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Opinion | Laundered Money Could Be Putin's Achilles' Heel - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 25 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have pointed out that Russia has run huge trade surpluses every year since the early 1990s, which should have led to a large accumulation of overseas assets. Yet official statistics show Russia with only moderately more assets than liabilities abroad. How is that possible? The obvious explanation is that wealthy Russians have been skimming off large sums and parking them abroad.
  • The sums involved are mind-boggling. Novokmet et al. estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P. To give you some perspective, this is as if a U.S. president’s cronies had managed to hide $20 trillion in overseas accounts.
  • , “the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.” As far as I can tell, the overseas exposure of Russia’s elite has no precedent in history — and it creates a huge vulnerability that the West can exploit.
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  • two uncomfortable facts
  • First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain.
  • Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultrawealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.
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What Progressives Get Wrong About the Gilded Age - Bloomberg - 0 views

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  • America’s plutocrats are transforming themselves into hereditary dynasties, thanks to a prolonged campaign against inheritance taxes (or “death taxes” as they have been ingeniously dubbed).
  • The research firm Cerulli estimates that almost half of the estimated $72.6 trillion that will be transferred to the next generation between 2020 and 2045 will come from the richest 1.5% of households. Welcome to the world of trillion-dollar trust fund babies.
  • The rise of such dynasties clashes with America’s fundamental belief in equal opportunity and upward mobility. It leads to social closure as the children of the privileged hoard positions at the top of society.
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  • It produces economic distortions as high IQ types get jobs as “money butlers.” (Chuck Collins, the author of “The Wealth Hoarders,” estimates that at least 90,000 people are employed in what he calls the “wealth defense industry.”)
  • Today the educated are losing their faith in upward mobility.
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California gas prices: If Gov. Newsom's $400 rebate plan gets approved, how soon could ... - 0 views

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  • CALIFORNIA -- Californians shouldering the nation's highest gas prices could soon get a tax break, free rides on public transit and up to $800 on debit cards to help pay for fuel under a proposal revealed Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, but how soon could taxpayers start seeing the money?Gas prices have soared in recent weeks, the result of pandemic-induced inflation and Russia's invasion of Ukraine
  • State governments across the country have been debating what to do about it, with the most popular choices being slashing fuel taxes or offering rebates to taxpayers.Last week, the governors of Maryland and Georgia signed laws temporarily suspending their state's gas taxes, while Georgia on Wednesday also offered $1.1 billion in refunds to taxpayers in a separate action.California's average gas prices hit a new state record Wednesday at $5.88 per gallon, more than $2 higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA. California has the second-highest gas tax in the country at 51 cents per gallon. But the state's Democratic leaders have been wary of suspending the gas tax because they fear oil companies would not pass along the savings to drivers.
  • RELATED: Are California drivers paying a hidden gas fee?
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  • "This package is also focused on protecting people from volatile gas prices, and advancing clean transportation," Newsom said.Rebates like the ones Newsom is proposing take time to deliver, with the governor's office saying people could see the money by July.Rising fuel prices are a tricky policy issue for Newsom, who is trying to wean the state off fossil fuels. He has signed executive orders aimed at banning the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035 and halting all oil extraction by 2045.He has proposed a total of $10 billion in funding over six years to boost zero-emission vehicle production and build charging stations.
  • Newsom's plan must be approved by the Legislature, where Democrats dominate both the Assembly and the Senate. Democratic leaders, however, don't like the idea of giving money to rich people.They have been discussing their own rebate proposal, one that would give $200 rebates to every taxpayer and their children with taxable income less than $125,000 for single filers and $250,000 for joint filers. That means a family of five would get $1,000 while a single parent with two children would get $600.
  • A spokesperson for Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon called Newsom's idea "consistent with the Speaker's goal of providing targeted financial relief to Californians most in need" but stressed the idea is "in the very early stages."Newsom's plan is similar to a separate proposal floated last week by more moderate Democrats in the state Assembly that would give every taxpayer $400, regardless of income.
  • "People need relief now," said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher. "We've got now, like, four different competing plans amongst the Democrats. These guys are going to negotiate against themselves for weeks to months and who knows what we're going to get."
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Why YouTube Has Survived Russia's Social Media Crackdown | Time - 0 views

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  • In a style part investigative journalism, part polemic, the video’s hosts report that one of President Vladimir Putin’s allies, Russian senator Valentina Matviyenko, owns a multimillion-dollar villa on the Italian seafront. The video contrasts the luxurious lifestyle of Matviyenko and her family with footage of dead Russian soldiers, and with images of Russian artillery hitting civilian apartment buildings in Ukraine. A voiceover calls the war “senseless” and “unimaginable.” A slide at the end urges Russians to head to squares in their cities to protest at specific dates and times. In less than a week, the video racked up more than 4 million views.
  • TV news is dominated by the misleading narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a peace-keeping exercise. Despite this, YouTube has largely been spared from the Kremlin’s crackdown on American social media platforms since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a month ago.
  • The app had been a particular venue for activism: Many Russian celebrities spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine in their Instagram stories, and Navalny’s Instagram page posted a statement criticizing the war, and calling on Russians to come out in protest.
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  • On March 11, YouTube’s parent company Google announced that it would block Russian state-backed media globally, including within Russia. The policy was an expansion of an earlier announcement that these channels would be blocked within the European Union. “Our Community Guidelines prohibit content denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events, and we remove content about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy,” Google said in a statement. “In line with that, effective immediately, we are also blocking YouTube channels associated with Russian state-funded media, globally.”
  • That could leave many millions of Russians cut off from independent news and content shared by opposition activists like Navalny’s team. (It would also effectively delete 75 million YouTube users, or some 4% of the platform’s global total—representing a small but still-significant portion of Google’s overall profits.)
  • Today, YouTube remains the most significant way for tens of millions of ordinary Russians to receive largely uncensored information from the outside world.
  • Part of the reason for YouTube’s survival amid the crackdown is its popularity, experts say. “YouTube is by far and away the most popular social media platform in Russia,” says Justin Sherman, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s cyber statecraft initiative. The platform is even more popular than VK, the Russian-owned answer to Facebook.
  • Still, Sherman says the situation is volatile, with Russia now more likely than ever before to ban YouTube. For an authoritarian government like Russia’s, “part of the decision to allow a foreign platform in your country is that you get to use it to spread propaganda and disinformation, even if people use it to spread truth and organize against you,” he says. “If you start losing the ability to spread misinformation and propaganda, but people can still use it to spread truth and organize, then all of a sudden, you start wondering why you’re allowing that platform in your country in the first place.” YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.
  • On the same day as Navalny’s channel posted the video about Matviyenko, elsewhere on YouTube a very different spectacle was playing out. In a video posted to the channel of the Kremlin-funded media outlet RT, (formerly known as Russia Today,) a commentator dismissed evidence of Russian bombings of Ukrainian cities. She blamed “special forces of NATO countries” for allegedly faking images of bombed-out Ukrainian schools, kindergartens and other buildings.
  • “YouTube has, over the years, been a really important place for spreading Russian propaganda,” Donovan said in an interview with TIME days before YouTube banned Russian state-backed media.
  • In July 2021, the Russian government passed a law that would require foreign tech companies with more than 500,000 users to open a local office within Russia. (A similar law passed previously in India had been used by the government there to pressure tech companies to take down opposition accounts and posts critical of the government, by threatening employees with arrest.)
