 years now, while the kinds of jobs that promised long-term stability dwindled.

The number of precarious jobs like temp positions has exploded. At the height of postwar prosperity, almost 90 percent of jobs offered permanent employment with protections. By 2014, the figure had fallen to 68.3 percent.

nearly one-third of all workers have insecure or short-term jobs. Moreover, a low-wage sector emerged employing millions of workers who can barely afford basic necessities and often need two jobs to get by.

Though the upper-middle class still enjoys a high level of security, the lower middle contends with a very real risk of downward mobility. The relatively new phenomenon of a contracting — and internally divided — middle class has set off widespread anxiety.

Germany today now resembles a bank of escalators in a department store: one escalator has already taken some well-to-do customers to the upper floor, while for those below them, the direction of travel begins to reverse. The daily experience of many is characterized by constant running up a downward escalator. Even when people work hard and stick to the rules, they often make little progress.

a majority of Germans welcomed the new immigrants, just over two million in number, who arrived in 2015. But significant sections of the lower middle and the working class disapproved. When ascent no longer seems possible and collective social protest is almost nonexistent or ineffective, people tend to grow resentful. This has led to accumulated dissatisfaction with the old major parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

we see the classic “Confucian values” (or “Asian values”) argument that has historically been deployed to explain everything from the economic success of East Asian nations to the prevalence of authoritarian single-party rule in Asia, and even, most recently, China’s supposed edge in AI research.

So, yeah, kudos to Taiwan for keeping its people safe, but here in America we’re going to do what we always do in a crisis—line up at a gun store and accuse the opposing political party of acting in bad faith. Not for us, those Asian values.

But the truth is that Taiwan, one of Asia’s most vibrant and boisterous democracies, is a terrible example to cite as a cultural other populated by submissive peons

Taiwan’s self-confidence and collective solidarity trace back to its triumphal self-liberation from its own authoritarian past, its ability to thrive in the shadow of a massive, hostile neighbor that refuses to recognize its right to chart its own path, and its track record of learning from existential threats.

There is no doubt that in January it would have been difficult for the US to duplicate Taiwan’s containment strategy, but that’s not because Americans are inherently more ornery than Taiwanese

It’s because the United States has a miserable record when it comes to learning from its own mistakes and suffers from a debilitating lack of faith in the notion that the government can solve problems—something that dates at least as far back as the moment in 1986 when Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

The Taiwan-US comparison is the opposite of a clash of civilizations; instead, it’s a deathly showdown between competence and incompetence.

To be fair, there are some cultural aspects of East Asian societies that may work in Taiwan’s favor

There is undeniably a long tradition in East Asia of elevating scholars and experts to the highest levels of government,

The country’s president Tsai Ingwen, boasts a PhD from the London School of Economics, and the vice president, Chen Chien-jen, is a highly regarded epidemiologist

The threat of SARS put Taiwan on high alert for future outbreaks, while the past record of success at meeting such challenges seems to have encouraged the public to accept socially intrusive technological interventions.

First, and most important was Taiwan’s experience battling the SARS outbreak in 2003, followed by the swine flu in 2009

“Taiwan actually has a functioning democratic government, run by sensible, well-educated people—the USA? Not so much.”)

Taiwan’s commitment to transparency has also been critical

In the United States, the Trump administration ordered federal health authorities to treat high-level discussions on the coronavirus as classified material.

In Taiwan, the government has gone to great lengths to keep citizens well informed on every aspect of the outbreak, including daily press conferences and an active presence on social media

“Do not forget that Taiwan has been under China’s threat constantly,” wrote Wang Cheng-hua, a professor of art history at Princeton, “which has raised social consciousness about collective action. When the collective will supports government, then all of the strict measures implemented by the government make sense.”

Over the past quarter-century, Taiwan’s government has nurtured public trust by its actions and its transparency.

The democracy activists who risked their lives and careers during the island nation’s martial law era were not renowned for their willingness to accept government orders or preach Confucian social harmony

some of the current willingness to trust what the government is telling the people is the direct “result of having experienced the transition from an authoritarian government that lied all the time, to a democratic government and robust political dialogue that forced people to be able to evaluate information.”

Because of the opposition of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations or the World Health Organization

“The reality of being isolated from global organizations,” wrote Tung, “also makes Taiwanese very aware of the publicity of its success in handling a crisis like this. The more coverage from foreign media, the more people feel confident in government policy and social mobilization.”

