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Larger vehicles, such as the popular SUVs and trucks that dominate new car sales, are more dangerous for pedestrians than sedans. Meanwhile, the federal government doesn't mandate safety tests that consider pedestrian safety, only those that protect vehicle occupants.

In addition to releasing preliminary statistics for 2020, the GHSA also took a deep dive into figures from 2019 and before. The group reported about a third of pedestrians were intoxicated when they were struck, and deaths are more common at night and in warm states (possibly because warmer weather encourages nighttime walking). This year, for the first time, the GHSA also broke out data by race and found Black, Native American and Hispanic people were substantially overrepresented in pedestrian deaths, compared with their proportion of the overall population.

That trend, too, predates the pandemic. But Naomi Doerner, director of equity, diversity and inclusion at transportation consulting firm Nelson\Nygaard, notes the disparities of the pandemic affected pedestrian vulnerability, too.

After Sammy's death, Cohen co-founded a group called Families for Safe Streets that provides support to victims' families and advocates for policy changes to reduce traffic deaths. Slower speed limits and street redesigns such as wider sidewalks, narrow roads and rumble strips are among the group's priorities.

For Pho, the months since her mother's death have been anguished, her grief compounded by painful legal and criminal proceedings, and by the wave of anti-Asian harassment unfolding during the pandemic.

But she said she's found it healing to reach out to local advocacy groups such as Cohen's that are working to make streets safer."It's a trend that's just going to continue if we don't address it," Pho says. "It is a crisis."

Their analysis suggests that, as currently designed, “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) could be dangerous on public roadways, according to several of the experts.

That the Tesla keeps going after seeing a pedestrian near a crosswalk offers insight into the type of software Tesla uses, known as “machine learning.” This type of software is capable of deciphering large sets of data and forming correlations that allow it, in essence, to learn on its own.

Tesla’s software uses a combination of machine-learning software and simpler software “rules,” such as “always stop at stop signs and red lights.” But as one researcher pointed out, machine-learning algorithms invariably learn lessons they shouldn’t. It’s possible that if the software were told to “never hit pedestrians,” it could take away the wrong lesson: that pedestrians will move out of the way if they are about to be hit, one expert said

Software developers could create a “rule” that the car must slow down or stop for pedestrians. But that fix could paralyze the software in urban environments, where pedestrians are everywhere.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale. Many of these houses will be converted to rentals, which are rarely as well maintained as owner-occupied housing. Add the fact that the houses were built with cheap materials and methods to begin with, and you see why many fringe suburbs are turning into slums, with abandoned housing and rising crime.

The good news is that there is great pent-up demand for walkable, centrally located neighborhoods

The cities and inner-ring suburbs that will be the foundation of the recovery require significant investment at a time of government retrenchment. Bus and light-rail systems, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements — what traffic engineers dismissively call “alternative transportation” — are vital.

Still, other drivers said the job wasn’t overly difficult. “It’s about being alert, if you can’t be alert for a few straight hours then you’re not a very good driver,” a former Waymo test operator said. Video taken from inside the Uber vehicle, released by Tempe police, appears to show the vehicle heading straight into the pedestrian without slo

It is the second time in a year that Uber has ​temporarily halted testing following an accident involving one of its autonomous cars.

Uber began making the transition to using single test operators nearly three years after embarking on self-driving vehicle development. General Motors Co.’s Cruise Automation self-driving unit, which was founded in 2013, still has two test drivers in every car. Waymo—which has logged more than five million testing miles, by far the most of any company—began using one safety operator in many of its cars in 2015, about six years after its program began. Waymo now runs most vehicles without humans behind the wheel in the Phoenix area and plans to launch a commercial robot service later this year.

d under stress. California, where a lot of testing occurs, requires companies to disclose such “disengagements” of the autonomous technology, and unnecessary disengagements can interfere with learning and improving the technology.

NHTSA said it has an “active investigation” of Autopilot. “NHTSA generally does not comment on matters related to open investigations,” NHTSA spokeswoman Veronica Morales said in a statement. In 2021, the agency adopted a rule requiring carmakers such as Tesla to report crashes involving their driver-assistance systems.Beyond the data collection, though, there are few clear legal limitations on how this type of advanced driver-assistance technology should operate and what capabilities it should have.

