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As a result, their student populations are often far less diverse than they should be. And, sometimes, kids who would otherwise be eligible for these schools never get to enjoy them.

The country, he discovered, is home to some 165 of these institutions—"exam schools," as he calls them—or 1 percent of all public high schools.

econdly, selective-enrollment schools "are very sought after by upper-middle class people who might not consider using public schools if it weren’t for the selective-enrollment institutions. Essentially, it’s a way of ensuring greater participation from wealthier families who might otherwise move to the suburbs."

Selective-admissions programs are in part symptomatic of a broader, three-decade-old reform movement that has aimed to overcome the "mediocre educational performance" of the country’s students

They’re also an example of "school choice," the tenet that parents should have options when it comes to their kids’ education, even when it’s free.

"The idea was that, if you wanted to provide an excellent, gifted, and talented education for public school students, one could do a better job of that if in large cities there were specialized schools that would bring academically talented students together,"

These schools, some of which are centuries old, are concentrated in 31 states, including nearly three dozen total in New York City, Chicago, and Boston alone. All but three of these 31 states are located in the eastern half of the country,

"How do you recognize excellence on the one hand and promote genuine equal opportunity on the other?"

getting into selective-enrollment schools typically requires having proactive parents who know how to navigate the system—a resource many children lack.

The clashes over selective-admissions policies reflect the challenges districts face in reconciling two goals that are often diametrically opposed: academic achievement and equity. How can a school be color blind while simultaneously promoting educational access and diversity?

"the trick," he said, "is you don’t want the selective-enrollment schools to become enclaves of privilege that are separate and unequal from the rest of the system."

Can a fair selective-admissions system for public schools even exist?

urban school districts are nowhere near coming up with a model that works well and raises all students. The fact remains that many of these schools look and operate like elite schools exclusive to elite families.

These are schools renowned for their academic prowess and widely seen as conduits to the country’s top colleges. But, as the NAACP complaint demonstrates, they’re also notorious for their lack of racial diversity, enrolling disproportionate numbers of white and, in particular, Asian students, who made up 60 percent of the student bodies at these schools last year despite constituting just 15 percent of the city’s total enrollment.

Blacks and Latinos made up just 7 percent and 5 percent of the student bodies at these elite schools last year, respectively, even though the two groups together account for 70 percent of the public school population citywide.

many of New York City’s specialized high schools are more socioeconomically diverse than critics make them out to be.

"It’s not just a simple picture—there’s no one profile in this city," she said. "Those [test-only] schools are serving some first-generation strivers and working-class strivers that some of these other schools are not taking …

it’s hard to deny arguments that the test-only admissions policy can serve as a form of de facto discrimination. The multiple-choice exam is so rigorous some students devote entire summers to studying for it, often with the help of private tutors or intensive prep courses that cost thousands of dollars

much of the prejudice traces back to the lack of equal educational opportunity in kids’ earlier years, which effectively debunks the notion that a test is the fairest way to assess a student’s eligibility for enrollment.

When it comes to admission to one of the selective schools, most students only compete with their peers in the same tier. A student who lives in a single-parent household and relies on welfare, for example, would in theory rarely contend with a middle-class student for the same seat. Just 30 percent of the seats at each selective school goes to the highest-scoring students, regardless of their tier; the rest, for the most part, are divided among the highest-performing students in each tier. That means the bar is typically set higher for kids in the upper tiers (the fourth tier corresponds with the highest median income) than for those in the lower ones.

"Given the overlap between race and class in American society in cities like Chicago, giving a leg up to economically disadvantaged students will translate into [racial diversity],

Diversity aside, selective-enrollment high schools also raise questions about what the admissions process can do to an adolescent’s psyche, particularly when it places an inordinate emphasis on testing

Forget Halloween, weekend sleepovers with friends, playing outdoors. For many eighth graders in New York City, the fall is synonymous with tutors and exams, while the spring brings intense competition—and often volatile emotions—over placement in coveted spots at the city’s best high schools.

As for the students, "you’re given a cornucopia of beautiful and horrible choices and then held up, feeling like you’re being assessed and placed and feeling like your life is not your own," Szuflita said. "It feels very uncertain, and it feels like there are great triumphs and disasters."

