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Capitalism vs. Democracy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...capitalism-vs-democracy.html capitalism inequality entrepreneur unemployment history Marx economics
shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” described by one French newspaper as a “a political and theoretical bulldozer,” defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism.
  • He contends that capitalism’s inherent dynamic propels powerful forces that threaten democratic societies.
  • Capitalism, according to Piketty, confronts both modern and modernizing countries with a dilemma: entrepreneurs become increasingly dominant over those who own only their own labor
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  • in the long run, “when pay setters set their own pay, there’s no limit,” unless “confiscatory tax rates” are imposed.
  • suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality.
  • Conservative readers will find that Piketty’s book disputes the view that the free market, liberated from the distorting effects of government intervention, “distributes,” as Milton Friedman famously put it, “the fruits of economic progress among all people.
  • Piketty proposes instead that the rise in inequality reflects markets working precisely as they should: “This has nothing to do with a market imperfection: the more perfect the capital market, the higher” the rate of return on capital is in comparison to the rate of growth of the economy. The higher this ratio is, the greater inequality is.
  • we are in the presence of one of the watershed books in economic thinking.”
  • There are a number of key arguments in Piketty’s book.
  • One is that the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.
  • According to Piketty, those halcyon six decades were the result of two world wars and the Great Depression. The owners of capital – those at the top of the pyramid of wealth and income – absorbed a series of devastating blows. These included the loss of credibility and authority as markets crashed; physical destruction of capital throughout Europe in both World War I and World War II; the raising of tax rates, especially on high incomes, to finance the wars; high rates of inflation that eroded the assets of creditors; the nationalization of major industries in both England and France;
  • The six decades between 1914 and 1973 stand out from the past and future, according to Piketty, because the rate of economic growth exceeded the after-tax rate of return on capital. Since then, the rate of growth of the economy has declined, while the return on capital is rising to its pre-World War I levels.
  • “If the rate of return on capital remains permanently above the rate of growth of the economy – this is Piketty’s key inequality relationship,” Milanovic writes in his review, it “generates a changing functional distribution of income in favor of capital and, if capital incomes are more concentrated than incomes from labor (a rather uncontroversial fact), personal income distribution will also get more unequal — which indeed is what we have witnessed in the past 30 years.”
  • The Piketty diagnosis helps explain the recent drop in the share of national income going to labor (see Figure 2) and a parallel increase in the share going to capital.
  • Piketty’s analysis also sheds light on the worldwide growth in the number of the unemployed. The International Labor Organization, an agency of the United Nations, reported recently that the number of unemployed grew by 5 million from 2012 to 2013, reaching nearly 202 million by the end of last year. It is projected to grow to 215 million by 2018.
  • Piketty’s wealth tax solution runs directly counter to the principles of contemporary American conservatives who advocate antithetical public policies: cutting top rates and eliminating the estate tax.
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Barons of Broadband - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ugman-barons-of-broadband.html monopoly antitrust economics
shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • There used to be a bipartisan consensus in favor of tough antitrust enforcement. During the Reagan years, however, antitrust policy went into eclipse, and ever since measures of monopoly power, like the extent to which sales in any given industry are concentrated in the hands of a few big companies, have been rising fast.
  • , it became common to assert that the world had changed in ways that made all those old-fashioned concerns about monopoly irrelevant. Aren’t we living in an era of global competition? Doesn’t the creative destruction of new technology constantly tear down old industry giants and create new ones?
  • The truth, however, is that many goods and especially services aren’t subject to international competition: New Jersey families can’t subscribe to Korean broadband.
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  • creative destruction has been oversold: Microsoft may be an empire in decline, but it’s still enormously profitable thanks to the monopoly position it established decades ago.
  • there’s good reason to believe that monopoly is itself a barrier to innovation. Ms. Crawford argues persuasively that the unchecked power of telecom giants has removed incentives for progress: why upgrade your network or provide better services when your customers have nowhere to go?
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How Austerity Has Failed by Martin Wolf | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...how-austerity-has-failed austerity Europe crisis debt deficit
shared by Javier E on 18 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Austerity came to Europe in the first half of 2010, with the Greek crisis, the coalition government in the UK, and above all, in June of that year, the Toronto summit of the group of twenty leading countries. This meeting prematurely reversed the successful stimulus launched at the previous summits and declared, roundly, that “advanced economies have committed to fiscal plans that will at least halve deficits by 2013.”
  • This was clearly an attempt at austerity, which I define as a reduction in the structural, or cyclically adjusted, fiscal balance—i.e., the budget deficit or surplus that would exist after adjustments are made for the ups and downs of the business cycle.
  • The cuts in these structural deficits, a mix of tax increases and government spending cuts between 2010 and 2013, will be around 11.8 percent of potential GDP in Greece, 6.1 percent in Portugal, 3.5 percent in Spain, and 3.4 percent in Italy.
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  • The picture in the eurozone is worse: its economy expanded by 2 percent between 2009 and 2010. It is now forecast to expand by a mere 0.4 percent between 2010 and 2013. Austerity has put the crisis-hit countries through a wringer, with huge and ongoing recessions. Rates of unemployment are more than a quarter of the labor force in Greece and Spain (see figure 2).
  • it did not have to be this way.1. The creditor countries, particularly Germany, could have recognized that they were enjoying incredibly low interest rates on their own public debt partly because of the crises in the vulnerable countries. They could have shared some of this windfall they enjoyed with those under pressure. 2. The needed adjustment could have been made far more symmetrical, with strong action in creditor countries to expand demand. 3. The European Central Bank could have offered two years earlier the kind of open-ended support for debt of hard-pressed countries that it made available in the summer of 2012. 4. The funds made available to cushion the crisis could have been substantially larger. 5. The emphasis could then have been more on structural reforms, such as easing labor regulations and union protections that restrain hiring and firing and raise labor costs, and less on fiscal retrenchment in the form of reduced spending. Reduced labor costs could have made these nations’ export industries more competitive and encouraged domestic hiring.