  • The heightened risk to free expression in Russia Experts say that Russia’s ongoing crackdown on social media platforms heralds a significant shift in the shape of the Russian internet—and a potential end to the era where the Kremlin tolerated largely free expression on YouTube in return for access to a tool that allowed it to spread disinformation far and wide.
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Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Spars With Democrats at Senate Hearing - The New Yo... - 0 views

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  • Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, a former chief executive, said it was “somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job.” He suggested that while a union might be necessary at companies “that are not good employers,” that was not the case at Starbucks.
  • Democrats’ response came at two levels of elevation. First, they said the company was excluding unionized stores from the benefits that Starbucks had introduced since the union campaign began, such as faster accrual of sick leave and a credit-card tipping option for customers, showing that its commitment to such benefits was tenuous.
  • More broadly, Democrats argued that unions acted as a corrective to a basic power imbalance between workers and management. A company might treat workers generously under one chief executive, then harshly under another. Only a union can ensure that the favorable treatment persists
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  • in illustrating how far the politics of labor have changed in Washington in recent decades, there was perhaps no better bellwether than Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a former business owner and self-described “extreme moderate.”
  • Mr. Hickenlooper conducted himself more respectfully and deferentially than most of his Democratic colleagues, applauding Mr. Schultz for “creating one of the most successful brands in American history” and declaring that “you know more about economics than I will ever know.” But in his questioning he aligned himself squarely with his party, pointing out that the rise of inequality in recent decades had coincided with the weakening of unions.
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Opinion | Why Do Russians Still Want to Fight? - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • a significant number of Russian men are still keen to fight — more, in fact, than at the war’s outset. What explains the disconnect?
  • One obvious reason is fear. Men called up to the army have no choice but to obey, because opposition to the war has effectively been outlawed.
  • while fear and repression shape responses to the war, that doesn’t explain the readiness — willingness, even — of some Russian men to serve at the front. About 36 percent of Russian men are content to be conscripted, with the most supportive group being men aged 45 and older.
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  • That’s no accident. In the three decades since the end of the Soviet Union, those men have faced industrial collapse, the disappearance of millions of jobs and declining life expectancy. The war promises to change that downward trajectory, transforming the losers of the past three decades into new heroes
  • For many Russian men and their families, the war may be a horror. But it’s also the last opportunity to fix their lives.
  • First, there’s the money. The federal base salary for a soldier is about $2,500 a month, with payment of $39,000 for wounding and up to $65,000 in the case of death. Compared with a median monthly salary of $545, this is a handsome reward — even more so for the approximately 15.3 million Russians living below the poverty line.
  • there’s much more on offer, too. For those coming back from the front, the state promises fast-tracked entry into civil service jobs, health insurance, free public transportation, as well as free university education and free food at school for their children. And for those who were imprisoned and joined the Wagner private military company, the state grants freedom.
  • Today’s soldiers live in the shadows of the generation that won the war against Nazism. In Russian public culture, no honor is higher than to be a veteran of the “Great Patriotic War,” something the regime has capitalized on by framing today’s war as a kind of historical re-enactment of World War II.
  • As one soldier wrote on Telegram in February, the war confers “a sense of belonging to the great male deed, the deed of defending our Motherland.”
  • By allowing men to escape the difficulties of everyday life — with its low pay and routine frustrations — the war offers a restoration of male self-worth. These men, at last, matter.
  • Feelings of inferiority, too, are swept aside in the fraternal atmosphere of the front. “It doesn’t matter who you are, how you look,” as one soldier put it. In the communal life of conflict, many of the distinctions of civilian life dissolve. War is an equalizer.
  • Mistrust of the rich, belief that sanctions actually strengthen the economy and disdain for émigrés all attest to a class-based experience of the conflict. By participating in the war, millions of Russians at the bottom of the social ladder can emerge as the country’s true heroes, ready for the ultimate sacrifice. The risk may be grave and the financial reward uncertain. But the chance to rise in esteem and respect makes the effort worthwhile.
  • The longer the war drags on, bringing more casualties, loss and broken promises, the harder it may become to sustain such levels of acceptance
  • it may not. Collective emotional turmoil could deepen the feeling that the war must be won, no matter what. In the absence of an alternative vision of the future, Vladimir Putin and his war will continue to hold sway.
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The Contradictions of Sam Altman, the AI Crusader Behind ChatGPT - WSJ - 0 views

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  • Mr. Altman said he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly. He co-founded OpenAI eight years ago as a research nonprofit, arguing that it’s uniquely dangerous to have profits be the main driver of developing powerful AI models.
  • He is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built, he said—an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity. 
  • His goal, he said, is to forge a new world order in which machines free people to pursue more creative work. In his vision, universal basic income—the concept of a cash stipend for everyone, no strings attached—helps compensate for jobs replaced by AI. Mr. Altman even thinks that humanity will love AI so much that an advanced chatbot could represent “an extension of your will.”
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  • The Tesla Inc. CEO tweeted in February that OpenAI had been founded as an open-source nonprofit “to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”
  • Backers say his brand of social-minded capitalism makes him the ideal person to lead OpenAI. Others, including some who’ve worked for him, say he’s too commercially minded and immersed in Silicon Valley thinking to lead a technological revolution that is already reshaping business and social life. 
  • In the long run, he said, he wants to set up a global governance structure that would oversee decisions about the future of AI and gradually reduce the power OpenAI’s executive team has over its technology. 
  • Mr. Altman said he doesn’t necessarily need to be first to develop artificial general intelligence, a world long imagined by researchers and science-fiction writers where software isn’t just good at one specific task like generating text or images but can understand and learn as well or better than a human can. He instead said OpenAI’s ultimate mission is to build AGI, as it’s called, safely.
  • In its founding charter, OpenAI pledged to abandon its research efforts if another project came close to building AGI before it did. The goal, the company said, was to avoid a race toward building dangerous AI systems fueled by competition and instead prioritize the safety of humanity.
  • While running Y Combinator, Mr. Altman began to nurse a growing fear that large research labs like DeepMind, purchased by Google in 2014, were creating potentially dangerous AI technologies outside the public eye. Mr. Musk has voiced similar concerns of a dystopian world controlled by powerful AI machines. 
  • Messrs. Altman and Musk decided it was time to start their own lab. Both were part of a group that pledged $1 billion to the nonprofit, OpenAI Inc. 
  • OpenAI researchers soon concluded that the most promising path to achieve artificial general intelligence rested in large language models, or computer programs that mimic the way humans read and write. Such models were trained on large volumes of text and required a massive amount of computing power that OpenAI wasn’t equipped to fund as a nonprofit, according to Mr. Altman. 
  • “We didn’t have a visceral sense of just how expensive this project was going to be,” he said. “We still don’t.”
  • Tensions also grew with Mr. Musk, who became frustrated with the slow progress and pushed for more control over the organization, people familiar with the matter said. 
  • OpenAI executives ended up reviving an unusual idea that had been floated earlier in the company’s history: creating a for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, that would report to the nonprofit parent. 
  • Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder who advised OpenAI at the time and later served on the board, said the idea was to attract investors eager to make money from the commercial release of some OpenAI technology, accelerating OpenAI’s progress
  • “You want to be there first and you want to be setting the norms,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why speed is a moral and ethical thing here.”
  • The decision further alienated Mr. Musk, the people familiar with the matter said. He parted ways with OpenAI in February 2018. 