Given what we know about Taiwan’s hard-won historical experience, could the US have implemented a similar model?

The answer, sadly, seems to be no

it would be impossible for the US to successfully integrate a health care database with customs and travel records because there is no national health care database in the United States. “The US health care system is fragmented, making it difficult to organize, integrate, and assess data coming in from its various government and private-sector parts,”

more tellingly, continued Fidler, “the manner in which the United States has responded to Covid-19 demonstrates that the United States did not learn the lessons from past outbreaks and is struggling to cobble together a semblance of a strategy. ”

There’s where the contrast between the United States and Taiwan becomes most salient. The US is not only bad at the act of government but has actively been getting worse.

But Taiwan’s own success at building a functional democracy is probably the most potent rebuke to the Asian values thesis.

But over that same period, powerful political and economic interests in the US have dedicated themselves to undermining faith in government action, in favor of deregulated markets that have no capacity to react intelligently or proactively to existential threats.

And instead of learning from history, US leaders actively ignore it, a truth for which there could be no better symbolic proof than the Trump administration’s dismantling of the National Security Council pandemic office created by the Obama administration in the wake of the Ebola outbreak

Finally, instead of seeking to keep the public informed to the best of our ability, some of our political leaders and media institutions have gone out of their way to muddy the waters.

In Taiwan, one early government response to the Covid-19 outbreak was to institute a fine of $100,000 for the act of spreading fake news about the epidemic.

In the US the most popular television news network in the country routinely downplayed or misrepresented the threat of the coronavirus, until the severity of the outbreak became too large to ignore.

If there is any silver lining here, it’s that the disaster now upon us is of such immense scope that it could finally expose the folly of the structural forces that have been wreaking sustained havoc on American governmental institutions

So maybe we are finally about to learn that competence matters, that educated leaders are a virtue, and that telling the truth is a responsibility

Americans might have to learn this the hard way, like we did in Hong Kong and Singapore.”

We’re about to find out how hard it’s going to be. But will we learn?

Rorty sympathizes with the reasons that an ascendant Leftist faction lost faith in American institutions. He is as horrified as they are by the historic treatment of indigenous people and African Americans, and by America’s behavior in the Vietnam War.

But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate.

Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old “that has served human liberty well.” It would help, for example, “if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.”

If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice.

he criticizes the identity politics of the left for developing a politics “more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,” because many of the dispossessed are thereby ignored.

Surveying academia, for example, he observes that “nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.”

For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help. “The gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will very likely be wiped out,” he worried. “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

To avoid that future, to compete in national politics, Rorty believed that the Left would have to find a way to better address the consequences of globalization, and that it could only do so by “opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions.

What’s more, the Left “would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma.” In service of that transition, he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and  to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”

The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique…

it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.

disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’” This obsession with power elicited scathing words:

in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-sate is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions

Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms.

Instead, “the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.

its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner

The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us—black, white, and brown—are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such. This strategy gave rise to the “platoon” movies, which showed Americans of various ethnic backgrounds fighting and dying side by side.

the contemporary cultural Left urges that America should not be a melting-pot, because we need to respect one another in our differences. This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than to ignore it… If the Cultural left insists on continuing its present strategy––on asking us to respect one another in our differences rather than asking us to cease noting those differences––then it will have to find a new way of creating a sense of commonality at the level of national politics. For only a rhetoric of commonality can forge a winning majority in national elections.

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites.

These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it. I think that the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy.

This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

Our national character is still in the making. Few in 1897 would have predicted the Progressive Movement, the forty-hour week, Women’s Suffrage, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Movement, the successes of second-wave feminism, or the Gay Rights Movement. Nobody in 1997 can know that America will not, in the course of the next century, witness even greater moral progress.

The recipes for breaking this intergenerational trap are clear: a nurturing environment in the early years combined with accessible and high-quality health care and education promote the capacities of young children, heighten the development of their skills as they grow older, and ultimately raise their chances of upward mobility.

The 1 percent are an important touchstone for these upper-middle-class families, who after all have also experienced significant growth in their relative standing

An era of higher inequality gives them both more resources to promote the capacities of their children, and more incentive to make these investments since their children now have all the more to gain. It is not unreasonable for these aspiring families to believe that with a little more effort they may yet cross the threshold into the top 1 percent, and they can certainly imagine that their children stand just as good a chance, if not better.