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Holocaust: The Ignored Reality by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...holocaust-the-ignored-reality holocaust wwII genocide history
shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today’s confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share
  • Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done.
  • Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.
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  • The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.
  • By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.
  • the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans
  • In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)
  • The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.
  • The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans
  • The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.
  • German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small
  • when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state.
  • An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived.
  • We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive.
  • the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938.
  • It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.
  • The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at “kulaks,” which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror.
  • If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
  • mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.
  • Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag
  • During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.
  • Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland’s capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed.
  • By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.
  • Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.
  • If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.
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H-Net Reviews, Harlow: Longman, 2002. xvi + 297 pp. $25.00 (cloth), - 0 views

www.h-net.org/...showrev.php Italy unification risorgimento history historiography
shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 13 - Cached
  • The new edition, co-written with Eugenio F. Biagini, Reader in Modern British and European History at the University of Cambridge, covers a much wider range of relevant issues for the unification of Italy. New chapters have been devoted to questions such as the Italian language and the role of women in the process of unification, as well as to a series of relevant issues after 1861, such as the Venetian situation from 1862, and the problem of brigandage in the south once the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia. This much enforces the original project, as a complete unification of Italy had, of course, not yet been reached in 1861. Moreover, Beales's original chapters have been completely overhauled to include recent historical scholarship on the subject. The original set-up of the Historical Problems series has been maintained in this new edition. All the original primary material is reprinted, while the new topics are illustrated by further documents, which now grow from sixteen to twenty-three. A brief chronology of events between 1748 and 1876 has also been added.
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Now That's Rich - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-now-thats-rich.html rich inequality income wealth history science learning art technology technocracy shakespeare programming periodical futuristic
shared by Javier E on 10 May 14 - No Cached
  • let’s think about what it means that these 25 men (yes, they’re all men) made a combined $21 billion in 2013
  • ignore the rhetoric about “job creators” and all that. Conservatives want you to believe that the big rewards in modern America go to innovators and entrepreneurs, people who build businesses and push technology forward. But that’s not what those hedge fund managers do for a living; they’re in the business of financial speculation, which John Maynard Keynes characterized as “anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” Or since they make much of their income from fees, they’re actually in the business of convincing other people that they can anticipate average opinion about average opinion.
  • at this point, the evidence suggests that hedge funds are a bad deal for everyone except their managers; they don’t deliver high enough returns to justify those huge fees, and they’re a major source of economic instability
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  • a close look at the rich list supports the thesis made famous by Thomas Piketty in his book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — namely, that we’re on our way toward a society dominated by wealth, much of it inherited, rather than work.
  • these days a lot of top money managers’ income comes not from investing other people’s money but from returns on their own accumulated wealth
  • Over time, extreme inequality in income leads to extreme inequality of wealth; indeed, the wealth share of America’s top 0.1 percent is back at Gilded Age levels. This, in turn, means that high incomes increasingly come from investment income, not salaries. And it’s only a matter of time before inheritance becomes the biggest source of great wealth.
  • why does all of this matter? Basically, it’s about taxes.America has a long tradition of imposing high taxes on big incomes and large fortunes, designed to limit the concentration of economic power as well as raising revenue. These days, however, suggestions that we revive that tradition face angry claims that taxing the rich is destructive and immoral
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F.B.I. Confirms a Sharp Rise in Mass Shootings Since 2000 - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...25shooters.html gun violence research
shared by Javier E on 25 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Mass shootings have risen drastically in the past half-dozen years.
  • In 44 of the 64 cases in which the F.B.I. was able to determine the length of the shooting, the gunfire lasted less than five minutes. Twenty-three shootings ended in less than two minutes. In 64 of the 160 total cases, the gunmen committed suicide.
  • There were, on average, 16.4 such shootings a year from 2007 to 2013, compared with an average of 6.4 shootings annually from 2000 to 2006. In the past 13 years, 486 people have been killed in such shootings, with 366 of the deaths in the past seven years. In all, the study looked at 160 shootings since 2000.
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  • The analysts said the gunmen had been attracted to the attention that mass killers received. They were often motivated by a sense that they had no other way to resolve the issues they faced other than violently lashing out, the analysts said.
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Live anthrax shipped accidentally to S Korea and US labs - BBC News - 0 views

diigo.com/07o2a6 military US
shared by maddieireland334 on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 28 May 15
     
    The US military accidentally sent live anthrax samples to as many as nine labs across the country and to a US military base in South Korea, the Pentagon says. Twenty-two military personnel at the Osan Air Base in South Korea are receiving preventive treatment after being possibly exposed to the sample.
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Why the Rich Are So Much Richer by James Surowiecki | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...tz-why-rich-are-so-much-richer inequality redistribution rent politics economics economic policy
shared by Javier E on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Historically, inequality was not something that academic economists, at least in the dominant neoclassical tradition, worried much about. Economics was about production and allocation, and the efficient use of scarce resources. It was about increasing the size of the pie, not figuring out how it should be divided.
  • “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and…the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”
  • Stiglitz argues, what we’re stuck with isn’t really capitalism at all, but rather an “ersatz” version of the system.
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  • Stiglitz has made the case that the rise in inequality in the US, far from being the natural outcome of market forces, has been profoundly shaped by “our policies and our politics,” with disastrous effects on society and the economy as a whole. In a recent report for the Roosevelt Institute called Rewriting the Rules, Stiglitz has laid out a detailed list of reforms that he argues will make it possible to create “an economy that works for everyone.”
  • his entire career in academia has been devoted to showing how markets cannot always be counted on to produce ideal results. In a series of enormously important papers, for which he would eventually win the Nobel Prize, Stiglitz showed how imperfections and asymmetries of information regularly lead markets to results that do not maximize welfare.