  • Mr. Musk announced his departure in a company all-hands, former employees who attended the meeting said. Mr. Musk explained that he thought he had a better chance at creating artificial general intelligence through Tesla, where he had access to greater resources, they said.
  • A young researcher questioned whether Mr. Musk had thought through the safety implications, the former employees said. Mr. Musk grew visibly frustrated and called the intern a “jackass,” leaving employees stunned, they said. It was the last time many of them would see Mr. Musk in person.  
  • Mr. Musk’s departure marked a turning point. Later that year, OpenAI leaders told employees that Mr. Altman was set to lead the company. He formally became CEO and helped complete the creation of the for-profit subsidiary in early 2019.
  • OpenAI said that it received about $130 million in contributions from the initial $1 billion pledge, but that further donations were no longer needed after the for-profit’s creation. Mr. Musk has tweeted that he donated around $100 million to OpenAI. 
  • In the meantime, Mr. Altman began hunting for investors. His break came at Allen & Co.’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho in the summer of 2018, where he bumped into Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, on a stairwell and pitched him on OpenAI. Mr. Nadella said he was intrigued. The conversations picked up that winter.
  • “I remember coming back to the team after and I was like, this is the only partner,” Mr. Altman said. “They get the safety stuff, they get artificial general intelligence. They have the capital, they have the ability to run the compute.”   
  • Mr. Altman shared the contract with employees as it was being negotiated, hosting all-hands and office hours to allay concerns that the partnership contradicted OpenAI’s initial pledge to develop artificial intelligence outside the corporate world, the former employees said. 
  • Some employees still saw the deal as a Faustian bargain. 
  • OpenAI’s lead safety researcher, Dario Amodei, and his lieutenants feared the deal would allow Microsoft to sell products using powerful OpenAI technology before it was put through enough safety testing,
  • They felt that OpenAI’s technology was far from ready for a large release—let alone with one of the world’s largest software companies—worrying it could malfunction or be misused for harm in ways they couldn’t predict.  
  • Mr. Amodei also worried the deal would tether OpenAI’s ship to just one company—Microsoft—making it more difficult for OpenAI to stay true to its founding charter’s commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first, the former employees said.
  • Microsoft initially invested $1 billion in OpenAI. While the deal gave OpenAI its needed money, it came with a hitch: exclusivity. OpenAI agreed to only use Microsoft’s giant computer servers, via its Azure cloud service, to train its AI models, and to give the tech giant the sole right to license OpenAI’s technology for future products.
  • In a recent investment deck, Anthropic said it was “committed to large-scale commercialization” to achieve the creation of safe AGI, and that it “fully committed” to a commercial approach in September. The company was founded as an AI safety and research company and said at the time that it might look to create commercial value from its products. 
  • Mr. Altman “has presided over a 180-degree pivot that seems to me to be only giving lip service to concern for humanity,” he said. 
  • “The deal completely undermines those tenets to which they secured nonprofit status,” said Gary Marcus, an emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at New York University who co-founded a machine-learning company
  • The cash turbocharged OpenAI’s progress, giving researchers access to the computing power needed to improve large language models, which were trained on billions of pages of publicly available text. OpenAI soon developed a more powerful language model called GPT-3 and then sold developers access to the technology in June 2020 through packaged lines of code known as application program interfaces, or APIs. 
  • Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei clashed again over the release of the API, former employees said. Mr. Amodei wanted a more limited and staged release of the product to help reduce publicity and allow the safety team to conduct more testing on a smaller group of users, former employees said. 
  • Mr. Amodei left the company a few months later along with several others to found a rival AI lab called Anthropic. “They had a different opinion about how to best get to safe AGI than we did,” Mr. Altman said.
  • Anthropic has since received more than $300 million from Google this year and released its own AI chatbot called Claude in March, which is also available to developers through an API. 
  • Mr. Altman disagreed. “The unusual thing about Microsoft as a partner is that it let us keep all the tenets that we think are important to our mission,” he said, including profit caps and the commitment to assist another project if it got to AGI first. 
  • In the three years after the initial deal, Microsoft invested a total of $3 billion in OpenAI, according to investor documents. 
  • More than one million users signed up for ChatGPT within five days of its November release, a speed that surprised even Mr. Altman. It followed the company’s introduction of DALL-E 2, which can generate sophisticated images from text prompts.
  • By February, it had reached 100 million users, according to analysts at UBS, the fastest pace by a consumer app in history to reach that mark.
  • n’s close associates praise his ability to balance OpenAI’s priorities. No one better navigates between the “Scylla of misplaced idealism” and the “Charybdis of myopic ambition,” Mr. Thiel said. 
  • Mr. Altman said he delayed the release of the latest version of its model, GPT-4, from last year to March to run additional safety tests. Users had reported some disturbing experiences with the model, integrated into Bing, where the software hallucinated—meaning it made up answers to questions it didn’t know. It issued ominous warnings and made threats. 
  • “The way to get it right is to have people engage with it, explore these systems, study them, to learn how to make them safe,” Mr. Altman said.
  • After Microsoft’s initial investment is paid back, it would capture 49% of OpenAI’s profits until the profit cap, up from 21% under prior arrangements, the documents show. OpenAI Inc., the nonprofit parent, would get the rest.
  • He has put almost all his liquid wealth in recent years in two companies. He has put $375 million into Helion Energy, which is seeking to create carbon-free energy from nuclear fusion and is close to creating “legitimate net-gain energy in a real demo,” Mr. Altman said.
  • He has also put $180 million into Retro, which aims to add 10 years to the human lifespan through “cellular reprogramming, plasma-inspired therapeutics and autophagy,” or the reuse of old and damaged cell parts, according to the company. 
  • He noted how much easier these problems are, morally, than AI. “If you’re making nuclear fusion, it’s all upside. It’s just good,” he said. “If you’re making AI, it is potentially very good, potentially very terrible.” 
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The Doctor Who Helped Take Down FTX in His Spare Time - The Atlantic - 0 views

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  • Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.
  • And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient
  • Block: There’s always stuff going on the blockchain, but these companies also have agreements off of the blockchain, right? Everything they have inside these exchanges is not on the blockchain. It’s using regular old database technology, and it’s not traceable at all. So yeah, a lot of the most important economic activity in crypto has nothing to do with blockchain at all. Huge percentages of people who do this kind of retail crypto trading, they don’t even know how to take what they bought off the exchange and put it in their own wallet.
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  • Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous.
  • Crypto hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated. But you get right down to it, and it’s just a ledger. It’s just like somebody writing down numbers in a book, and it’s page after page of numbers. That’s all it is.
  • And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?
  • The vast majority of people who got involved in this have no interest related to the technology or in the political or ideological aspects of crypto. They just see an opportunity to get rich. And a lot of those people end up absorbing and parroting some of the crypto ideals back to you, but they don’t really care to understand what’s going on. It’s just their excuse for what they’ve already done, which is gamble on something they thought was going to make them wealthy.
  • I think most crypto companies are, like FTX, just borrowing from customer deposits to keep things afloat. And even the companies that aren’t doing that—I think Coinbase, for example, isn’t doing anything illicit, but their business model is based on this ecosystem where new money comes in. And that’s stopping.
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How Sam Bankman-Fried Put Effective Altruism on the Defensive - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.
  • ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.
  • Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”
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  • To the uninitiated, the fact that Bankman-Fried saw a special urgency in preventing killer robots from taking over the world might sound too outlandish to seem particularly effective or altruistic. But it turns out that some of the most influential E.A. literature happens to be preoccupied with killer robots too.