For them, an American dream based on effort, talent and just deserts still lives, and as a result they are likely to be less and less predisposed, with their considerable cultural and political influence, to support the recasting of American public policy to meet its most pressing need: the prospects of those at the bottom.

The new CDC guidance says fully vaccinated people can:Read MoreVisit other vaccinated people indoors without masks or physical distancingVisit indoors with unvaccinated people from a single household without masks or physical distancing, if the unvaccinated people are at low risk for severe disease.

Skip quarantine and testing if exposed to someone who has Covid-19 but are asymptomatic, but should monitor for symptoms for 14 daysThis means that vaccinated grandparents may finally feel comfortable visiting their unvaccinated grandchildren and giving them a big hug, especially if they're local -- the CDC still says people should avoid travel -- and as long as none of the unvaccinated people in that household are at risk for severe Covid-19.

However, people who are fully vaccinated still need to take precautions in many scenarios. The guidelines say fully vaccinated people must:Wear a mask and keep good physical distance around the unvaccinated who are at increased risk for severe Covid-19, or if the unvaccinated person has a household member who is at higher riskWear masks and physically distance when visiting unvaccinated people who are from multiple households.

If fully vaccinated people live in a non-health care congregate setting, such as a group home or detention facility, they should quarantine for 14 days and get tested if exposed to someone with a suspected or confirmed Covid-19 case.The guidelines say that the risk of infection in social activities like going to the gym or restaurant is lower for the fully vaccinated. However, people should still take precautions, as transmission risk in these settings is higher and increases the more unvaccinated people are involved. So wear that mask on the treadmill, and if dining out, keep it on while waiting for your meal

Walensky said CDC travel guidelines will remain the same for the vaccinated until there is more data about how much or how little vaccinated people can transmit the virus to others. She added that a "larger swath" of the population will also need to be vaccinated before it's really safe. About 90% of the country is still not vaccinated, Walensky said. Travel brings too much exposure to crowds and the spread of variants is also a real concern.

"We are here in no small measure because of the safety protection that many, many Americans have taken with regard to their family, friends and neighbors," Zients said. "We ask people to continue to do that so we can get there, as quickly and as permanently as possible."There are now 30 million people in the United States who are fully vaccinated, but the United States still averaged more than 60,000 cases per day over the last seven days, according to Johns Hopkins University.

"We continue to have high levels of virus around the country, and more readily transmissible variants have now been confirmed in nearly every state, while we work to quickly vaccinate people more and more each day, we have to see this through," Walensky said Monday. "Let's stick together. Please keep wearing a well fitting mask and taking the other public health actions we know work to help stop the spread of this virus."

The older writers knew that being cultured and urbane wasn’t a sign of elitism. Culture was the tool they used for social mobility. T.S. Eliot was cheap and sophisticated argument was free.

Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.

First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise

Today’s dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment.

conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.

an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism

Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump.

The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party.

Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else.

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community.

This is a sad story. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound.

Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics

Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

As conservatism has become a propagandistic, partisan movement it has become less vibrant, less creative and less effective.

That leads to the third big change. Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.

For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good

Trump demagogy filled the void.

recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party.

Conservatism is now being led astray by its seniors, but its young people are pretty great

It’s hard to find a young evangelical who likes Donald Trump. Most young conservatives are comfortable with ethnic diversity and are weary of the Fox News media-politico complex.

Conservatism’s best ideas are coming from youngish reformicons who have crafted an ambitious governing agenda (completely ignored by Trump).

A Trump defeat could cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth.

It was good to be a young conservative back in my day. It’s great to be one right now.

It’s more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours).

the average time people spend on Facebook has gone up — from around 40 minutes in 2014 — even as the number of monthly active users has surged. And that’s just the average. Some users must be spending many hours a day on the site,

time has become the holy grail of digital media.

Time is the best measure of engagement, and engagement correlates with advertising effectiveness. Time also increases the supply of impressions that Facebook can sell, which brings in more revenue (a 52 percent increase last quarter to $5.4 billion).