While some diseases, like cystic fibrosis, are caused by a single genetic mutation, the most common ones are not. Instead, mutations to a number of different genes can each raise the risk of getting, say, heart disease or breast cancer. Discovering these mutations can shed light on these diseases and point to potential treatments. But many of them are rare, making it necessary to search large groups of people to find them.

The wealth of data created in Iceland may enable scientists to begin doing that

For example, they found eight people in Iceland who shared a mutation on a gene called MYL4. Medical records showed that they also have early onset atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat.

they identified a gene called ABCA7 as a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.Previous studies had suggested a gene in the genetic neighborhood of ABCA7 was associated with the disease.But the Icelandic study pinpointed the gene itself — and even the specific mutation involved.

Since Dr. Stefansson and his colleagues submitted their initial results for publication, they have continued gathering DNA from Icelanders.The scientists now have full genomes from about 10,000 Icelanders and partial genetic information on 150,000 more.

Dr. Stefansson said that means that his firm could generate a report for genetic disease on every person in Iceland

Iceland is a particularly fertile country for doing genetics research. It was founded by a small number of settlers from Europe arriving about 1,100 years ago. Between 8,000 and 20,000 people came mainly from Scandinavia, Ireland and Scotland.

The country remained isolated for the next thousand years, and so living Icelanders have a relatively low level of genetic diversity. This makes it easier for scientists to detect genetic variants that raise the risk of disease, because there are fewer of them to examine.

celand also has impressive genealogical records. Through epic poems and historical documents, many Icelanders can trace their ancestry back to the nation’s earliest arrivals. Geneticists use national genealogy databases to look for diseases that are unusually common in relatives — a sign that they share a mutation.

the company is now investigating a gene, found by Decode, with a strong link to cardiovascular disease in Iceland. (He declined to name the gene.)

“The broader lesson of our analysis,” Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren write, “is that social mobility should be tackled at a local level.”

the new estimates of mobility conflict with earlier estimates. For example, previous estimates suggested that New York City was a good place for lower-income children to grow up: Children raised in lower-income families in New York had above-average outcomes in adulthood.

better or worse is measured by the household incomes of children in early adulthood. This makes New York look worse than it would if individual incomes were used, because it, along with Northern California, has some of the lowest marriage rates in the country. Manhattan is actually better than most of the country at raising the individual incomes of poor girls. Marriage rates, too, are strongly affected by where children grow up.

Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren based the latest estimates on the incomes of more than five million children who moved between areas when they were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. These estimates are causal: They suggest moving a given child to a new area would in fact cause him or her to do better or worse.

In the new estimates, Manhattan ranks among the worst counties in the country for girls from lower-income families.

But New York appeared above average in part because it has a large number of immigrants, who have good rates of upward mobility no matter where they live: Nothing about New York in particular caused these children to do better.

in poor families. It is better than only about 7 percent of counties.

The United States is responsible for bringing the various opposition groups in line while the Russians are supposed to pressure the government. Washington and Moscow also agreed to set up a hotline to monitor compliance by both sides.

President Obama sealed the final terms of the arrangement in a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has become perhaps the most influential player in the Syrian war since Russia thrust itself into the conflict in September on behalf of its client, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

The diplomatic efforts did yield a small victory: Aid was delivered for the first time in months to several towns after the combatants gave permission under intense pressure.

On the ground in Syria, the prospects for an end to the bloodshed seemed even more elusive. In the last week alone, more than 100 people in Homs and Damascus were killed by suicide bombings by the Islamic State.

Airstrikes by the Syrian government and its Russian allies in Aleppo and elsewhere have killed scores of people, including in at least five hospitals, one aided by the international charity Doctors Without Borders.

Farther east, scores of civilians were said by locals to have been killed in airstrikes by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

The priorities, Mr. Obama told Mr. Putin, were to “alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people,” accelerate a political settlement and keep the focus on the coalition’s battle against the Islamic State.

hundreds of thousands of Syrians remain trapped in areas that are classified as besieged or hard to reach, without regular access to food and medicine. Humanitarian groups caution that the more access to aid is used as part of political deals, the less the combatants will provide it unconditionally, as required under international law.

The agreement came after one false start: Secretary of State John Kerry announced in Munich on Feb. 12 that the truce would take effect in a week, but the target date passed as the two sides wrestled over how to carry it out. On Sunday, in Amman, Jordan, Mr. Kerry spoke three times by phone with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, to iron out the details.