  • Holden Karnofsky, a former hedge funder and a founder of GiveWell, an organization that assesses the cost-effectiveness of charities, has spoken about the need for “worldview diversification” — recognizing that there might be multiple ways of doing measurable good in a world filled with suffering and uncertainty
  • The books, however, are another matter. Considerations of immediate need pale next to speculations about existential risk — not just earthly concerns about climate change and pandemics but also (and perhaps most appealingly for some tech entrepreneurs) more extravagant theorizing about space colonization and A.I.
  • there’s a remarkable intellectual homogeneity; the dominant voices belong to white male philosophers at Oxford.
  • Among his E.A. innovations has been the career research organization known as 80,000 Hours, which promotes “earning to give” — the idea that altruistic people should pursue careers that will earn them oodles of money, which they can then donate to E.A. causes.
  • each of those terse sentences glosses over a host of additional questions, and it takes MacAskill an entire book to address them. Take the notion that “future people count.” Leaving aside the possibility that the very contemplation of a hypothetical person may not, for some real people, be “intuitive” at all, another question remains: Do future people count for more or less than existing people count for right now?
  • MacAskill cites the philosopher Derek Parfit, whose ideas about population ethics in his 1984 book “Reasons and Persons” have been influential in E.A. Parfit argued that an extinction-level event that destroyed 100 percent of the population should worry us much more than a near-extinction event that spared a minuscule population (which would presumably go on to procreate), because the number of potential lives dwarfs the number of existing ones.
  • If you’re a utilitarian committed to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the arithmetic looks irrefutable. The Times’s Ezra Klein has written about his support for effective altruism while also thoughtfully critiquing longtermism’s more fanatical expressions of “mathematical blackmail.”
  • In 2015, MacAskill published “Doing Good Better,” which is also about the virtues of effective altruism. His concerns in that book (blindness, deworming) seem downright quaint when compared with the astral-plane conjectures (A.I., building an “interstellar civilization”) that he would go on to pursue in “What We Owe the Future.”
  • In both books he emphasizes the desirability of seeking out “neglectedness” — problems that haven’t attracted enough attention so that you, as an effective altruist, can be more “impactful.” So climate change, MacAskill says, isn’t really where it’s at anymore; readers would do better to focus on “the issues around A.I. development,” which are “radically more neglected.
  • In his recent best seller, “What We Owe the Future” (2022), MacAskill says that the case for effective altruism giving priority to the longtermist view can be distilled into three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.”
  • “Earning to give” has its roots in the work of the radical utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” has been a foundational E.A. text. It contains his parable of the drowning child: If you’re walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, you should wade in and save the child, even if it means muddying your clothes
  • Extrapolating from that principle suggests that if you can save a life by donating an amount of money that won’t pose any significant problems for you, a decision not to donate that money would be not only uncharitable or ungenerous but morally wrong.
  • Singer has also written his own book about effective altruism, “The Most Good You Can Do” (2015), in which he argues that going into finance would be an excellent career choice for the aspiring effective altruist. He acknowledges the risks for harm, but he deems them worth it
  • Chances are, if you don’t become a charity worker, someone else will ably do the job; whereas if you don’t become a financier who gives his money away, who’s to say that the person who does become a financier won’t hoard all his riches for himself?
  • On Nov. 11, when FTX filed for bankruptcy amid allegations of financial impropriety, MacAskill wrote a long Twitter thread expressing his shock and his anguish, as he wrestled in real time with what Bankman-Fried had wrought.
  • “If those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community,” MacAskill wrote in a Tweet, followed by screenshots from “What We Owe the Future” and Ord’s “The Precipice” that emphasized the importance of honesty and integrity.
  • I’m guessing that Bankman-Fried may not have read the pertinent parts of those books — if, that is, he read any parts of those books at all. “I would never read a book,” Bankman-Fried said earlier this year. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
  • Avoiding books is an efficient method for absorbing the crudest version of effective altruism while gliding past the caveats
  • For all of MacAskill’s galaxy-brain disquisitions on “A.I. takeover” and the “moral case for space settlement,” perhaps the E.A. fixation on “neglectedness” and existential risks made him less attentive to more familiar risks — human, banal and closer to home.
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The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...2022-the-crypto-story
shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • the technological accomplishment of Bitcoin is that it invented a decentralized way to create scarcity on computers. Bitcoin demonstrated a way for me to send you a computer message so that you’d have it and I wouldn’t, to move items of computer information between us in a way that limited their supply and transferred possession.
  • The wild thing about Bitcoin is not that Satoshi invented a particular way for people to send numbers to one another and call them payments. It’s that people accepted the numbers as payments.
  • That social fact, that Bitcoin was accepted by many millions of people as having a lot of value, might be the most impressive thing about Bitcoin, much more than the stuff about hashing.
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  • Socially, cryptocurrency is a coordination game; people want to have the coin that other people want to have, and some sort of abstract technical equivalence doesn’t make one cryptocurrency a good substitute for another. Social acceptance—legitimacy—is what makes a cryptocurrency valuable, and you can’t just copy the code for that.
  • A thing that worked exactly like Bitcoin but didn’t have Bitcoin’s lineage—didn’t descend from Satoshi’s genesis block and was just made up by some copycat—would have the same technology but none of the value.
  • Here’s another generalization of Bitcoin: Satoshi made up an arbitrary token that trades electronically for some price. The price turns out to be high and volatile. The price of an arbitrary token is … arbitrary?
  • it’s very interesting as a matter of finance theory. Modern portfolio theory demonstrates that adding an uncorrelated asset to a portfolio can improve returns and reduce risk.
  • To the extent that the price of Bitcoin 1) mostly goes up, though with lots of ups and downs along the way, and 2) goes up and down for reasons that are arbitrary and mysterious and not tied to, like, corporate earnings or the global economy, then Bitcoin is interesting to institutional investors.
  • In practice, it turns out that the price of Bitcoin is pretty correlated with the stock market, especially tech stocks
  • Bitcoin hasn’t been a particularly effective inflation hedge: Its price rose during years when US inflation was low, and it’s fallen this year as inflation has increased.
  • The right model of crypto prices might be that they go up during broad speculative bubbles when stock prices go up, and then they go down when those bubbles pop. That’s not a particularly appealing story for investors looking to diversify.
  • one important possibility is that the first generalization of Bitcoin, that an arbitrary tradeable electronic token can become valuable just because people want it to, permanently broke everyone’s brains about all of finance.
  • Before the rise of Bitcoin, the conventional thing to say about a share of stock was that its price represented the market’s expectation of the present value of the future cash flows of the business.
  • But Bitcoin has no cash flows; its price represents what people are willing to pay for it. Still, it has a high and fluctuating market price; people have gotten rich buying Bitcoin. So people copied that model, and the creation of and speculation on pure, abstract, scarce electronic tokens became a big business.
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Book Review: 'Beaverland,' by Leila Philip - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...beaverland-leila-philip.html book review rodent
shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • That beaver was simply doing what beavers do: altering their surroundings to create a more hospitable place for themselves.
  • beavers share something rare with humans. We build; they build. We change the landscape; they change the landscape. “Beavers,” she writes, “are the only animals apart from man that radically transform their environment.”
  • Indigenous people may have hunted beavers for their meat and their fur, but they maintained taboos against overhunting, and some tribes, like the Blackfeet, considered them sacred animals that must never be harmed.