And time enables Facebook to learn more about its users — their habits and interests — and thus better target its ads. The result is a powerful network effect that competitors will be hard pressed to match.

the only one that comes close is Alphabet’s YouTube, where users spent an average of 17 minutes a day on the site. That’s less than half the 35 minutes a day users spent on Facebook

Users spent an average of nine minutes on all of Yahoo’s sites, two minutes on LinkedIn and just one minute on Twitter

People spending the most time on Facebook also tend to fall into the prized 18-to-34 demographic sought by advertisers.

“You hear a narrative that young people are fleeing Facebook. The data show that’s just not true. Younger users have a wider appetite for social media, and they spend a lot of time on multiple networks. But they spend more time on Facebook by a wide margin.”

What aren’t Facebook users doing during the 50 minutes they spend there? Is it possibly interfering with work (and productivity), or, in the case of young people, studying and reading?

While the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys nearly every conceivable time-occupying activity (even fencing and spelunking), it doesn’t specifically tally the time spent on social media, both because the activity may have multiple purposes — both work and leisure — and because people often do it at the same time they are ostensibly engaged in other activities

The closest category would be “computer use for leisure,” which has grown from eight minutes in 2006, when the bureau began collecting the data, to 14 minutes in 2014, the most recent survey. Or perhaps it would be “socializing and communicating with others,” which slipped from 40 minutes to 38 minutes.

But time spent on most leisure activities hasn’t changed much in those eight years of the bureau’s surveys. Time spent reading dropped from an average of 22 minutes to 19 minutes. Watching television and movies increased from 2.57 hours to 2.8. Average time spent working declined from 3.4 hours to 3.25. (Those hours seem low because much of the population, which includes both young people and the elderly, does not work.)

The bureau’s numbers, since they cover the entire population, may be too broad to capture important shifts among important demographic groups

ComScore reported that television viewing (both live and recorded) dropped 2 percent last year, and it said younger viewers in particular are abandoning traditional live television. People ages 18-34 spent just 47 percent of their viewing time on television screens, and 40 percent on mobile devices.

Among those 55 and older, 70 percent of their viewing time was on television, according to comScore. So among young people, much social media time may be coming at the expense of traditional television.

comScore’s data suggests that people are spending on average just six to seven minutes a day using social media on their work computers. “I don’t think Facebook is displacing other activity,” he said. “People use it during downtime during the course of their day, in the elevator, or while commuting, or waiting.

Facebook, naturally, is busy cooking up ways to get us to spend even more time on the platform

A crucial initiative is improving its News Feed, tailoring it more precisely to the needs and interests of its users, based on how long people spend reading particular posts. For people who demonstrate a preference for video, more video will appear near the top of their news feed. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more data they will generate about themselves, and the better the company will get at the task.

he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.

Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.

The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.

In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.

In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.

A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.

 Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.

Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.

They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.

A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.

Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.

Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.

In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”

The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o

 Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”

even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.

Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours

Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.

As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores

In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.

Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it

The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”

as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”

Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”

That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.

Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning

We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers

this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.

Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms

internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.

“When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation.

The signs that an image is AI-generated are easy to miss for a user simply scrolling past, who has an instant to decide whether to like or boost a post on social media. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s likely that such signs will be harder to spot in the future.

The combination of easily-generated fake content and the suspicion that anything might be fake allows people to choose what they want to believe, adds DiResta, leading to what she calls “bespoke realities.”

Examples of misleading content created by generative AI are not hard to come by, especially on social media

This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend,

“What our work suggests is that most regular people do not want to share false things—the problem is they are not paying attention,”

People’s attention is already limited, and the way social media works—encouraging us to gorge on content, while quickly deciding whether or not to share it—leaves us precious little capacity to determine whether or not something is true

are now using its existence as a pretext to dismiss accurate information

in the course of a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla’s “full self-driving” system, Elon Musk’s lawyers responded to video evidence of Musk making claims about this software by suggesting that the proliferation of “deepfakes” of Musk was grounds to dismiss such evidence. They advanced that argument even though the clip of Musk was verifiably real

If the crisis of authenticity were limited to social media, we might be able to take solace in communication with those closest to us. But even those interactions are now potentially rife with AI-generated fakes.

what sounds like a call from a grandchild requesting bail money may be scammers who have scraped recordings of the grandchild’s voice from social media to dupe a grandparent into sending money.

companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are trying to spin the altering of personal images as a good thing. 

With its latest Pixel phone, the company unveiled a suite of new and upgraded tools that can automatically replace a person’s face in one image with their face from another, or quickly remove someone from a photo entirely.