  • He also argued that this meant, at least in theory, that well-placed government interventions could help correct these market failures
  • in books like Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) he offered up a stinging critique of the way the US has tried to manage globalization, a critique that made him a cult hero in much of the developing world
  • Stiglitz has been one of the fiercest critics of the way the Eurozone has handled the Greek debt crisis, arguing that the so-called troika’s ideological commitment to austerity and its opposition to serious debt relief have deepened Greece’s economic woes and raised the prospect that that country could face “depression without end.”
  • For Stiglitz, the fight over Greece’s future isn’t just about the right policy. It’s also about “ideology and power.
  • there’s a good case to be made that the sheer amount of rent-seeking in the US economy has expanded over the years. The number of patents is vastly greater than it once was. Copyright terms have gotten longer. Occupational licensing rules (which protect professionals from competition) are far more common. Tepid antitrust enforcement has led to reduced competition in many industries
  • The Great Divide is somewhat fragmented and repetitive, but it has a clear thesis, namely that inequality in the US is not an unfortunate by-product of a well-functioning economy. Instead, the enormous riches at the top of the income ladder are largely the result of the ability of the one percent to manipulate markets and the political process to their own benefit.
  • Inequality obviously has no single definition. As Stiglitz writes:There are so many different parts to America’s inequality: the extremes of income and wealth at the top, the hollowing out of the middle, the increase of poverty at the bottom. Each has its own causes, and needs its own remedies.
  • his preoccupation here is primarily with why the rich today are so much richer than they used to be.
  • the main reason people at the top are so much richer these days than they once were (and so much richer than everyone else) is not that they own so much more capital: it’s that they get paid much more for their work than they once did, while everyone else gets paid about the same, or less
  • while incomes at the top have risen in countries around the world, nowhere have they risen faster than in the US.
  • One oft-heard justification of this phenomenon is that the rich get paid so much more because they are creating so much more value than they once did
  • as companies have gotten bigger, the potential value that CEOs can add has increased as well, driving their pay higher.
  • Stiglitz will have none of this. He sees the boom in the incomes of the one percent as largely the result of what economists call “rent-seeking.”
  • from the perspective of the economy as a whole, rent-seeking is a waste of time and energy. As Stiglitz puts it, the economy suffers when “more efforts go into ‘rent seeking’—getting a larger slice of the country’s economic pie—than into enlarging the size of the pie.”
  • The work of Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez has been instrumental in documenting the rise of income inequality, not just in the US but around the world. Major economic institutions, like the IMF and the OECD, have published studies arguing that inequality, far from enhancing economic growth, actually damages it. And it’s now easy to find discussions of the subject in academic journals.
  • . After all, while pretax inequality is a problem in its own right, what’s most destructive is soaring posttax inequality. And it’s posttax inequality that most distinguishes the US from other developed countries
  • All this rent-seeking, Stiglitz argues, leaves certain industries, like finance and pharmaceuticals, and certain companies within those industries, with an outsized share of the rewards
  • within those companies, the rewards tend to be concentrated as well, thanks to what Stiglitz calls “abuses of corporate governance that lead CEOs to take a disproportionate share of corporate profits” (another form of rent-seeking)
  • This isn’t just bad in some abstract sense, Stiglitz suggests. It also hurts society and the economy
  • It alienates people from the system. And it makes the rich, who are obviously politically influential, less likely to support government investment in public goods (like education and infrastructure) because those goods have little impact on their lives.
  • More interestingly (and more contentiously), Stiglitz argues that inequality does serious damage to economic growth: the more unequal a country becomes, the slower it’s likely to grow. He argues that inequality hurts demand, because rich people consume less of their incomes. It leads to excessive debt, because people feel the need to borrow to make up for their stagnant incomes and keep up with the Joneses. And it promotes financial instability, as central banks try to make up for stagnant incomes by inflating bubbles, which eventually burst
  • exactly why inequality is bad for growth turns out to be hard to pin down—different studies often point to different culprits. And when you look at cross-country comparisons, it turns out to be difficult to prove that there’s a direct connection between inequality and the particular negative factors that Stiglitz cites
  • This doesn’t mean that, as conservative economists once insisted, inequality is good for economic growth. In fact, it’s clear that US-style inequality does not help economies grow faster, and that moving toward more equality will not do any damage
  • Similarly, Stiglitz’s relentless focus on rent-seeking as an explanation of just why the rich have gotten so much richer makes a messy, complicated problem simpler than it is
  • When we talk about the one percent, we’re talking about two groups of people above all: corporate executives and what are called “financial professionals” (these include people who work for banks and the like, but also money managers, financial advisers, and so on)
  • The emblematic figures here are corporate CEOs, whose pay rose 876 percent between 1978 and 2012, and hedge fund managers, some of whom now routinely earn billions of dollars a year
  • Shareholders, meanwhile, had fewer rights and were less active. Since then, we’ve seen a host of reforms that have given shareholders more power and made boards more diverse and independent. If CEO compensation were primarily the result of bad corporate governance, these changes should have had at least some effect. They haven’t. In fact, CEO pay has continued to rise at a brisk rate
  • So what’s really going on? Something much simpler: asset managers are just managing much more money than they used to, because there’s much more capital in the markets than there once was
  • that means that an asset manager today can get paid far better than an asset manager was twenty years ago, even without doing a better job.
  • there’s no convincing evidence that CEOs are any better, in relative terms, than they once were, and plenty of evidence that they are paid more than they need to be, in view of their performance. Similarly, asset managers haven’t gotten better at beating the market.
  • More important, probably, has been the rise of ideological assumptions about the indispensability of CEOs, and changes in social norms that made it seem like executives should take whatever they could get.
  • It actually has important consequences for thinking about how we can best deal with inequality. Strategies for reducing inequality can be generally put into two categories: those that try to improve the pretax distribution of income (this is sometimes called, clunkily, predistribution) and those that use taxes and transfers to change the post-tax distribution of income
  • he has high hopes that better rules, designed to curb rent-seeking, will have a meaningful impact on the pretax distribution of income. Among other things, he wants much tighter regulation of the financial sector
  • t it would be surprising if these rules did all that much to shrink the income of much of the one percent, precisely because improvements in corporate governance and asset managers’ transparency are likely to have a limited effect on CEO salaries and money managers’ compensation.