On Monday, while flying back to Washington, Mr. Kerry briefed ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey about the agreement, according to a senior State Department official. He is expected to discuss the truce when he testifies at a budget hearing Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. Kerry has tended to be more optimistic than the White House about the prospects for a diplomatic solution in Syria. But his statement on Monday was also notably reserved. He did not mention the Feb. 27 date and said that while the agreement represented a “moment of promise,” the “fulfillment of that promise depends on actions.”

Analysts expressed skepticism about the deal, noting that in the five days before the truce takes effect, the Syrian forces and their Russian allies could inflict a lot more damage to Aleppo through bombing raids. Some speculated that Russia might expand its military campaign to Idlib, southwest of Aleppo, where Nusra fighters are also operating.

“This depends entirely on the good faith of Russia, Iran and the Assad regime, none of whom have shown much good faith in the last five years,” said Frederic C. Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who worked on Syria policy during the first term of the Obama administration.

In Riyadh on Monday, a Saudi-backed consortium of Syrian opposition groups and political dissidents said they would agree to the terms of the truce. But Riad Hijab, who coordinates the group’s efforts, did not expect the Syrian government, Iran or Russia to abide by it since, he said, Mr. Assad’s survival depended on “the continuation of its campaign of oppression, killing and forced displacement.”

For the Obama administration, a partial truce in Syria may simply be a way to keep a lid on the violence there while it turns its attention to planning and carrying out military operations against Islamic State fighters in Libya.

Some analysts said the agreement was less an effort to end the fighting in Syria than to ease the bloodshed enough to allow more humanitarian aid to reach stricken cities like Aleppo.

Perry was accused of using his veto power to threaten a public official and overstepping his authority, but the judges ruled that courts can't undermine the veto power of a governor.

"Come at the king, you best not miss," Republican Judge David Newell wrote in his concurring opinion, quoting a popular line from the HBO series "The Wire."

Perry has been campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz since becoming the first major GOP candidate to drop out of the race last year.

"I've always known the actions I took were not only lawful and legal, they were right," said Perry, who spoke at the headquarters of an influential Texas conservative think tank, which has previously christened its balcony overlooking downtown as the "Gov. Rick Perry Liberty Balcony."

The court said veto power can't be restricted by the courts and the prosecution of a veto "violates separations of powers." A lower appeals court had dismissed the other charge, coercion by a public servant, in July.

Perry had rebuked the charges as a partisan attack from the start, calling it a "political witch hunt," but the dismissal brought accusations of Republican judges doing a favor for a party stalwart.

Texans for Public Justice, a left-leaning watchdog group that filed the original criminal complaint that led to the indictment, said Perry was handed a "gift" based on his stature.

Even a Republican judge who dissented in the ruling said the decision could leave the public with an uneasy perception that the system went out of its way to clear a famous politician with deep connections.

Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas history, made just one court appearance in the case and was defiant from the start — he went out for ice cream after turning himself in for booking at an Austin jail, and smiled wide for his mug shot.

Legal scholars across the political spectrum raised objections about the case. Still, the Republican judge overseeing it repeatedly refused to throw it out on constitutional grounds, prompting Perry's appeals.

Michael McCrum, the special prosecutor who secured Perry's indictment, maintained that the matter was built on evidence — not politics — and deserved to go to trial. He can appeal, but that would be a lengthy process. Combined, the original charges carried a potential maximum of 109 years in prison.

Perry had formally announced he was running for president in June, hoping to convince GOP primary voters he deserved another chance after his 2012 bid was undone by a series of public gaffes. But his second campaign lasted barely three months, and he dropped out of the race in September.

The former governor spent more than $2 million on top defense lawyers. His latest White House campaign raised barely half that much in its first month, and Perry blamed the indictment for his sluggish fundraising. But polls showed he was badly trailing despite visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He was the first candidate to leave a GOP field jammed with 17 presidential hopefuls at the time.

OPEC members Qatar, Venezuela and Kuwait said they were also ready to freeze output and oil sources in Iraq - the world's fastest-growing producer in the past year - said Baghdad would abide by a global deal aimed at tackling a growing oversupply and helping prices recover from their lowest in over a decade.