“Tesla has decided to take these much greater risks with the technology because they have this sense that it’s like, ‘Well, you can figure it out. You can determine for yourself what’s safe’ — without recognizing that other road users don’t have that same choice,” former NHTSA administrator Steven Cliff said in an interview.“If you’re a pedestrian, [if] you’re another vehicle on the road,” he added, “do you know that you’re unwittingly an object of an experiment that’s happening?”

Banner researched Tesla for years before buying a Model 3 in 2018, his wife, Kim, told federal investigators. Around the time of his purchase, Tesla’s website featured a video showing a Tesla navigating the curvy roads and intersections of California while a driver sits in the front seat, hands hovering beneath the wheel.The video, recorded in 2016, is still on the site today.“The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons,” the video says. “He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

Musk made a similar assertion about a more sophisticated form of Autopilot called Full Self-Driving on an earnings call in July. “Now, I know I’m the boy who cried FSD,” he said. “But man, I think we’ll be better than human by the end of this year.”

While the video concerned Full Self-Driving, which operates on surface streets, the plaintiffs in the Banner case argue Tesla’s “marketing does not always distinguish between these systems.”

Not only is the marketing misleading, plaintiffs in several cases argue, the company gives drivers a long leash when deciding when and how to use the technology. Though Autopilot is supposed to be enabled in limited situations, it sometimes works on roads it’s not designed for. It also allows drivers to go short periods without touching the wheel and to set cruising speeds well above posted speed limits.

Identifying semi-trucks is a particular deficiency that engineers have struggled to solve since Banner’s death, according to a former Autopilot employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Tesla complicated the matter in 2021 when it eliminated radar sensors from its cars, The Post previously reported, making vehicles such as semi-trucks appear two-dimensional and harder to parse.

“If a system turns on, then at least some users will conclude it must be intended to work there,” Koopman said. “Because they think if it wasn’t intended to work there, it wouldn’t turn on.”Andrew Maynard, a professor of advanced technology transitions at Arizona State University, said customers probably just trust the technology.“Most people just don’t have the time or ability to fully understand the intricacies of it, so at the end they trust the company to protect them,” he said.

We don’t even really know what a conscience is, but somebody’s going to have to program one nonetheless.

it turns out that the way we move largely determines the way we live.

gadgets cumulatively contribute only a fraction of what we save by living in a walkable neighborhood. It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week.

“gizmo green”; the obsession with “sustainable” products that often have a statistically insignificant impact on the carbon footprint when compared to our location. And, as already suggested, our location’s greatest impact on our carbon footprint comes from how much it makes us drive.

study made it clear that, while every factor counts, none counts more than walkability. Specifically, it showed how, in drivable locations, transportation energy use consistently tops household energy use, in some cases by more than 2.4 to 1. As a result, the most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood.

because it’s better than nothing, LEED — like the Prius — is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows us to avoid thinking more deeply about our larger footprint. For most organizations and agencies, it is enough. Unfortunately, as the transportation planner Dan Malouff puts it, “LEED architecture without good urban design is like cutting down the rainforest using hybrid-powered bulldozers.”

10 to 20 units per acre is the density at which drivable suburbanism transitions into walkable urbanism.

“We are a destructive species, and if you love nature, stay away from it. The best means of protecting the environment is to

The average New Yorker consumes roughly one-third the electricity of the average Dallas resident, and ultimately generates less than one-third the greenhouse gases of the average American.

New York is our densest big city and, not coincidentally, the one with the best transit service. All the other subway stations in America put together would not outnumber the 468 stops of the MTA. In terms of resource efficiency, it’s the best we’ve got.

New York consumes half the gasoline of Atlanta (326 versus 782 gallons per person per year). But Toronto cuts that number in half, as does Sydney — and most European cities use only half as much as those places. Cut Europe’s number in half, and you end up with Hong Kong

Paris is one place that has determined that its future depends on reducing its auto dependence. The city has recently decided to create 25 miles of dedicated busways, introduced 20,000 shared city bikes in 1,450 locations, and committed to removing 55,000 parking spaces from the city every year for the next 20 years. These changes sound pretty radical, but they are supported by 80 percent of the population.

increasing density from two units per acre to 20 units per acre resulted in about the same savings as the increase from 20 to 200.

the American anti-urban ethos remained intact as everything else changed. The desire to be isolated in nature, adopted en masse, led to the quantities and qualities we now call “sprawl,” which somehow mostly manages to combine the traffic congestion of the city with the intellectual culture of the countryside.

most communities with these densities are also organized as traditional mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, the sort of accommodating environment that entices people out of their cars. Everything above that is icing on the cake.

unless we hit a national crisis of unprecedented severity, it is hard to imagine any argument framed in the language of sustainability causing many people to modify their behavior. So what will?