  • Most importantly, the financial industry is now a much bigger part of the US economy than it was in the 1970s, and for Stiglitz, finance profits are, in large part, the result of what he calls “predatory rent-seeking activities,” including the exploitation of uninformed borrowers and investors, the gaming of regulatory schemes, and the taking of risks for which financial institutions don’t bear the full cost (because the government will bail them out if things go wrong).
  • The redistributive policies Stiglitz advocates look pretty much like what you’d expect. On the tax front, he wants to raise taxes on the highest earners and on capital gains, institute a carbon tax and a financial transactions tax, and cut corporate subsidies
  • It’s also about investing. As he puts it, “If we spent more on education, health, and infrastructure, we would strengthen our economy, now and in the future.” So he wants more investment in schools, infrastructure, and basic research.
  • The core insight of Stiglitz’s research has been that, left on their own, markets are not perfect, and that smart policy can nudge them in better directions.
  • Of course, the political challenge in doing any of this (let alone all of it) is immense, in part because inequality makes it harder to fix inequality. And even for progressives, the very familiarity of the tax-and-transfer agenda may make it seem less appealing.
  • the policies that Stiglitz is calling for are, in their essence, not much different from the policies that shaped the US in the postwar era: high marginal tax rates on the rich and meaningful investment in public infrastructure, education, and technology. Yet there’s a reason people have never stopped pushing for those policies: they worked
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What Technology Wants - 0 views

www.carnegiecouncil.org/...0329.html technology future Technium trends scaling culture evolution
shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Do you know what technology is? We commonly think about technology as anything that was invented after you were born. My friend Denny Hills made kind of a version of that through his statement, "It's anything that doesn't work yet."
  • Wired, which was not about the technology, but about the culture around the technology. We like to think of ourselves as a lifestyle magazine. We are a magazine about technology culture in the way that Rolling Stone is a magazine about music culture.
  • This book came out of a little bit of my own efforts to try to understand what technology meant and where it should fit into the realm of the world. When a new technology came along, should we embrace it, or hold off?
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  • What's the theory behind technology? Do we just deal with each one, one by one, or was there a kind of a framework to understand and have a perspective on technology?
  • All these technologies that we have now made are interrelated, they are codependent, and they form a kind of an ecosystem of technologies. You might even think of it as if these were species, as if it was a super-organism of technology.
  • I'm interested in this super-organism of all the technologies. I gave it a name. I call it the Technium.
  • In the larger sense, the Technium is anything that we make with our minds.
  • all these things are connected together and they form an interacting whole, a kind of a super-organism, that has in many ways its own slight bit of autonomy, and its own agenda.
  • It wants in the way that a plant wants light and so it will lean towards the light. It has an urgency to go towards light. It's not intelligent, it's not aware of it, but that's what it wants.
  • If it does want things, it means that it wants it independent of our choosing. At the same time we are making it; it is there because we exist. It's not independent of us, but it has some slight bit of autonomy.
  • Biologists are slowly coming around to admitting that there are directions in evolution. The standard orthodoxy for many years was that it was completely random, and that there was no direction whatsoever. Any ordinary person found that shocking because they could definitely see a direction in evolution.
  • We see an arc of increasing complexity in the long journey of life.
  • Along the long history there is movement towards increasing diversity.
  • There is also increasing movement towards specialization.
  • There is a trend towards increasing structure. Things become more and more complicated.
  • There is a trend towards emergence
  • There are other trends—towards ubiquity, towards energy efficiency, towards degrees of freedom.
  • What I'm suggesting is that there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way.
  • The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense.
  • The amount of energy running through a sunflower, per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun.
  • The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know.
  • The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it's evolving its ability to evolve.
  • Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.
  • We are going to fill the universe with all different kinds of thinkings, because only by having many different kinds of minds can we actually understand the universe. Our own mind is probably insufficient to completely comprehend the universe.
  • The reason why we want to embrace it with our full arms is because what technology brings us is an opportunity for everybody's special mix of talents to be expressed. Just as we all have different faces, we all have a different mix of aptitudes and abilities. We use technologies to express those things.
  • The question is: Was Moore's Law inevitable? What drives Moore's Law? Where is this coming from?
  • Moore's Law, not in terms of transistors, but in terms of measuring computer power, was happening long before Moore or anybody even noticed it. The effect was happening before anybody believed it.
  • this suggests is that this is actually an inherent attribute of the physics, and it suggests that it is independent of the economy. Even if the silicon chip had been invented in Stalinist Russia under a command economy, it probably would still follow exactly the same kind of curve.
  • Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute looked at a whole bunch of technologies, like solar and batteries and other kinds of things, and they show this this scaling law holds true in many industries.
  • It has something to do with the basic shape of the economy and of physics, and it's not really a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way I suggest that these kinds of curves are inevitable. One of the characteristics of the Technium is it exhibits these scaling laws.
  • we do know that the media that we have does rewire our brains. We know this by studies of people who are literate. They took scans in Peru of people who were illiterate and those who could read and write. They found that in fact their brains work differently—not just when they're reading, but just in general. After having five, ten or twenty years of education and learning to read and write, it actually changes how your brain works.
  • It's also very clear that if you are spending five or ten hours a day in front of a computer, that is going to change how your brain works. It is going to rewire how we're doing things.
  • We have a dependency on the alphabet. That's how we think about things. We need reading and writing. We think in terms of words. We imagine it. We see it around us. It's ubiquitous. We are dependent on the alphabet. That doesn't seem to bother us very much.
  • As these technologies become more ubiquitous and as we become dependent upon it, that's what it is. We will be dependent upon it. It will be our exobrain. We'll use it to remember. It will always be around.
  • We invented the external stomach, it's called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it's actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.
  • What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That's just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.
  • What I'm saying is that there is only a little more good in technology than bad, but a little is all we need. If we create one-tenth of a percent more than we destroy every year, we can make civilization, because that tenth of a percent compounded over centuries is all that we need.