Benchmark Brent oil prices fell 2 percent on Tuesday to below $33 per barrel on concerns that Iran may reject the deal and that even if Tehran agreed it would not help ease the growing global glut.

The fact that output from Saudi Arabia and Russia is near record highs complicates any agreement since Iran is producing at least 1 million barrels per day below its capacity and pre-sanctions levels.

However, two non-Iranian sources close to OPEC discussions told Reuters that Iran may be offered special terms as part of the output freeze deal. "Iran is returning to the market and needs to be given a special chance but it also needs to make some calculations," said one source. The sources did not elaborate on the special terms, which technically could be anything from setting limited production increase levels for Iran to linking future output rises to a recovery in oil prices.

The last global deal - OPEC and non-OPEC - dates back to 2001 when Saudi Arabia persuaded Mexico, Norway and Russia to contribute to production cuts, although Moscow never followed through and raised exports instead.

More than 88 percent of contributions to Mr. Sanders through Sept. 30 came from donations of $200 or less.

Jeb Bush and groups supporting him have reported more than $120 million in contributions so far, significantly more than any other candidate.

Donald Trump’s campaign spent $1.4 million through June 30, 74 percent of his campaign’s money at that point.

Leek housed more than 50 refugees in three different properties by Christmas 1914 and silk-mill workers led a fund-raising scheme which made over £2,500 by May 1916.

One very obvious observation is that in 1914 the government was slow and clumsy in its response to the flood of humanity. Churchill flatly rejected any idea of receiving them, and the Local Government Board had no part in distributing the families. This was done by volunteers

From a conservative point of view, Mr. Obama did everything wrong, afflicting the comfortable (slightly) and comforting the afflicted (a lot), and nothing bad happened. We can, it turns out, make our society better after all.

What did Mr. Obama do that was supposed to kill jobs? Quite a lot, actually. He signed the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, which critics claimed would crush employment by starving businesses of capital.

He raised taxes on high incomes, especially at the very top, where average tax rates rose by about six and a half percentage points after 2012, a step that critics claimed would destroy incentives.

And he enacted a health reform that went into full effect in 2014, amid claims that it would have catastrophic effects on employment.

Yet none of the dire predicted consequences of these policies have materialized.

what do we learn from this impressive failure to fail? That the conservative economic orthodoxy dominating the Republican Party is very, very wrong.

Mr. Cruz acknowledged that Mr. Trump had begun to sound “fairly conservative” on the campaign trail, but he said voters were “far more discerning.”

“Today’s massive scale of instability and its capacity to cross borders, vividly demonstrated by the refugee crisis in Europe, makes humanitarian aid a global public good that requires an appropriate fund-raising model,” the report says

Countries that host refugees feel the impact acutely, but do not always have direct access to donor money. And refugees are often prohibited from working in the countries where they are living.

The report urges money transfer agencies to drop their fees, which is a nod to the importance of remittances from migrants to their home countries, especially in times of crisis. The authors of the report also encourage more cash assistance, rather than food, tents and blankets. They cite one 2014 study in which 70 percent of a sample group of Syrian refugees traded “in-kind assistance they received for cash.”

The microtax idea is modeled after a tax on airfare that helped raise about $2 billion between 2006 and 2011, largely for immunization programs worldwide.

Carson and the real estate developer are not so different from one another in this predilection for outrageous utterances, it’s just that one smiles and the other scowls.

This is the same Ben Carson who on a radio show in 2013 said of white liberals:“Well, they’re the most racist people there are because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box — you have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

he and the front-runner are two sides of the same coin: they are both dangerous, but one is a narcissist who just might win the nomination and the other is a near-narcoleptic who never had a chance.

Several recent studies found evidence that working-memory training may improve children’s math or reading skills or their fluid intelligence: the ability to reason in novel situations.

Another powerful factor is interactive reading with children under 4, inviting them to participate and helping them elaborate on their ideas. Such activity is linked to IQ gains of more than six points, according to a 2013 research analysis. (Typical IQs range from 85 to 115, with 100 as the mean.)

Playing card and board games like Set, Blink or Mastermind may have similar effects. Free apps targeting working memory and other skills are described at the University of California, Riverside’s Brain Game Center.