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  • this global fur trade coincided with what American geomorphologists call “the great drying,” the three centuries between 1600 and 1900 when the country’s rivers and wetlands shrank and in some cases disappeared.
  • The Europeans, however, knew that rich aristocrats back home in drafty stone castles were willing to pay huge sums of money for warm beaver pelts, and so upon their arrival in the New World the fur trade proceeded accordingly — decimating the beaver population nearly to the point of extinction.
  • dams are also why some ecologists insist that beavers may be able to help remedy the effects of climate change. Beavers build dams, which create ponds, which create ecosystems. They move water, and so could help alleviate both droughts and floods. They create “beaver meadows,” in which flowing water isn’t necessarily visible but is nevertheless there, as if absorbed by a giant sponge.
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The new tech worldview | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-new-tech-worldview tech guru theories pundit culture innovation western civilization ai
shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Sam Altman is almost supine
  • the 37-year-old entrepreneur looks about as laid-back as someone with a galloping mind ever could. Yet the ceo of OpenAi, a startup reportedly valued at nearly $20bn whose mission is to make artificial intelligence a force for good, is not one for light conversation
  • Joe Lonsdale, 40, is nothing like Mr Altman. He’s sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, dressed in linen with his hair slicked back. The tech investor and entrepreneur, who has helped create four unicorns plus Palantir, a data-analytics firm worth around $15bn that works with soldiers and spooks
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  • a “builder class”—a brains trust of youngish idealists, which includes Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, a payments firm valued at $74bn, and other (mostly white and male) techies, who are posing questions that go far beyond the usual interests of Silicon Valley’s titans. They include the future of man and machine, the constraints on economic growth, and the nature of government.
  • They share other similarities. Business provided them with their clout, but doesn’t seem to satisfy their ambition
  • The number of techno-billionaires in America (Mr Collison included) has more than doubled in a decade.
  • ome of them, like the Medicis in medieval Florence, are keen to use their money to bankroll the intellectual ferment
  • The other is Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, whose essays on everything from cities to politics are considered required reading on tech campuses.
  • Mr Altman puts it more optimistically: “The iPhone and cloud computing enabled a Cambrian explosion of new technology. Some things went right and some went wrong. But one thing that went weirdly right is a lot of people got rich and said ‘OK, now what?’”
  • A belief that with money and brains they can reboot social progress is the essence of this new mindset, making it resolutely upbeat
  • The question is: are the rest of them further evidence of the tech industry’s hubristic decadence? Or do they reflect the start of a welcome capacity for renewal?
  • Two well-known entrepreneurs from that era provided the intellectual seed capital for some of today’s techno nerds.
  • Mr Thiel, a would-be libertarian philosopher and investor
  • This cohort of eggheads starts from common ground: frustration with what they see as sluggish progress in the world around them.
  • Yet the impact could ultimately be positive. Frustrations with a sluggish society have encouraged them to put their money and brains to work on problems from science funding and the redistribution of wealth to entirely new universities. Their exaltation of science may encourage a greater focus on hard tech
  • the rationalist movement has hit the mainstream. The result is a fascination with big ideas that its advocates believe goes beyond simply rose-tinted tech utopianism
  • A burgeoning example of this is “progress studies”, a movement that Mr Collison and Tyler Cowen, an economist and seer of the tech set, advocated for in an article in the Atlantic in 2019
  • Progress, they think, is a combination of economic, technological and cultural advancement—and deserves its own field of study
  • There are other examples of this expansive worldview. In an essay in 2021 Mr Altman set out a vision that he called “Moore’s Law for Everything”, based on similar logic to the semiconductor revolution. In it, he predicted that smart machines, building ever smarter replacements, would in the coming decades outcompete humans for work. This would create phenomenal wealth for some, obliterate wages for others, and require a vast overhaul of taxation and redistribution
  • His two bets, on OpenAI and nuclear fusion, have become fashionable of late—the former’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is all the rage. He has invested $375m in Helion, a company that aims to build a fusion reactor.
  • Mr Lonsdale, who shares a libertarian streak with Mr Thiel, has focused attention on trying to fix the shortcomings of society and government. In an essay this year called “In Defence of Us”, he argues against “historical nihilism”, or an excessive focus on the failures of the West.
  • With a soft spot for Roman philosophy, he has created the Cicero Institute in Austin that aims to inject free-market principles such as competition and transparency into public policy.
  • He is also bringing the startup culture to academia, backing a new place of learning called the University of Austin, which emphasises free speech.
  • All three have business ties to their mentors. As a teen, Mr Altman was part of the first cohort of founders in Mr Graham’s Y Combinator, which went on to back successes such as Airbnb and Dropbox. In 2014 he replaced him as its president, and for a while counted Mr Thiel as a partner (Mr Altman keeps an original manuscript of Mr Thiel’s book “Zero to One” in his library). Mr Thiel was also an early backer of Stripe, founded by Mr Collison and his brother, John. Mr Graham saw promise in Patrick Collison while the latter was still at school. He was soon invited to join Y Combinator. Mr Graham remains a fan: “If you dropped Patrick on a desert island, he would figure out how to reproduce the Industrial Revolution,”
  • While at university, Mr Lonsdale edited the Stanford Review, a contrarian publication co-founded by Mr Thiel. He went on to work for his mentor and the two men eventually helped found Palantir. He still calls Mr Thiel “a genius”—though he claims these days to be less “cynical” than his guru.
  • “The tech industry has always told these grand stories about itself,” says Adrian Daub of Stanford University and author of the book, “What Tech Calls Thinking”. Mr Daub sees it as a way of convincing recruits and investors to bet on their risky projects. “It’s incredibly convenient for their business models.”
  • In the 2000s Mr Thiel supported the emergence of a small community of online bloggers, self-named the “rationalists”, who were focused on removing cognitive biases from thinking (Mr Thiel has since distanced himself). That intellectual heritage dates even further back, to “cypherpunks”, who noodled about cryptography, as well as “extropians”, who believed in improving the human condition through life extensions
  • Silicon Valley has shown an uncanny ability to reinvent itself in the past.
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There's a New Menace Stalking Suburbia. Meet the McBasement. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eet-the-mcbasement-11665497875 rich house construction size excess culture
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • One solution? Go low. “The possibilities are endless,” says Stephen Cheney, owner of Cheney Custom Homes, who is currently constructing a roughly 16,000-square-foot home and guest home with a 5,600-square-foot “bunker” below for a bowling alley, 3-D golf simulator, and spa..origami-wrapper *{margin:0;padding:0;border:0}.origami-top-border{border-top:1px solid #dadada;padding-top:10px}.origami-headline{font-family:Retina,'Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:500;color:#333;font-size:18px;line-height:20px;margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image-wrapper{display:flex;margin-bottom:10px;gap:10px}.origami-image-wrapper:last-of-type{margin-bottom:8px}.origami-image{flex:1 1}.origami-image img{max-width:100%;width:100%;height:100%;display:block;max-inline-size:100%}.origami-image figcaption{display:none}.origami-caption{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:18.6667px;margin-bottom:4px}.origami-credit{display:block;font-family:Retina,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-weight:300;color:#555;line-height:20px;text-transform:uppercase}@media (min-width:640px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-desktop{display:none}}@media (max-width:639px){#origami-dac13529-1203-4200-8bb3-a2147cdf655f .origami-hide-on-mobile{display:none}}
  • Basements can dwarf homes above. Designer Andrew Kotchen, a principal at Workshop/APD, is working on a 5,000-square-foot Nantucket abode that will have a 10,000-square-foot basement with a basketball court, garage, bedrooms and a wellness space.