The gold standard of quality-of-life rankings is the Mercer Survey, which carefully compares global cities in the 10 categories of political stability, economics, social quality, health and sanitation, education, public services, recreation, consumer goods, housing, and climate.

the top 10 cities always seem to include a bunch of places where they speak German (Vienna, Zurich, Dusseldorf, etc.), along with Vancouver, Auckland, and Sydney. These are all places with compact settlement patterns, good transit, and principally walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, there isn’t a single auto-oriented city in the top 50. The highest-rated American cities in 2010, which don’t appear until No. 31, are Honolulu, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, and Seattle.

Our cities, which are twice as efficient as our suburbs, burn twice the fuel of these European, Canadian, and Aussie/Kiwi places. Yet the quality of life in these foreign cities is deemed higher than ours by a long shot.

if we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable. Doing so is not easy, but it can be done, it has been done,

What the coming trade war will do, however, is cause a lot of disruption. Today’s world economy is built around “value chains” that spread across borders: your car or your smartphone contain components manufactured in many countries, then assembled or modified in many more. A trade war would force a drastic shortening of those chains, and quite a few U.S. manufacturing operations would end up being big losers, just as happened when global trade surged in the past.

An old joke tells of a motorist who runs over a pedestrian, then tries to fix the damage by backing up — and runs over the victim a second time. Well, the effects of the Trumpist trade war on U.S. workers will be a lot like that.

the best bet is that the trade war is coming. Buckle your seatbelts.

Last week, protests turned violent in parts of the country where demonstrators demanded empty supermarkets be resupplied. And on Friday, the government said it would continue its truncated workweek for an additional 15 days.

American officials say the multiplying crises have led Mr. Maduro to fall out of favor with members of his own socialist party, who they believe may turn on him, leading to chaos in the streets.

The regional tensions came to a head last week when Mr. Maduro went on television to chide the Organization of American States, which has criticized Venezuela’s handling of the economic and political crises.

Mr. Almagro responded with an open letter blasting the president, calling on him to allow the recall referendum his opponents are pushing this year to remove Mr. Maduro from office.

Venezuela’s public schools are now closed on Fridays, another effort to save electricity. So Ms. González was waiting in line with her elder child at an A.T.M., while her husband watched over the other one at home.

Venezuela’s government says the problems are the result of an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country.

But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products.

On a recent day in the downtown government center, pedestrians milled about, but nearly every building — including several museums, the public registry office and a Social Security center — was empty, giving the appearance of a holiday.

Intel, founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, both physicists, began by building memory chips that were twice as fast as old ones. Sun Microsystems introduced a new kind of modular computer system, built by one of its founders, Andy Bechtolsheim. Their “big ideas” were expressed in physical products and grew out of their own technical expertise. In that light, Meraki, which came from Biswas’s work at M.I.T., can be seen as having its origins in the old guard. And it followed what was for decades the highway that connected academia to industry: Grad students researched technology, powerful advisers brokered deals, students dropped out to parlay their technologies into proprietary solutions, everyone reaped the profits. That implicit guarantee of academia’s place in entrepreneurship has since disappeared. Graduate students still drop out, but to start bike-sharing apps and become data scientists. That is, if they even make it to graduate school. The success of self-educated savants like Sean Parker, who founded Napster and became Facebook’s first president with no college education to speak of, set the template. Enstitute, a two-year apprenticeship, embeds high-school graduates in plum tech positions. Thiel Fellowships, financed by the PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, give $100,000 to people under 20 to forgo college and work on projects of their choosing.

Much of this precocity — or dilettantism, depending on your point of view — has been enabled by web technologies, by easy-to-use programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Node.js and by the explosion of application programming interfaces (A.P.I.s) that supply off-the-shelf solutions to entrepreneurs who used to have to write all their own code for features like a login system or an embedded map. Now anyone can do it, thanks to the Facebook login A.P.I. or the Google Maps A.P.I.