A huge new study offers a more conclusive answer than past research. Students gain about one to five additional IQ points for every year they remain in school

Raising IQ may require the kind of sustained involvement that comes with attending school, with all the practice and challenges it entails. “It’s not like you just go in for an hour of treatment a week. It’s a real lifestyle change,” he says.

Ways You Can Raise Smarter Children Engage them early in lively conversation. Play ​card, board or videogames that ​build​ working memory. Stress the intrinsic rewards of learning rather than grades. Frame a bad grade as a reason to work harder. Enroll them in schools where intelligence is seen as fluid rather than fixed. Teach them that their ability is under their control.

Sanders is not one to quote scripture, but he believes ethical imperative is the foundation of serious politics. “It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be involved in politics if one didn’t have a moral sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice,” Sanders told me by phone

“A moral imperative is absolutely part of how I approach public policy. Because if it’s not there, then what does?” Ocasio-Cortez said, noting that the tattered books that most shaped her politics were written by moral leaders such as King and Howard Thurman. “Everyone’s going crazy about socialism and democratic socialism. For me, that’s not my seat. My seat is a moral seat.”

“In a society that is materially and logistically and in every way capable of ensuring people are paid a dignified wage, have healthcare, have access to an education and opportunity – if that is materially possible,” she said, “I feel like we are morally compelled to make it so.

In her 1997 book Healing the Soul of America, re-released in revised form last month, spiritual leader Marianne Williamson described our country’s political dysfunction as symptom of a greedy society that has not yet atoned for its crimes against native and enslaved peoples, exploited laborers, women and children. She called for politicians to work for good rather than for special interests or the status quo: “A conscience-based politics cares less for political expediency than for moral truth.”

But dealing with political bullies can be a complicated matter. Sanders said that, when forced to weigh political or financial capital with his own ideals, the decision invariably involves compromise

In recent decades, according to Pew Research Center, the portion of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has risen from one in 10 to nearly one in four. Meanwhile, Pew found in a 2014 survey of 35,000 people that just 18% of those “nones” identify as politically conservative. It makes sense, then, that – in a culture whose framework for morality has relied on religion for centuries – many liberals would struggle to find the words to talk about what moves them at the deepest level.

in the coming months, he tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls”—those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers

a consensus in the center-right media: For a conservative outlet to hang onto its audience—let alone any influence in Republican politics—it must plant itself firmly in Trump’s camp.

Rather than crafting coverage that aims to turn rank-and-file Trump voters against the president—an effort that would almost certainly fail—it wants to shame and stigmatize the “bad actors” in the conservative elite

you’ll find one lively polemic after another calling out Trump-friendly politicos by name—often in witheringly personal terms

Glenn Beck dropped his long-held opposition and donned a red MAGA cap on his radio show last May. National Review, which crusaded against Trump’s nomination, now routinely publishes pro-Trump writers. Most recently, Erick Erickson, the conservative blogger who helped popularize the #NeverTrump hashtag, announced that he would vote for the president in 2020.

“A lot of folks have had a free shot to get in bed with some of the most disreputable [people] out there, and they still have a veneer of respectability,” Sykes says. “We want to raise the opportunity cost.”

a list of high-status commentators (Marc Thiessen, Hugh Hewitt), think tankers (Henry Olsen, Victor Davis Hanson), and politicos (Bill Bennett).

“This sounds naive, but I quite frankly feel they know better,” he tells me. “And at certain points of moral clarity, I could see them coming back to the faith of their fathers.”

With no plans to sell advertising, Longwell says it has already raised enough money to keep the shoestring operation funded for more than a year

One thing The Bulwark doesn’t have is a coherent vision for what conservatism should look like after Trump

I asked him if he worried that he was limiting his future job prospects in the conservative press, but he seemed confused by the question: “Where is someone like me going to go?”

economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.

“We automate the pieces that can be automated,” said Paul Hart, a senior vice president running the radio-frequency power business at NXP’s plant in Chandler. “The work force grows but we need A.I. and automation to increase the throughput.”

“The view that we should not worry about any of these things and follow technology to wherever it will go is insane,”

But the industry doesn’t generate that many jobs

Because it pushes workers to the less productive parts of the economy, automation also helps explain one of the economy’s thorniest paradoxes: Despite the spread of information technology, robots and artificial intelligence breakthroughs, overall productivity growth remains sluggish.