  • Every time there's a new technology that comes along, we have the possibility to use it for harm or for good. We also suddenly have a new possibility and choice that we didn't have before. That new choice is that little tiny tenth of a percent that's better, because we have now another freedom that we didn't have before. That tips it into the good side. It's not much better, but that's all we need over the long term. That's why over the long term it's good, because it increases choices and possibilities.
  • Technology is not powerful unless it can be powerfully abused. There is going to be a learning period. There are going to be phases that people go through and then become addicted. They don't know how to use it.
  • DDT is horrible. Don't give it a job as a pesticide, and spray millions of acres of cotton fields. That's a terrible job and causes all kinds of havoc. Yet used locally and sprayed around households, DDT eliminates malaria and saves millions of lives a year, and it has very little environmental impact that way. That's a better job for this technology.
  • We want to find the right jobs for these things and the right frame. Just like there are no bad children, there are also no bad technologies. You've just got to find the right place for them.
  • My research has shown that there are very few species of technology that ever go extinct. That's the difference between biological evolution and technological evolution; in technology things don't go extinct. They can be resurrected.
  • Very few people go backwards. Why? Because we have to surrender so many choices and options.
  • As wholesome and as satisfying as those lives are, the price of going back to these places is surrendering choices and opportunities. In general, the whole arc of evolution is towards expanding those, and that's why by embracing technology we can align ourselves with this long arc throughout the cosmos into the future.
  • I did a calculation that showed three-quarters of the total energy that we use on the planet right now, at least in the United States, is used in servicing technology. Roughly, three-quarters of the gasoline that you use in your car is used to move the car and not you. You're just a minor passenger in this whole thing. We have energy used to heat the warehouses that are holding the stuff that we have or to move the stuff that we have. Already this Technium is consuming three-quarters of our energy.
  • That is also where it's going. There will be more technology used to support more technology. Most of the traffic on the Internet is not people talking to each other; it's machines talking to other machines.
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The Crisis of the American Intellectual | Via Meadia - 0 views

blogs.the-american-interest.com/...s-of-the-american-intellectual intellectual crisis US
shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth.
  • the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level.  Instead of opportunities they see threats; instead of hope they see danger; instead of the possibility of progress they see the unraveling of everything beautiful and true.
  • there seem to be three big reasons why so many intellectuals today are so backward looking and reactionary.
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  • First, there’s ideology.  Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state.
  • Most American intellectuals today are still shaped by this worldview and genuinely cannot imagine an alternative vision of progress.  It is extremely difficult for such people to understand the economic forces that are making this model unsustainable and to see why so many Americans are in rebellion against this kind of state and society – but if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and the institutions of twentieth century progressivism.  The promises of the administrative state can no longer be kept and its premises no longer hold.
  • This doesn’t mean that government becomes insignificant.  The state will survive and as social life becomes more complex it will inevitably acquire new responsibilities – but it will look and act less like the administrative, bureaucratic entity of the past. 
  • Second, there are the related questions of interest and class.  Most intellectuals today still live in a guild economy.  The learned professions – lawyers, doctors, university professors, the clergy of most mainline denominations, and (aspirationally anyway) school teachers and journalists – are organized in modern day versions of the medieval guilds.  Membership in the guilds is restricted, and the self-regulated guilds do their best to uphold an ideal of service and fairness and also to defend the economic interests of the members.
  • Just as the industrial revolution broke up the manufacturing guilds, the information revolution today is breaking up the knowledge guilds. 
  • Ultimately one suspects that services once reserved for elites will be available for the masses, just as the industrial revolution enabled mass ownership of goods that had once been the preserve of small elites.  The effect will not only be to raise living standards for most people by improving their access to useful services.  It will also be to transfer power and authority from the provider of such services to the consumer.
  • Third, there’s training.  America today has many technical intellectuals – people like doctors, engineers, and others who are able to carry out complex tasks – and we are extraordinarily rich in specialist intellectuals who have a deep knowledge of a particular subject. 
  • We are much less effective at teaching and supporting people who are able to master the essentials of many complex subjects, integrate the insights from this kind of study into a coherent social or political vision, and communicate what they have learned to a broad general lay audience.  The more complex a society and the more rapidly it is changing, the more need it has for multi-disciplinary, synthesizing intellectuals who are focused on communicating serious ideas to a large audience.
  • In most of our learned professions and knowledge guilds today, promotion is linked to the needs and aspirations of the guild rather than to society at large.  Promotion in the academy is almost universally linked to the production of ever more specialized, theory-rich (and, outside the natural sciences, too often application-poor) texts, pulling the discourse in one discipline after another into increasingly self-referential black holes.  We suffer from ‘runaway guilds’: costs skyrocket in medicine, the civil service, education and the law in part because the imperatives of the guilds and the interests of their members too often triumph over the needs and interests of the wider society.
  • Right now, too many intellectuals try to turn this into a left/right debate rather than one about the past and the future.
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Eurozine - Multiculturalism at its limits? - Kenan Malik, Fero Sebej Managing diversity... - 0 views

www.eurozine.com/...2011-01-18-debate-en.html multiculturalism culture free speech politics public private racism diversity equality
shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • part of the problem is confusion over what we mean by multiculturalism. It can mean one of two things. First: diversity as lived experience. Second: multiculturalism as a political process.
  • To talk of diversity as lived experience is to talk of the experience of living in a society that, through mass immigration, has become more open, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan.
  • But multiculturalism as a political process has come to mean something very different, namely the process of managing that diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes. It's a process through which cultural differences are institutionalized, publicly affirmed, recognized and institutionalized; through which political
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  • why is diversity good? Diversity isn't good in and of itself; it's good because it allows us to expand our horizons, to break out of the boxes – by they cultural, ethnic, or religious – in which we find ourselves. To think about other values, other beliefs, other lifestyles, to make judgements upon those values and beliefs and lifestyles. To enter, in other words, into a dialogue, a debate, through which a more universal language of citizenship can arise. It is precisely such dialogue and debate that multiculturalism as a political process undermines and erodes in the name of "respect" and "tolerance".