One of the more enterprising examples of these kinds of interfaces is the start-up Stripe, which sells A.P.I.s that enable businesses to process online payments. When Meraki first looked into taking credit cards online, according to Biswas, it was a monthslong project fraught with decisions about security and cryptography. “Now, with Stripe, it takes five minutes,” he said. “When you combine that with the ability to get a server in five minutes, with Rails and Twitter Bootstrap, you see that it has become infinitely easier for four people to get a start-up off the ground.”

The sense that it is no longer necessary to have particularly deep domain knowledge before founding your own start-up is real; that and the willingness of venture capitalists to finance Mark Zuckerberg look-alikes are changing the landscape of tech products. There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems

There’s a glass-half-full way of looking at this, of course: Tech hasn’t been pedestrianized — it’s been democratized. The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared

many of the hottest web start-ups are not novel, at least not in the sense that Apple’s Macintosh or Intel’s 4004 microprocessor were. The arc of tech parallels the arc from manufacturing to services. The Macintosh and the microprocessor were manufactured products. Some of the most celebrated innovations in technology have been manufactured products — the router, the graphics card, the floppy disk

One of Stripe’s founders rowed five seat in the boat I coxed freshman year in college; the other is his older brother. Among the employee profiles posted on its website, I count three of my former teaching fellows, a hiking leader, two crushes. Silicon Valley is an order of magnitude bigger than it was 30 years ago, but still, the start-up world is intimate and clubby, with top talent marshaled at elite universities and behemoths like Facebook and Google.

A few weeks ago, a programmer friend and I were talking about unhappiness, in particular the kind of unhappiness that arises when you are 21 and lavishly educated with the world at your feet. In the valley, it’s generally brought on by one of two causes: coming to the realization either that your start-up is completely trivial or that there are people your own age so knowledgeable and skilled that you may never catch up.

The latter source of frustration is the phenomenon of “the 10X engineer,” an engineer who is 10 times more productive than average. It’s a term that in its cockiness captures much of what’s good, bad and impossible about the valley. At the start-ups I visit, Friday afternoons devolve into bouts of boozing and Nerf-gun wars. Signing bonuses at Facebook are rumored to reach the six digits. In a landscape where a product may morph several times over the course of a funding round, talent — and the ability to attract it — has become one of the few stable metrics.

there is a surprising amount of angst in Silicon Valley. Which is probably inevitable when you put thousands of ambitious, talented young people together and tell them they’re god’s gift to technology. It’s the angst of an early hire at a start-up that only he realizes is failing; the angst of a founder who raises $5 million for his company and then finds out an acquaintance from college raised $10 million; the angst of someone who makes $100,000 at 22 but is still afraid that he may not be able to afford a house like the one he grew up in.

San Francisco, which is steadily stealing the South Bay’s thunder. (“Sometime in the last two years, the epicenter of consumer technology in Silicon Valley has moved from University Ave. to SoMa,” Terrence Rohan, a venture capitalist at Index Ventures, told me

Both the geographic shift north and the increasingly short product cycles are things Jim attributes to the rise of Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.), a collection of servers owned and managed by Amazon that hosts data for nearly every start-up in the latest web ecosystem.Continue reading the main story

now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.”

This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures. There are no longer hectic six-week stretches that culminate in a release day followed by a lull. Every day is release day. You roll out new code continuously, and it’s this cycle that enables companies like Facebook, as its motto goes, to “move fast and break things.”

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the excitement I’ve been hinting at. Another part is prestige. Smart kids want to work for a sexting app because other smart kids want to work for the same sexting app. “Highly concentrated pools of top talent are one of the rarest things you can find,” Biswas told me, “and I think people are really attracted to those environments.

These days, a new college graduate arriving in the valley is merely stepping into his existing network. He will have friends from summer internships, friends from school, friends from the ever-increasing collection of incubators and fellowships.

As tech valuations rise to truly crazy levels, the ramifications, financial and otherwise, of a job at a pre-I.P.O. company like Dropbox or even post-I.P.O. companies like Twitter are frequently life-changing. Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code.

Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks, which older engineers may have not laid eyes on for years.

Was there, Connolly asked, “a triggering event that flooded the I.R.S. with new applications?” Answering his own question, Connolly said “the triggering event is the Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United. The number of applications between 2009 and 2012 for a 501(c)(4) doubled from 1,751 to 3,357.” Citizens United was decided on Jan. 21, 2010.

HE I.