Joseph Stalin, who was fond of erasing people he didn’t like from official photos, would have loved this technology.

In Google’s defense, it is adding a record of whether an image was altered to data attached to it. But such metadata is only accessible in the original photo and some copies, and is easy enough to strip out.

The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium, from our immediate communities to the geopolitical, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who

To put our current moment in historical context, he notes that the PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.

Not everyone agrees that arming the public with easy access to AI will exacerbate our current difficulties with misinformation. The primary argument of such experts is that there is already vastly more misinformation on the internet than a person can consume, so throwing more into the mix won’t make things worse.

it’s not exactly reassuring, especially given that trust in institutions is already at one of the lowest points in the past 70 years, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, and polarization—a measure of how much we distrust one another—is at a high point.

“What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts?” says Farid. “If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises—when you erode trust in institutions.”

The violence in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, which is home to several ethnic groups, is separate from the war in the northern Tigray region that erupted in November 2020 between Ethiopian federal forces and rebellious forces of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

“All evidence suggests that they are doing much better, and the simplest explanation for that is that they did take social-distancing measures very seriously and they did it early,

while positive cases are surely being undercounted—as they are across the country—San Francisco’s stable public-health system and low death count offer validation of its success so far.

“Deaths are hard to hide,”

Breed ordered businesses closed and issued a citywide shelter-in-place policy effective on March 17, at a point when San Francisco had fewer than 50 confirmed coronavirus cases.

By the time New York City fully shut down on March 22, more than 10,000 cases were reported across its five boroughs.

“She took incredible political heat and criticism,” Harris said, “and she had the courage to make a decision that she in her gut, based on science and the research she did, told her this was the right thing to do for her people, even when other people couldn’t see it yet.”

“Hindsight these days is not years later; it’s weeks later,” the senator said. “So hindsight tells us London Breed was really smart. She did the right thing at the right time, even though it’s not what people wanted to hear.”

Epidemiologists told me that San Francisco and other West Coast cities likely benefited from the Trump administration’s late-January restrictions on travel from China, while the president’s delay in banning flights from Europe, which he didn’t do until mid-March, hit New York hard.

“New York was like Italy, and San Francisco and Washington State are more like, not necessarily the South Koreans, but some of the Asian countries that have had slower growth rates,

“Really, it’s about early identification of a problem, saying, ‘We’re going to be more proactive than reactive.’”

It’s that difference in decision making—proactive versus reactive—that has separated leaders at all levels of government during this crisis.

Mary Ellen Carroll, who runs the city’s Department of Emergency Management, told me. By late January, Breed had activated San Francisco’s emergency-operations center in preparation for an outbreak—the first such move in any major city in the country. The mayor has since relocated the command post to the Moscone Center, a sprawling complex where top city officials can work in-person while social distancing. Everyone, including Breed, wears a mask when they meet, Carroll said.Breed told me that what got her a

“A picture’s worth a thousand words—seeing the images of what could potentially happen and then hearing your doctors tell you that we may not have the capacity to handle this situation,” the mayor said, recalling a briefing during which her advisers laid out the possibilities for a similar scenario in stark detail. “We have tons of hospitals in San Francisco. What do you mean we don’t have the capacity to handle an outbreak of this capacity?” Breed recalled thinking. “That’s when I was just like, Oh my goodness, this is serious

In D.C., Trump was reportedly incensed that Messonnier was raising such alarm. In San Francisco, Breed declared a state of emergency that very day.

“I think they remember how hard it was when we didn’t close down the bathhouses and saw what happened to the epidemic at that point,” said Maldonado, the Stanford epidemiologist.

Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages?

That this “assortative mating,” in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it’s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly.

it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need — that’s what we’re already doing!

Or it would be like telling admissions offices at elite schools that they should seek a form of student-body “diversity” that’s mostly cosmetic, designed to flatter multicultural sensibilities without threatening existing hierarchies all that much. They don’t need to be told — that’s how the system already works!

The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation’s elite.

But don’t come out and say it! Next people will start wondering why the names in the U.S. News rankings change so little from decade to decade. Or why the American population gets bigger and bigger, but our richest universities admit the same size classes every year, Or why in a country of 300 million people and countless universities, we can’t seem to elect a president or nominate a Supreme Court justice who doesn’t have a Harvard or Yale degree.

That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.