  • I think the very notion of multiculturalism is an irrational one. It assumes from the start that societies are composed of cultures that somehow relate to each other externally, as it were. Here is one culture, here's another, and there's another, and these cultures then interact with each other. In fact cultures aren't like that: cultures are living, organic entities that constantly change. There is no such thing as a multicultural society. There are societies with a variety of cultural forms, beliefs, lifestyles, values – in fact, virtually every society embodies such diversity – but to say that is to say something very different thing to the claim that a society is "multicultural".
  • Societies have always been conflictual, riven by class differences, generational differences, gender differences, ideological differences. But today we tend to see social clashes in a very narrow way, in terms of religion, faith and culture, because we have come to see identity in very narrow ways. The debate about multiculturalism is a debate in which certain differences – culture, ethnicity and faith – have come to be regarded as important and others – such as class, say, or generation – as less relevant.
  • There are two ways over the past half-century in which we've stopped treating people as citizens. One is through racism. The racist says "you're not a citizen, you don't have full rights in this society because you have a different skin colour, you are foreign", etc. The second is multiculturalism. The multiculturalist says: "we treat you not as an individual citizen, but as a Muslim or a Hindu or a Sikh or a black". The irony is that multiculturalism developed as an attempt to combat the problems created by racism. But it has recreated many of the problems by treating people not as citizens but as members of groups, and by formulating public policy in relation to those groups and not in relation to the needs of individual citizens.
  • we have to say that the multicultural policies were flawed from the very beginning: it wasn't as if this was a good set of policies that somehow eroded over time. The fact is that it was a lot easier to combat racism by saying to people "go on, follow your own values, cultures, lifestyles, beliefs, we will fund your festival, your dance troupe, your cultural centre"... we used to call it the "saree, samosa and steel band brigade".
  • What has happened is that the very notion of equality has transformed over the last twenty years. Equality used to mean that everybody was treated the same despite their differences. Now it's come to me that everybody is treated differently because of those differences.
  • There are two problems with granting people rights by virtue of their belonging to a group, as opposed to their being citizens with specific social, economic and other needs. First, the group becomes a focus not only for providing rights, but also for prejudice: you deal not with the problems of individual Roma, but the imputed problems of Roma as a whole. Second, you deny the same rights to other groups, to others who don't happen to be in that group, such as Muslims.
  • As for the relationship between multiculturalism and constraints on free speech, an argument has developed that runs something like this: we live in a society where there are lots of different peoples and cultures, each with deeply set, often irreconcilable, views and beliefs. In such a society we need to restrict what people say or do in order to minimize friction between cultures and to guarantee respect for people embedded in different cultures.
  • it is precisely because we live in a plural society that we need the most robust defence of free speech possible. It seems to me that in a plural society, the giving of offence is both inevitable and necessary. It is inevitable because we do have societies with deep-seated, conflicting views. But it's far better to have those conflicts out in the open than to suppress them in the name of respect and tolerance. But most importantly, the giving of offence is necessary because no kind of social change or social progress is possible without offending some group of other. When people say, "you are offending me", what they are really saying is, "you can't say that because I don't want my beliefs to be questioned or ridiculed or abused." That seems to me deeply problematic.
  • The real issue is not actually the threat of violence from Islamists. It is something much more internal to western societies, the sense that it is morally wrong to give offence to other groups and cultures. People are frightened of doing things because they fear the repercussions, but they are also frightened of doing things because they think it is morally wrong to offend other people and other cultures. And I think that is a much greater problem. We should say it is morally right to offend people. That is what a plural society is. If we want to live in a plural society, the price of a plural society – though I don't see it as a price, I think it is the value of the plural society – is that we confront each other. That is what is good about plural society.
  • We also need to make a distinction between colour blindness and racism blindness. The two have become confused, so that in France, for instance, arguments against multiculturalism have become an argument in defence of racism. Discriminatory policies, and not just against the Roma, but also against Muslims and others, have been defended on the basis that they are necessary for assimilation. The law outlawing the burqa, for instance. In one sense assimilation means treating individuals as citizens and not as members of a particular group. That seems to me to be a very good thing. But that is not what assimilation has come to mean in practice somewhere like France, where policies of assimilation have re
  • sulted in the authorities treating different groups of people differently by pointing up their differences, insisting that certain groups – Muslims or the Roma, for example – cannot belong to our culture, to our society, because their culture, their values, their ways of life are so different and inimical to ours. That is the way assimilation policies have developd and I think that is very dangerous.
  • Part of the problem of multiculturalism is that the distinction between the public and the private realms have become eroded. We need to defend the right of people to pursue their values, their lifestyles, their beliefs in private. By "private", I don't mean in the privacy of their homes, but in those areas of life distinct from the state and state institutions. But we also need to ensure that, in the public realm, the state does not treat people differently because of their particular values, beliefs or lifestyles. The ideal plural society is one where people have perfect freedom to pursue their beliefs, values and lifestyles in private but in public are treated as citizens, whatever those lifestyles, beliefs and values are. Multiculturalism has come to mean the very opposite: people are treated differently in the public realm because of their values, beliefs and lifestyles, but at the same time restrictions are placed upon the private realm, on what one can say or do, because of fear of giving offence.
  • Fighting racism doesn't mean I have to limit freedom of expression. I hate racist jokes, but I would protect the right of people to tell them. They are really ugly and stupid, but I wouldn't dream of regulating it by law. Actually, I do not believe in collective rights. I think everyone should be treated equally, but people also need to be free to live how they prefer. Fighting violent racism is something that should be done by law enforcement authorities. But it is also the responsibility of the cultural elites: to make racism something one should be ashamed of. It's a matter of education, I think. Not of laws limiting free speech.