Axon, which makes the Taser as well as body cameras used by police forces, is also automating whatever it can. Today, robots make four times as many Taser cartridges as 80 workers once did less than 10 years ago

The same is true across the high-tech landscape. Aircraft manufacturing employed 4,234 people in 2017, compared to 4,028 in 2010. Computer systems design services employed 11,000 people in 2017, up from 7,000 in 2010.

To find the bulk of jobs in Phoenix, you have to look on the other side of the economy: where productivity is low. Building services, like janitors and gardeners, employed nearly 35,000 people in the area in 2017, and health care and social services accounted for 254,000 workers. Restaurants and other eateries employed 136,000 workers, 24,000 more than at the trough of the recession in 2010. They made less than $450 a week.

While Banner invests heavily in technology, the machines do not generally reduce demand for workers. “There are not huge opportunities to increase productivity, but technology has a significant impact on quality,” said Banner’s chief operating officer, Becky Kuhn

The 58 most productive industries in Phoenix — where productivity ranges from $210,000 to $30 million per worker, according to Mr. Muro’s and Mr. Whiton’s analysis — employed only 162,000 people in 2017, 14,000 more than in 2010

Employment in the 58 industries with the lowest productivity, where it tops out at $65,000 per worker, grew 10 times as much over the period, to 673,000.

The same is true across the national economy. Jobs grow in health care, social assistance, accommodation, food services, building administration and waste services

On the other end of the spectrum, the employment footprint of highly productive industries, like finance, manufacturing, information services and wholesale trade, has shrunk over the last 30 years

“In the standard economic canon, the proposition that you can increase productivity and harm labor is bunkum,” Mr. Acemoglu said

By reducing prices and improving quality, technology was expected to raise demand, which would require more jobs. What’s more, economists thought, more productive workers would have higher incomes. This would create demand for new, unheard-of things that somebody would have to make

To prove their case, economists pointed confidently to one of the greatest technological leaps of the last few hundred years, when the rural economy gave way to the industrial era.

In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.

The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.

In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.

The only reason employment didn’t fall across the entire economy is that other industries, with less productivity growth, picked up the slack. “The challenge is not the quantity of jobs,” they wrote. “The challenge is the quality of jobs available to low- and medium-skill workers.”

the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.

The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.

the cost of automation to workers and society could be substantial. “It may well be that,” Mr. Summers said, “some categories of labor will not be able to earn a subsistence income.” And this could exacerbate social ills, from workers dropping out of jobs and getting hooked on painkillers, to mass incarceration and families falling apart.

Silicon Valley’s dream of an economy without workers may be implausible. But an economy where most people toil exclusively in the lowliest of jobs might be little better.

Boeing correctly reports that the company itself does not directly fund super PACs (which are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money). Doing so would be a violation of the contributor ban. However, it has ways around this

The company’s PAC may give up to $5,000 to a candidate’s campaign committee or use its funds for any other “lawful purpose” — which includes unlimited contributions to super PACs or “dark money” nonprofit groups as well. Last cycle, the company’s PAC gave $250,000 to the Mitch McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund; $250,000 to Karl Rove’s dark-money group, One Nation; and $250,000 to the dark-money group American Action Network.

There is also, in effect, another even larger loophole for contractors looking to influence national politicians: the inaugural committee for a president-elect. Because inaugural committees are technically not connected to the political campaign, “all bets are off,

Boeing gave a million dollars to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee

The documents also raise new questions about Facebook, which is already grappling with intense criticism over the spread of Russian propaganda and fake news. The data Cambridge collected from profiles, a portion of which was viewed by The Times, included details on users’ identities, friend networks and “likes.”

“Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do,” Mr. Grewal said. “No systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”Still, he added, “it’s a serious abuse of our rules.”

The group experimented abroad, including in the Caribbean and Africa, where privacy rules were lax or nonexistent and politicians employing SCL were happy to provide government-held data, former employees said.

Mr. Nix and his colleagues courted Mr. Mercer, who believed a sophisticated data company could make him a kingmaker in Republican politics, and his daughter Rebekah, who shared his conservative views. Mr. Bannon was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics, recalled Mr. Wylie and other former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.

Mr. Wylie’s team had a bigger problem. Building psychographic profiles on a national scale required data the company could not gather without huge expense. Traditional analytics firms used voting records and consumer purchase histories to try to predict political beliefs and voting behavior.