R.S. appropriation has gone up during periods of Democratic control and down when Republicans have controlled at least one branch of Congress

the I.R.S. commissioner, described the effect of these cuts to the Way and Means Committee. “No challenge facing our agency is greater than the significant reduction in funding that has occurred over the last several years,” he said. “I am deeply concerned about the ability of the I.R.S. to continue to fulfill its mission if the agency lacks adequate funding. Our current level of funding is clearly less than what the agency needs.”

Koskinen observed that cuts in agency funding have reduced audits of corporations and of wealthy citizens: “Audits of high-income individuals – defined as those with $1 million or more in income – fell 3.7 percent as well last year. The I.R.S. examined approximately 61,000 business returns in FY 2013, down 13 percent from FY 2012.”

Republicans are aware of what happens to tax collections from the rich when the I.R.S. budget is cut and seem happy to live with those consequences.

imilarly, the House Oversight Committee has been relentless in its efforts to blame the Obama administration for the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others were killed. Committee Republicans have done so despite their own record of repeatedly voting to cut spending on security for state department personnel.

it’s no fun serving on an oversight committee when your own party is running the executive branch. The years when Republicans controlled the House and White House, 2001 to 2007, were a public relations disaster for the Oversight Committee. The panel pointedly avoided taking on the Bush administration despite a plethora of scandals: abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison, evidence that the claim Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction was false, Jack Abramoff’s illicit lobbying, and the failure of the administration to respond to Hurricane Katrina.By the end of 2005, the committee had issued the Bush administration a total of 3 subpoenas, all on relatively noncontroversial matters.

While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership, American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number.

“Before Uber was a thing, I would rarely go to Hollywood,” said Drew Heitzler, an artist who lives in Venice, a potentially treacherous drive away. “The prospect of going to Hollywood on a weekend night, if I was invited to a party or an art event, it just wouldn’t happen. I would just stay home.”

Taxis here were often unreliable, he added, but ride shares are always just a swipe away.

“There’s a lot of New Yorkers here, and they’re saying it’s almost like New York.”

Once, only the privileged few, the studio bosses and pampered starlets, could afford to have a chauffeur and a waiting car to transport them around sprawling Los Angeles. Now anyone with a credit card can enjoy that freedom.

“Uber and Lyft have made it much more affordable, and encouraged people to venture out of their neighborhoods, and to explore.”

That is especially true of downtown Los Angeles, which is enjoying the double whammy of a recent cultural resurgence — partly bolstered by the Ace, which opened its hotel and performance space in a historic 1920s movie palace in January — and the car services that deliver once-reluctant visitors. Along with Santa Monica and West Hollywood, it is the area with the highest ridership, according to an Uber representative, though the company refused to release specific figures.

A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.

Grand Central Market, a food hall from 1917, has lately turned Smorgasburg-y; on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut. Outside, the street is blocked off for pedestrians, with cafe tables and umbrellas, and nearby is a linger-worthy bookstore and a retro barbershop with shuffleboard. Along Broadway, between discount stores and pupusa stands, are boutiques like OAK NYC and Acne Studios, the Swedish fashion label that opened a giant store there this fall.

“I find myself going down there a lot and taking friends that are coming to visit, because there’s so much cool stuff to do,” s

Ride sharing, some analysts say, has become a viable alternative to owning a car: between the cost of gas, insurance, garages and valet tips, it’s often more economical to get a lift in a professional’s Toyota than to drive solo in your own, and that’s without factoring in the mental cost of sitting in gridlock on Interstate 405.

A short ride through downtown in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes.

In a nod to the city’s continued obsession with the status ride, the company recently implemented, in Los Angeles and Orange County only, UberPlus, with a fleet of BMWs and other luxury vehicles. Even with ride shares, what you pull up in matters.

Other measures the new city council has enacted include divestment from fossil fuels and a commitment to halving the city's greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the decade.

"The time for climate action is now, and the new city government will address climate change both locally and globally," Berg told the International Business-Times. "The reduction in pollution will make the city even better to live in, and ensure that we take our global responsibility."

It was The Economists’ Hour, as the title of the New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum’s debut book has it.

Lemann and Appelbaum contribute to the second wave of post-2008 commentary. The first postmortems focused narrowly on the global financial crisis, dissecting the distorted incentives, regulatory frailty, and groupthink that caused bankers to blow up the world economy

The new round of analysis broadens the lens, searching out larger political and intellectual wrong turns, an expansion that reflects the morphing of the 2008 crash into a general populist surge.