  • The point about free speech is this: who is it that benefits from censorship? Is it those in power, or is it those without power? It seems to me that the only people to benefit from censorship are those with the power to enforce that censorship and the need to do so. Those who have no power are much better served by as little censorship as possible. Free speech is always the weapon in the hands of those who want to challenge power and censorship is always a weapon in those who want to preserve their power. That's why I think anyone who wants to challenge racism should support of the greatest extension of free speech possible.
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Race to the Top of What? Obama On Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...top-of-what-obama-on-education academic education liberal arts science reading culture
shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • what is limited — in short supply — is learning that is academic rather than consumerist or market-driven. After two years of college, they report, students are “just slightly more proficient in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing than when they entered.”
  • The authors give several explanations for this unhappy result. First, a majority of students surveyed said “that they had not taken a single course . . . that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.” Moreover, “only 42 percent had experienced both a reading and writing requirement of this character during the prior semester.” The conclusion? “If students are not being asked . . . to read and write on a regular basis . . . it is hard to imagine how they will improve their capacity to master performance tasks.”
  • “market-based educational reforms that elevate the role of students as ‘consumers’ do not necessarily yield improved outcomes in terms of student learning.” (There’s an understatement.)
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  • Ravitch now sees its emphasis on testing and consumer choice as educationally disastrous. “I concluded,” she says, “that curriculum and instruction were far more important than choice and accountability.” And she rejects the rush to privatization and the popular mantra that schools should be run like businesses: “I realized that incentives and sanctions may be right for business . . . where the bottom line — profit — is the highest priority, but they are not right for schools”
  • “the humanistic aspects of science and social science — the imaginative creative aspect of rigorous critical thought — are . . . losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of . . . applied skills suited to profit-making” (“Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities,” 2010). In the brave new world of accountability, the arts and literature will be kicked to the curb “because they don’t look like they lead to personal or national economic achievement.” Indeed, “the ability to think and argue . . . looks to many people like something dispensable if what we want are marketable outputs of a quantifiable nature”
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Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? by Eyal Press | NYRBlog | The New York Review of B... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...young-israelis-turn-right israel palestine youth attitudes survey research democracy rights
shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.
  • In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.
  • One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”
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  • The fact that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip chose in 2006 to elect Hamas, whose Charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and foresees Israel’s eventual destruction, hasn’t helped matters. Neither has the collapse of the peace process. Israelis in their late teens and twenties barely remember the hope that greeted the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They do have strong memories of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when a wave of suicide bombings “managed to obliterate any trust the Israelis had in a political settlement,” as the public opinion analysts Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki observe in their recent study of the violence’s impact. That was followed by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which the Israeli right warned would make the country vulnerable and which indeed brought a barrage of Qassam missiles to the border town of Sderot; and the Israeli war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, in which more than one hundred Israeli soldiers—many of them young—were killed and hundreds more wounded.
  • the popular tabloids and Israel’s leaders converged around the theme of blaming the unraveling of the peace process on Palestinian intransigence.
  • “Older people remember the years when people actually liked Israel. They’re more likely to view criticism from the outside as a possibly legitimate critique of Israel’s policies. Young people are basically being told, over and over again, that criticism of Israel is de-legitimization of Israel, because they’re anti-Semites.”
  • For years Israelis have complained, not without reason, that textbooks used in Palestinian schools have failed to recognize Israel’s existence or to inculcate open-minded attitudes toward Jews among Arab youth
  • To judge by the petition signed by 472 high school teachers and sent to the Ministry of Education in December, however, some civics instructors are having trouble instilling the values of peace and tolerance in Israeli children. The subject of the petition was the growing prevalence of bigotry among students
  • What the instructor has been hearing from his pupils is, of course, something young Israelis have been hearing more and more from their leaders
  • A striking irony apparent in the survey commissioned by the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative is that young Arabs, who are often portrayed in the Israeli press as implacably hostile to the country’s ideals, support principles such as “mutual respect between all sectors” in higher proportions than their Jewish counterparts (84 versus 75 percent). Significantly more (58 versus 25 percent) also “strongly agree” with Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which states: “All citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, will participate in the life of the state, based on the principle of full, equal citizenship, and appropriate representation in all state institutions.” The country’s founders hoped this language would serve as a set of guiding principles for the state.
  • it does seem ironic that in the Jewish State, which insists on defining itself as the Jewish democratic state and the only democracy in the Middle East, the Arabs are our most democratic citizens.”
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The Butchery of Hitler and Stalin | Hoover Institution - 0 views

www.hoover.org/...80201 Holocaust Russia Stalin Hitler genocide
shared by Javier E on 12 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • All told, some fourteen million people are estimated to have died as a result of these atrocities; to put this number into context, it is two million more than the total number of German and Soviet soldiers killed in battle and over thirteen million more than American losses in all of its foreign wars combined.
  • The Holocaust was a unique historical event, the causes of which were distinctive. But it’s precisely because it occurred alongside other wide-scale horrors that Snyder is right to “test the proposition that deliberate and direct mass murder by these two regimes in the bloodlands is a distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment.”
  • Both ideologically and practically, Stalinism gave rise to Hitler. This was thanks to Soviet communism’s absolutist and totalitarian nature, which gave Hitler all the evidence he needed that nothing less than the full militarization of society was required to confront the eastern menace. Similarly, Stalin’s paranoid worldview directly contributed to policies which only emboldened Hitler. Stalin instructed German communists to treat their Social Democratic countrymen as “social fascists,” leading to fractures on the German left that ultimately gave way for Hitler’s ascent. This hothouse geopolitical environment created, as Hobsbawm would later put it, an “Age of Extremes.”
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  • Despite the images of walking skeletons that greeted American liberators at Buchenwald, the full enormity of the Holocaust was not fully appreciated, even in the Western world, until relatively recently, for the simple reason that “the Americans and the British liberated no part of Europe that had a very significant Jewish population before the war, and saw none of the German death facilities.” Those facilities, and the fields in which the Germans exterminated the vast majority of their Jewish victims, lay in the bloodlands, which were conquered by the Soviets.