But those kinds of records were useless for figuring out whether a particular voter was, say, a neurotic introvert, a religious extrovert, a fair-minded liberal or a fan of the occult. Those were among the psychological traits the firm claimed would provide a uniquely powerful means of designing political messages.

Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from the their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew — a claim that has been disputed.

When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. The business covered the costs — more than $800,000 — and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, according to company emails and financial records.

He ultimately provided over 50 million raw profiles to the firm, Mr. Wylie said, a number confirmed by a company email and a former colleague. Of those, roughly 30 million contained enough information, including places of residence, that the company could match users to other records and build psychographic profiles. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested.Image

Under the guidance of Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s digital director in 2016 and now the campaign manager for his 2020 re-election effort, Cambridge performed a variety of services, former campaign officials said. That included designing target audiences for digital ads and fund-raising appeals, modeling voter turnout, buying $5 million in television ads and determining where Mr. Trump should travel to best drum up support.

“We wanted as much as we could get,” he acknowledged. “Where it came from, who said we could have it — we weren’t really asking.”

The firm was effectively a shell. According to the documents and former employees, any contracts won by Cambridge, originally incorporated in Delaware, would be serviced by London-based SCL and overseen by Mr. Nix, a British citizen who held dual appointments at Cambridge Analytica and SCL. Most SCL employees and contractors were Canadian, like Mr. Wylie, or European.

In a memo to Mr. Bannon, Ms. Mercer and Mr. Nix, the lawyer, then at the firm Bracewell & Giuliani, warned that Mr. Nix would have to recuse himself “from substantive management” of any clients involved in United States elections. The data firm would also have to find American citizens or green card holders, Mr. Levy wrote, “to manage the work and decision making functions, relative to campaign messaging and expenditures.”

In summer and fall 2014, Cambridge Analytica dived into the American midterm elections, mobilizing SCL contractors and employees around the country. Few Americans were involved in the work, which included polling, focus groups and message development for the John Bolton Super PAC, conservative groups in Colorado and the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican.

While Cambridge hired more Americans to work on the races that year, most of its data scientists were citizens of the United Kingdom or other European countries, according to two former employees.

Mr. Wylie said the Facebook data was “the saving grace” that let his team deliver the models it had promised the Mercers.

Mr. Grewal, the Facebook deputy general counsel, said in a statement that both Dr. Kogan and “SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica certified to us that they destroyed the data in question.”

But copies of the data still remain beyond Facebook’s control. The Times viewed a set of raw data from the profiles Cambridge Analytica obtained.

While Mr. Nix has told lawmakers that the company does not have Facebook data, a former employee said that he had recently seen hundreds of gigabytes on Cambridge servers, and that the files were not encrypted.

Today, as Cambridge Analytica seeks to expand its business in the United States and overseas, Mr. Nix has mentioned some questionable practices. This January, in undercover footage filmed by Channel 4 News in Britain and viewed by The Times, he boasted of employing front companies and former spies on behalf of political clients around the world, and even suggested ways to entrap politicians in compromising situations.

Mr. Nix is seeking to take psychographics to the commercial advertising market. He has repositioned himself as a guru for the digital ad age — a “Math Man,” he puts it. In the United States last year, a former employee said, Cambridge pitched Mercedes-Benz, MetLife and the brewer AB InBev, but has not signed them on.

Mr. Wylie found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. The approach, the scientists said, could reveal more about a person than their parents or romantic partners knew

The Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC controlled by House Speaker Paul Ryan, offered mock congratulations to Laura Moser, the Bernie Sanders-aligned Democrat who advanced to a runoff for a Houston-area House seat held by Republican Rep. John Culberson. Ms. Moser had been attacked by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

In the Seventh District, the top fundraiser—nonprofit executive Alex Triantaphyllis—came in fourth. In a Dallas House Democratic primary, the best fundraiser by far was a former Hillary Clinton aide, Ed Meier, who placed behind candidates who hadn’t raised even half the amount he had. He had more than $300,000 on hand as of Feb. 14 but failed to make the runoff.

They won runoff positions in all three of the most closely watched and competitive House Democratic primaries.

One of those women, Gina Oritz Jones, is an openly gay Filipino-American veteran of the Iraq war.