  • For the 10,000-square-foot grotto, workers are using the same waterproofing technique as Boston’s Big Dig highway project, Mr. Kotchen says. An emergency pump system and thick concrete slab underneath will prevent the foundation from floating up should water levels rise, he says.
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  • In Aspen, a 5,000-square-foot basement at the confluence of two rivers required “dewatering,” says Ryan Walterscheid, a partner at architecture firm Forum Phi. Workers drilled wells around the site and pumped out almost a billion gallons of water before pouring the foundation. (The water was poured back into the river.)
  • r David Taban, who is trying to build a 23,144-square-foot house, of which 9,829 would be a basement. (He wants to dig down to appease neighbors who worried his home would hurt their views.) But getting a basement of that size required removing 5,346 cubic yards of dirt, which one city planner said would amount to 594 truckloads.
  • Spec developers know the more livable space, the bigger the price tag, says Brett Loehmann, a project manager at McClean Design. “If you don’t have great amenities, you’re not going to be the coolest person on the block.”
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The End of the Silicon Valley Myth - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672598
shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • These companies, launched with promises to connect the world, to think different, to make information free to all, to democratize technology, have spent much of the past decade making the sorts of moves that large corporations trying to grow ever larger have historically made—embracing profit over safety, market expansion over product integrity, and rent seeking over innovation—but at much greater scale, speed, and impact. Now, ruled by monopolies, marred by toxicity, and overly reliant on precarious labor, Silicon Valley looks like it’s finally run hard up into its limits.
  • They’re failing utterly to create the futures they’ve long advertised, or even to maintain the versions they were able to muster. Having scaled to immense size, they’re unable or unwilling to manage the digital communities they’ve built
  • They’re paralyzed when it comes to product development and reduced to monopolistic practices such as charging rents and copying or buying up smaller competitors
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  • Their policies tend to please no one; it’s a common refrain that antipathy toward Big Tech companies is one of the few truly bipartisan issues
  • You can just feel it, the cumulative weight of this stagnation, in the tech that most of us encounter every day. The act of scrolling past the same dumb ad to peer at the same bad news on the same glass screen on the same social network: This is the stuck future. There is a sense that we have reached the end of the internet, and no one wants to be left holding the bag
  • There’s a palpable exhaustion with the whole enterprise, with the men who set out to build the future or at least get rich, and who accomplished only one and a half of those things.
  • The big social networks are stuck. And there is little profit incentive to get them unstuck. That, after all, would require investing heavily in content moderators, empowering trust and safety teams, and penalizing malicious viral content that brings in huge traffic.
  • It’s not just social media that’s in decline, already over, or worse.
  • As its mighty iPhone sales figures have plateaued and its business has grown more conservative—it hasn’t released a culturally significant new product line since 2016’s AirPods—Apple has begun to embrace advertising.
  • as Google has consolidated its monopoly, the quality of its flagship search product has gotten worse. Result pages are cluttered with ads that must be scrolled through in order to find the “‘organic”’ items, and there’s reason to think the quality of the results has gotten worse over time as well.
  • YouTube, meanwhile, is facing many of the same policy quagmires as Facebook and Twitter, especially when it comes to content moderation—and similarly failing to meaningfully address them.
  • What a grim outcome for the internet, where the possibilities were once believed to be endless and where users were promised an infinite spectrum of possibility to indulge their creativity, build robust communities, and find their best expression, even when they could not do so in the real world
  • Big Tech, of course, never predicated its business models on enabling any of that, though its advertising and sloganeering may have suggested otherwise. Rather, companies’ ambitions were always focused on being the biggest: having the most users, selling the most devices, locking the most people into their walled gardens and ecosystems. The stuckness we’re seeing is the result of some of the most ambitious companies of our generation succeeding wildly yet having no vision beyond scale—no serious interest in engaging the civic and social dimensions of their projects.
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Opinion | The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vate-plane-climate-change.html luxury boat airplane emissions climate change carbon response billlio rich
shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.
  • the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.
  • The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitan
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  • Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht.
  • France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.
  • Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Irelan
  • Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.
  • this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallie
  • In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?
  • making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.
  • “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.
  • When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.
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Opinion | America, China and a Crisis of Trust - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hina-america-relationship.html china america crisis rivalry culture politics history
shared by Javier E on 16 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.
  • The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool.
  • In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.
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  • it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.
  • These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.
  • The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.
  • Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.
  • some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable
  • Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.
  • China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.
  • For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.
  • China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.
  • “ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”
  • “I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”
  • Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”
  • A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”
  • t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?
  • the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”
  • Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists
  • One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.
  • in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.
  • Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.
  • This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet
  • so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.
  • no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.
  • when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.
  • As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.
  • when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”
  • as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.
  • So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.
  • As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.
  • When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”
  • TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions
  • TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.
  • “Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”
  • But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.
  • As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”
  • China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.
  • It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.
  • when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”
  • Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.
  • it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.
  • eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror
  • Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.
  • Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.
  • As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.
  • Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.
  • at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.
  • I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.
  • I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.
  • China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.
  • Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.
  • I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.
  • If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.
  • As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.
  • In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”
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The 'Black Hole' That Sucks Up Silicon Valley's Money - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560216 philanthropy silicon valley rich tax shelter money
shared by Javier E on 14 May 18 - No Cached
  • That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.
  • The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the country—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.
  • There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent.
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  • Donor-advised funds are categorized by law as public charities, rather than private foundations, so they have no payout requirements and few disclosure requirements.
  • And wealthy residents of Silicon Valley are donating large sums to such funds
  • critics say that in part because of its structure as a warehouse of donor-advised funds, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has not had a positive impact on the community it is meant to serve. Some people I talked to say the foundation has had little interest in spending money, because its chief executive, Emmett Carson, who was placed on paid administrative leave after the Chronicle’s report, wanted it to be known that he had created one of the biggest foundations in the country. Carson was “aggressive” about trying to raise money, but “unaggressive about suggesting what clients would do with it,”
  • “Most of us in the local area have seen our support from the foundation go down and not up,” he said.
  • The amount of money going from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the nine-county Bay Area actually dropped in 2017 by 46 percent, even as the amount of money under management grew by 64 percent, to $13.5 billion
  • “They got so drunk on the idea of growth that they lost track of anything smacking of mission,” he said. It did not help perceptions that the foundation opened offices in New York and San Francisco at the same time local organizations were seeing donations drop.
  • The foundation now gives her organization some grants, but they don’t come from the donor-advised funds, she told me. “I haven’t really cracked the code of how to access those donor-advised funds,” she said. Her organization had been getting between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from United Way that it no longer gets, she said,
  • Rob Reich, the co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, set up a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation as an experiment. He spent $5,000—the minimum amount accepted—and waited. He received almost no communication from the foundation, he told me. No emails or calls about potential nonprofits to give to, no information about whether the staff was out looking for good opportunities in the community, no data about how his money was being managed.
  • One year later, despite a booming stock market, his account was worth less than the $5,000 he had put in, and had not been used in any way in the community. His balance was lower because the foundation charges hefty fees to donors who keep their money there. “I was flabbergasted,” he told me. “I didn’t understand what I, as a donor, was getting for my fees.”