Berle went further. He laid out in detail how shareholders, being so dispersed and numerous, could not hope to restrain bosses—indeed, how nobody could do so. Enormous powers to shape society belonged to company chieftains who answered to no one. Hence Berle’s prescription: The government should regulate them.

“the Treaty of Detroit,” GM’s bosses granted workers regular cost-of-living pay increases, a measure of job security, health insurance, and a pension—benefits that were almost unheard-of. General Motors had “set itself up as a comprehensive welfare state for its workers,” in Lemann’s succinct formulation.

Berle celebrated the Treaty of Detroit by propounding a pro-corporate liberalism. The corporation had become the “conscience-carrier of twentieth-century American society,” he marveled

Anticipating the “end of history” triumphalism of a later era, the sociologist Daniel Bell feted the corporatist order in a book titled The End of Ideology.

the chief threat to Berle’s vision came not from America’s suspicion of concentrated power. It came from economics

Starting in the 1970s, however, economists began to wield extraordinary influence. They persuaded Richard Nixon to abolish the military draft. They brought economics into the courtroom. They took over many of the top posts at regulatory agencies

The rise of economics, Appelbaum writes, “transformed the business of government, the conduct of business, and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life.

Jensen agreed with Berle’s starting point: Corporate managers were unaccountable because shareholders could not restrain them. But rather than seeing a remedy in checks exerted by regulators and organized labor, Jensen proposed to overhaul the firm so that ownership and control were reunited

In sum, Jensen’s prescriptions inverted Berle’s. The market could be made to solve the problem of the firm. Government could pull back from regulation

After decades in which economists’ influence expanded rapidly, the striking thing about the Trump administration and its foreign analogues is that they have largely dispensed with economic advisers

Shortly after the publication of his research, the invention of junk bonds made hostile takeovers the rage. During the ’80s, more than a quarter of the companies on the Fortune 500 list were targeted. Jensen became the scholar who explained why this unprecedented boardroom bloodbath was good news for America.

to a considerable extent, the news was good. Shielded from market discipline, the old corporate heads had deployed capital carelessly

From 1977 to 1988, Jensen calculated, American corporations had increased in value by $500 billion as a result of the new market for corporate control. Reengineered and reinvigorated, American business staved off what might have been an existential threat from Japanese competition.

Yet a large cost eluded Jensen’s calculations. The social contract of the Berle era was gone: the unstated assumption of lifetime employment, the promise of retirement benefits, the sense of community and stability and shared purpose that gave millions of lives their meaning. Berle had viewed the corporation as a social and political institution as much as an economic one, and the dismembering of corporations on purely economic grounds was bound to generate fallout that had not been accounted for

Even before the 2008 crash, Jensen disavowed the transactional culture he had helped to legitimize. Holy shit, Jensen remembers saying to himself. Anything can be corrupted.

Contrary to common presumption, the economics establishment in the 1990s and 2000s did not believe that markets were perfectly efficient. Rather, influential economists took the pragmatic view that markets would discipline financiers more effectively than regulators could

He is happy to state at the outset that market-oriented reforms have lifted billions out of poverty, and to recognize that the deregulation that helped undo Berle-ism was not some kind of right-wing plot. In the late ’70s, it was initiated by Democrats such as President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy.

Inequality has grown to unacceptable extremes in highly developed economies. From 1980 to 2010, life expectancy for poor Americans scandalously declined, even as the rich lived longer.

Meanwhile, the primacy of economics has not generated faster economic growth. From 1990 until the eve of the financial crisis, U.S. real GDP per person grew by a little under 2 percent a year, less than the 2.5 percent a year in the oil-shocked 1970s.

economists have repeatedly made excessive claims for their discipline

In the ’60s, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s advisers thought they had the business cycle tamed. They believed they could prevent recessions by “fine-tuning” tax and spending policies

When this expectation was exposed as hubris, Milton Friedman urged central banks to focus exclusively on the supply of money circulating in the economy. This too was soon discredited. From the ’90s onward, economists oversold the benefits of targeting inflation, forgetting that other perils—the human cost of unemployment, the destabilization wrought by financial bubbles—might well be worse than rising prices

Greenspan and Summers ducked the political challenge of buffering new kinds of financial trading with regulatory safeguards

Michael C. Jensen, an entertainingly impassioned financial economist who reframed attitudes toward the corporation in the mid-’70s.

today’s fierce international competition and disruptive innovation oblige businesses to cut costs or go under. The dilemma is that, even as they compel efficiency, globalization and technological change exacerbate inequality and uncertainty and therefore the need for a compassionate social contract

LinkedIn is not a solution to worker insecurity writ large, still less to inequality. On the contrary, a world in which people compete to gather connections may be even less equal than our current one. A few high-octane networkers will attract large followings, while a long tail of pedestrians will have only a handful of buddies

Rather than buy in to a single grand vision, societies should prefer a robust contest among interest groups—what Lemann calls pluralism. Borrowing from the forgotten early-20th-century political scientist Arthur Bentley, Lemann defines groups broadly. States and cities are “locality groups,” income categories are “wealth groups,” supporters of a particular politician constitute “personality groups.” People inevitably affiliate themselves with such groups; groups naturally compete to influence the government; and the resulting push and pull, not squabbles among intellectuals about organizing concepts, constitutes the proper stuff of politics

Lemann is aware of the risks in this conclusion. He cites the obvious objection: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” In a contest of competing interest groups, the ones with the most money are likely to win

For those who regard inequality as a challenge, an interest-group free-for-all is a perilous prescription.

Appelbaum presents a series of persuasive recommendations, confirming that Lemann is wrong to despair of reasoned, technocratic argument. If policy makers want ordinary Americans to appreciate the benefits of open trade, they must ensure that displaced workers have access to training and health care. Because some interest groups are weaker than others, government should correct the double standard by which the power of labor unions is regarded with antipathy but the power of business monopolies is tolerated

Progressives should look for ways to be pro-competition but anti-inequality

—it isn’t so clear that the economists have departed

throughout Appelbaum’s narrative, many of the knights who slay the dragons of bad economic ideology are economists themselves. The story of the past generation is more about debates among economists than about economists pitted against laypeople. Perhaps, with a bit of humility and retooling, the economists will have their day again. If they do not come up with the next set of good ideas, it is not obvious who will

He continued: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes they’ll have two ventilators and now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

Taking new measures to enforce social distancing, New York has taken down dozens of basketball hoops across the city and is planning to close wide boulevards in the Bronx and Brooklyn to traffic to allow pedestrians more space to move around while distancing themselves from each other.

In Chicago, city officials closed its famous lakefront to the public, after too many crowds were gathering on the shores of Lake Michigan. Mayor Lori Lightfoot told Chicagoans in a vociferous public plea: “Dear God: stay home, save lives.”

In Louisiana, the number of known coronavirus cases in Louisiana rose to 2,305 on Thursday, an increase of 510 cases in a day, and a total of 83 deaths, according to the Louisiana department of health.

Amid the statistics, personal stories are beginning to emerge. A two-month-old baby died of coronavirus in Nashville; in New York, Dennis Dickson became the first NYPD officer to die from the virus.

That's because the disinformation ecosystem is still proliferating via social media and the hyper-partisan fragmentation of society. Trump is a symptom rather than its root cause. There is every reason to hope that the presence of a president who does not lie all the time will not exacerbate our divides on a daily basis. But it would be dangerously naïve to believe that the underlying infrastructure of hate news and fake news will be solved with a new president.

Reforms are necessary. As I've written before on CNN Opinion, "Social media and tech platforms have a responsibility not to run knowingly false advertisements or promote intentionally false stories. They must disclose who is paying for digital political ads and crack down on the spread of disinformation. The Honest Ads Act would require the same disclosures that are required on television and radio right now. This is a no brainer. The profit motive from hate news and fake news might be reduced by moving digital advertising toward attention metrics to measure and monetize reader engagement and loyalty, incentivizing quality over clickbait. But perhaps the single biggest reform would come from social media companies requiring that accounts verify they are real people, rather than bots that bully people and manipulate public opinion."

It would be a huge mistake to assume that simply because the velocity of lies from the White House is likely to decrease dramatically that the need for fact checks has expired. Instead, it has only transformed to a broader arena than a presidential beat. It's the part of news that people need most now, the tip of the spear that fights for the idea that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts. This is necessary for a substantive, civil and fact-based debate, which is a precondition for a functioning, self-governing society. And that's why fact checking will remain a core responsibility for journalists in the future.