  • Though donors receive a big tax break for donating to donor-advised funds, the funds have no payout requirements, unlike private foundations, which are required to disperse 5 percent of their assets each year. With donor-advised funds, “there’s no urgency and no forced payout,”
  • he had met wealthy individuals who said they were setting up donor-advised funds so that their children could disperse the funds and learn about philanthropy—they had no intent to spend the money in their own lifetimes.
  • Fund managers also receive fees for the amount of money they have under management, which means they have little incentive to encourage people to spend the money in their accounts,
  • Transparency is also an issue. While foundations have to provide detailed information about where they give their money, donor-advised funds distributions are listed as gifts made from the entire charitable fund—like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation—rather than from individuals.
  • Donor-advised funds can also be set up anonymously, which makes it hard for nonprofits to engage with potential givers. They also don’t have websites or mission statements like private foundations do, which can make it hard for nonprofits to know what causes donors support.
  • Public charities—defined as organizations that receive a significant amount of their revenue from small donations—were saddled with less oversight, in part because Congress figured that their large number of donors would make sure they were spending their money well, Madoff said. But an attorney named Norman Sugarman, who represented the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, convinced the IRS to categorize a certain type of asset—charitable dollars placed in individually named accounts managed by a public charity—as donations to public, not private, foundations.
  • Donor-advised funds have been growing nationally as the amount of money made by the top 1 percent has grown: Contributions to donor-advised funds grew 15.1 percent in fiscal year 2016, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, while overall charitable contributions grew only 1.4 percent that year
  • Six of the top 10 philanthropies in the country last year, in terms of the amount of nongovernmental money raised, were donor-advised funds,
  • In addition, those funds with high payout rates could just be giving to another donor-advised fund, rather than to a public charity, Madoff says. One-quarter of donor-advised fund sponsors distribute less than 1 percent of their assets in a year,
  • Groups that administer donor-advised funds defend their payout rate, saying distributions from donor-advised funds are around 14 percent of assets a year. But that number can be misleading, because one donor-advised fund could give out all its money, while many more could give out none, skewing the data.
  • Donor-advised funds are especially popular in places like Silicon Valley because they provide tax advantages for donating appreciated stock, which many start-up founders have but don’t necessarily want to pay huge taxes on
  • Donors get a tax break for the value of the appreciated stock at the time they donate it, which can also spare them hefty capital-gains taxes. “Anybody with a business interest can give their business interest before it goes public and save huge amounts of taxes,”
  • Often, people give to donor-advised funds right before a public event like an initial public offering, so they can avoid the capital-gains taxes they’d otherwise have to pay, and instead receive a tax deduction. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan gave $500 million in stock to the foundation in 2012, when Facebook held its initial public offering, and also donated $1 billion in stock in 2013
  • Wealthy donors can also donate real estate and deduct the value of real estate at the time of the donation—if they’d given to a private foundation, they’d only be able to deduct the donor’s basis value (typically the purchase price) of the real estate at the time they acquired it. The difference can be a huge amount of money in the hot market of California.
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Working from home and the US-Europe divide - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-home-and-the-us-europe-divide leisure US Europe culture policy economics
shared by Javier E on 04 May 24 - No Cached
  • there is one explanation that seems almost too simplistic: that “Americans just work harder”,
  • The numbers do in fact bear out this assertion—a rare case of national stereotypes being empirically provable
  • On average Americans work 1,811 hours per year, according to data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. That is 15% more than in the EU, where the average is 1,571 hours
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  • it is not just that Europeans spend a few extra weeks on the beach. The typical working day in Britain, France and Germany is half an hour shorter than in America, according to the International Labour Organisation.
  • which is the better way of living—with more money or more free time? The reality is that it is difficult for people to choose
  • Those in America work according to American schedules; those in Europe conform to European norms.
  • the more fruitful question is why Americans put in longer hours
  • The answer leads to a curious new observation: that remote work is making America’s office drones a little more European, albeit with a puritanical twist.
  • A first guess suggests that culture might account for the variation in work hours. Maybe Europeans enjoy their leisure more. They are spoilt for choice about how to spend time off
  • As for Americans, surveys indicate that they view hard work as intrinsically worthwhile. “Rugged individualism” is, after all, what built the country.
  • the difficulty with chalking up the difference to culture is that until the early 1970s many Europeans worked more
  • American working hours are basically the same now as back then. The big change is that Europeans now toil less. Hours are down a whopping 30% in Germany over the past half-century. Something beyond culture—a slow-moving, ill-defined variable—is at play.
  • Edward Prescott, an American economist, came to a provocative conclusion, arguing that the key was taxation
  • Until the early 1970s tax levels were similar in America and Europe, and so were hours worked. By the early 1990s Europe’s taxes had become more burdensome and, in Prescott’s view, its employees less motivated
  • A substantial gap persists today: American tax revenue is 28% of GDP, compared with 40% or so in Europe.
  • A recent study by Jósef Sigurdsson of Stockholm University examined how Icelandic workers responded to a one-year income-tax holiday in 1987, when the country overhauled its tax system. Although people with more flexibility—especially younger ones in part-time jobs—did indeed put in more hours, the overall increase in work was modest relative to that implied by Prescott’s model.
  • Regulation seems to matter more.
  • European rules give workers power, from generous parental-leave policies to stricter laws on firing staff. Many European countries try to put caps on working tim
  • most research agrees that they have reduced work hours.
  • Another important relationship is that, as people get richer, they typically want to work less
  • A recent paper by the IMF shows a remarkably strong link between GDP per person and hours worked in Europe. People in richer countries, such as the Netherlands, generally work less than those in poorer countries, such as Bulgaria.
  • Americans are wealthier than most Europeans, so why do they still work more?
  • Perhaps leisure is a collective-action problem. Americans may want to ask their bosses for longer holidays but are worried about being seen as slackers
  • A paper in 2005 by Alberto Alesina of Harvard University and colleagues argued that Europe’s stronger unions had in effect solved this collective-action problem by fighting for paid vacations, which ended up enshrined in law.
  • Europe’s well-regulated leisure time may then beget more leisure because it is more socially acceptable, and the market responds by supplying more good ways not to work. It is a virtuous cycle of lovely cafés.
  • One fascinating new development is a discrepancy in the rise of remote work
  • In 2023 the Global Survey of Working Arrangements found that full-time employees in America work from home 1.4 days a week, while those in Europe do so for 0.8 days
  • a striking result: Europeans and Americans now spend almost exactly the same amount of time in the office, with 1,320 hours a year for the former and 1,304 for the latter.
  • In other words, the extra 15% of work done by Americans annually is now from the comfort of their own homes—or occasionally on the beach, perhaps even one in Europe. Americans do still work harder, but rather more enjoyably than in the past
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Review: 'The Free World' by Louis Menand - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618713 free world intellectual artistic cultural history US european book review
shared by Javier E on 07 May 24 - No Cached
  • ouis Menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over
  • For those of us who lived through any portion of this period and its immediate aftermath, the book is a rather amazing compendium of the scholarly research, revision, and demythologizing that have been accomplished in recent decades.
  • Interweaving post-1945 art history, literary history, and intellectual history, Menand provides a familiar outline; the picture he presents is one of cultural triumph backed by American wealth and aggressive foreign policy.
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  • guided by a fascination with the wayward paths to fame, he half-unwittingly sows doubt about the justice of the American rise to artistic leadership in the postwar era. In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn
  • For the greatness and inevitability of artistic consecration, Menand substitutes the arbitrary confluences of forces at any given moment.
  • The curriculum runs chapter by chapter through George Kennan, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jackson Pollock, Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Elvis and the Beatles, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and Pauline Kael. Each biography opens a door to a school or trend of work
  • Menand’s is not a “great man” view of history, because no one seems particularly great. One gets a feeling for Sartre as a person, a limited knowledge of how Sartre made Being and Nothingness, and a vivid sense of how the book made Sartre a celebrity. Then one learns how a troupe of others came along and rode his success like a sled.
  • Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity.
  • group biographies, in miniature, of the existentialists, the Beats, the action painters, the Black Mountain School, the British Invasion, the pop artists, and many coteries more—are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up
  • All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty. Menand is a world-class entomologist: He can name every indistinguishable drone, knows who had an oversize mandible, who lost a leg, who carried the best crumbs.
  • From this vantage, the monuments really are just anthills.
  • Menand is truly one of the great explainers. He quotes approvingly a lesson taken by Lionel Trilling from his editor Elliot Cohen: “No idea was so difficult and complex but that it could be expressed in a way that would make it understood by anyone to whom it might conceivably be of interest.”
  • The underlying theory of the book rests on a picture of what makes for “cultural winners,” works and ideas that Menand defines as
  • He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer
  • Menand’s account of each is an abbreviated tour de force. His explanations work at all levels: interpretation for scholars, review for general readers, introductions for neophytes. Where another writer would take 20 pages to tell us why someone or something mattered historically, Menand does it in two.
  • goods or styles that maintain market share through “generational” taste shifts—that is, through all the “the king is dead; long live the king” moments that mark the phases of cultural history for people living through it.
  • Menand’s recountings are less concerned with the changing meanings of individual works than with their successive adoptions and co-optations, in defiance of depth and meaning. It is a process of “winning” often based on cults of personality, indifference to complex origins, and the fortune or misfortune of timing
  • Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public. His analysis helps demystify trends in commercial forms like film and pop music, especially when they otherwise seemed to run against the grain of pure profit
  • Often Menand’s point seems to be that the culture’s reigning talkers and salespeople and debaters need to conjure figures to venerate and attack (in ceaseless alternation) for short-range purposes of attention and competition. Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games.
  • The central question of this period in culture might be whether U.S. artists lived up to expectations
  • In 1945, Europe was in ruins. America was rich and productive and dictated the terms of the postwar economic and political order. Certainly the U.S. had the power to pretend to cultural glory, too. But was it a pretense, or did Americans really continue and exceed the prewar triumphs of European modernism?
  • Most histories of the arts after 1945 assume that the greatest American successes deserved their fame.
  • The thrust of many of Menand’s retellings is that “in the business of cultural exchange, misprision is often the key to transmission.” Fame comes through misreadings, fantasies, unintended resonances, charisma, and publicity.
  • Menand’s book bequeaths the sense that the last laugh may truly have been on the self-seriousness of a whole historical period, one that treated its most publicized and successful arts figures far too generously, giving them too much credit for depth and vision, while missing the cynical forces by which they’d been buoyed up and marketed
  • “Foreign film” in America in the ’50s and ’60s—when independent art cinemas emerged, showing imports such as work by Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave—proves to have been energized by a successful federal-government antitrust action against the monopolistic Hollywood studios
  • The idea of a “culture industry”
  • is used unironically by Menand to name the vastly scaled-up production and consumption of all artistic experience. “The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded, swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion.”
  • With his eye on this process, we miss out on artists and thinkers who dug deep and stayed home, who produced as hermits or eccentrics or introverted students of their art
  • Where did rock ’n’ roll come from?” Menand wonders. He answers that it was “the by-product of a number of unrelated developments in the American music business” that redirected sales to teenagers, and also the result of new radio-station competition, the partial racial desegregation of the music charts, and the arrival of 200-disc jukeboxes
  • I can imagine The Free World leaving my hypothetical college senior, denizen of the bleak attention economy of the 21st century, feeling liberated to discover that culture was no better—no more committed to a quest for what is true, noble, lasting, and beautiful—in the world of the Baby Boomers and beaming grandparents.
  • The book is so masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research, that I wonder whether Menand could truly have intended where his history of the postwar era landed me. I learned so much, and ended up caring so much les
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Book Review: 'Free and Equal,' by Daniel Chandler - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...and-equal-daniel-chandler.html rawls book review social justice liberalism fairness freedom
shared by Javier E on 09 May 24 - No Cached
  • in doing the hard work of spelling out what a Rawlsian program might look like in practice, Chandler ends up illustrating why liberalism has elicited such frustration from its many critics in the first place.
  • Rawls’s theory was premised on the thought experiment of the “original position,” in which individuals would design a just society from behind a “veil of ignorance.” People couldn’t know whether they would be born rich or poor, gay or straight, Black or white — and so, like the child cutting the cake who doesn’t get to choose the first slice, each would be motivated to realize a society that would be accepted as fair even by the most vulnerable.
  • This is liberalism grounded in reciprocity rather than selfishness or altruism. According to Rawls’s “difference principle,” inequalities would be permitted only as long as they promoted the interests of the least advantaged.
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  • People might not agree on much, Chandler says, but the “veil of ignorance” encourages us to find a mutually agreeable starting point. If we don’t know what community we are born into, we should want a “reasonable pluralism.” We should also want the state “to maintain the conditions that are the basis for our freedom and equality as citizens.”
  • As an example, Chandler raises the thorny issue of free speech. “Political, moral and religious” speech “is integral to developing our sense of what is fair and how to live,” he writes, which is why it deserves robust protection. But since some speech, such as advertising, plays “no meaningful role” in helping us figure out how to live a good life, such speech can be limited. The idea is to balance individual and group freedoms with the need for peaceful coexistence
  • The state should protect the rights of gay people not to be discriminated against — even though the state cannot force anyone or any group to approve of gay relationships. Chandler, who is gay, suggests that premising gay rights on getting everyone to agree on the question of morality is a waste of energy: “For some people this” — the belief that homosexuality is a sin — “is part of their faith and no reasoned argument will persuade them otherwise.”
  • The last two-thirds of “Free and Equal” are given over to specific policy proposals. Some of them sound familiar enough — restricting private money in politics; beefing up civic education — while others are more far-reaching and radical, including the establishment of worker cooperatives, in which “workers decide how things are done,” and the abolition of private schools.
  • t despite his valiant efforts, the book enacts both the promise and the limitations of the theory it seeks to promote. It didn’t leave me cold, but it did leave me restless.
  • He persuasively refutes the conflation of liberal egalitarianism with technocracy, and helpfully points out that an emphasis on technocratic competence “leaves many voters cold.
  • For anyone who venerates consensus in politics, this sounds appealing; given the fissures of our current moment, it also comes across as wildly insufficient.
  • that’s part of Chandler’s point: A Rawlsian framework encourages people with a variety of deeply held commitments to live together in mutual tolerance, free to figure out questions of individual morality and the good life for themselves.
  • Regarding Katrina Forrester’s “In the Shadow of Justice” (2019), a searching and brilliant history of how his ideas presumed a postwar consensus that was already fracturing at the time that “A Theory of Justice” was published, Chandler has little to say.
  • “Free and Equal” includes a detailed chapter on “Rawls and His Critics,” but mostly navigates around anything that might truly rattle the Rawlsian framework.
  • Perhaps Forrester wouldn’t be surprised by this move; as she puts it, “The capaciousness of liberal philosophy squeezed out possibilities for radical critique.”
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