  • But it was in Belarus where the conflagration between Nazis and Soviets, and between collaborationists and partisans, was greatest. By the end of the war, Snyder writes, a full half of the country’s population had either been killed or deported.
  • To this day, the populations of the former Soviet Bloc, and some elements of their intelligentsia, have yet to come to terms with their historical complicity in the Holocaust, painting their ancestors as victims, which indeed many of them no doubt were, while ignoring the fact that many were erstwhile collaborators.
  • The Nazi plan to eliminate the Jewish race — a plan which it executed often with the gleeful participation of local collaborators who needed no prompting in rounding up and murdering their Jewish neighbors — is today being downplayed so that Soviet crimes loom larger.
  • “the vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.” Their murders were personal affairs in that they involved soldiers firing bullets into their bodies; death did not take place within a closed chamber and the murderers saw the faces of their victims. Most of the killing took place in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.
  • The perverse irony of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s desire to conquer the bloodlands was that by expanding their empires they diversified them. Suddenly, they had a whole lot of foreigners living under their domain, who would need to be pacified. And so the solution to this problem would have to be the liquidation of massive numbers of people.
  • What has allowed the Soviet Union to escape the same sort of historical reproach as Nazi Germany is that its killing was carried out in the furtherance of various causes — absolute economic equality, the preservation of a dictatorship, the collectivization of agriculture — that are not commonly considered to exist on the same moral plane as a theory of racial superiority. “In Stalinism mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism; it was never the political victory itself,” Snyder explains.
  • Academics, journalists and political leaders in this region, particularly in the Baltic states, have put forward a “double genocide” approach to understanding this period of European history, which, unlike the more nuanced take of Snyder (who, while placing the Stalinist and Nazi regimes alongside each other as subjects of historical inquiry, does not equate them in terms of moral depravity), is explicitly political.
  • Snyder reports that the Nazis deliberately killed upwards of eleven million; for the Soviets during the Stalin period the figure was between six and nine million. On the Soviet side, these numbers are far less than what had originally been believed, due to the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives in the twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • This historical airbrushing amounts to “Holocaust obfuscation,” in the words of the academic Dovid Katz, which, he writes, “tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.” Last year, for instance, the Lithuanian government passed a law making it illegal to deny that the actions of the Soviet Union in Lithuania constitute “genocide,” as it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
  • But his acknowledgement that the period of 1933 to 1945 was marked by several genocides, rather than a single one, does not lead him to promote the “double genocide” theory. Snyder has written elsewhere that “The mass murder of the Jews was, indeed, unprecedented in its horror; no other campaign involved such rapid, targeted and deliberate killing, or was so tightly bound to the idea that a whole people ought to be exterminated.” It is morally specious to compare the Jewish Holocaust to the Soviet “genocide” of Balts or Poles or Ukrainians, awful as the experiences of these peoples were, because of the inherently different nature of the methods the Soviet and Nazi regimes used against their subject populations. The Soviet Union had many local collaborators throughout its occupied and satellite territories. And while the Nazis also had collaborators during their occupation of the Baltic States, there was never any room for a Jewish collaborator in the Nazi project.
  • Though Stalin’s murder campaigns were, in many cases, predicated on ethnic antagonism, the difference is that the Soviets did not exterminate for extermination’s own sake. Once Stalin’s discrete policies had been achieved (the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, for instance), the mass murder stopped, and the Soviet Union eventually wound down its widescale deportations and mass killings in the mid- 1950s. Had Hitler’s  regime, with its animalistic understanding of human nature, lasted beyond 1945, its mass murder and terror would not have decreased. For these tactics were not just means but ends; they were the very lifeblood, the weltanschauung, of nazism itself.
  • The crucial factor one must consider in evaluating these two strains of totalitarianism is their competing long-term visions, and the policies that were required to execute them. Classifying Stalin’s various murder campaigns (alongside Nazi policies towards Roma, gays, educated Poles and Soviet citizens in Belarus and Ukraine) as “genocides,” which Snyder does, while also singling out the Holocaust as the worst of them all, is not mutually exclusive.
  • Bloodlands is an incredibly original work. It seeks to redirect our understanding of the Holocaust as primarily an eastern phenomenon, and one which took place among a spate of mass killing policies. When popular interest in the Holocaust and an “international collective memory” of it began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, it focused almost exclusively on the experience of German and West European Jews, the wealthiest and most assimilated on the continent, who died in far smaller numbers than did the Jews of Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States, who were nearly eradicated. “Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history,”
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The Education of Peter Drucker - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...4484 Drucker economic culture capitalism fascism market writing
shared by Javier E on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • "Since I was twenty," Drucker wrote at eighty-two, "writing has been the foundation of everything I have been doing." From the first he showed a mastery of modern English prose. He has that rarest quality in a writer of non-fiction—a voice, a characteristic way of saying.
  • Economic Man limns a crisis of belief in capitalism (and socialism), the causes of which have yet to be ameliorated. Ignoring its specifically European causes, Drucker focuses on the civilizational causes of fascism. We live in that same civilization.
  • Drucker asserted in the book that Economic Man's promise—that a society built around the market (the major social institution of the nineteenth century) could achieve "freedom and justice through economic development"—had failed, and that this had "destroyed the belief in capitalism as a social system." The Great War and the Depression made this crisis of belief a reality for millions. "These catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable laws.
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  • In place of a market society, fascism sought to offer a "non-economic society," with non-economic incentives and satisfactions.
  • From that book forward Drucker has stressed the need for a strong non-economic society to make "inequality appear far less intolerable" and to shore people up against the bottom-line nihilism of the market. His work as a consultant to nonprofit organizations has been in furtherance of that goal. An anti-Utopian, he believed that "the bearable society" is the best we can achieve. Churches and secular voluntary organizations help men and women cope with the meaninglessness of much modern work.
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Israel releases 26 Palestinian prisoners - Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ease-20131230221424954472.html
shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Twenty-six Palestinian prisoners have been released from Israeli jails, as part of a US-brokered deal to restart Middle East negotiations.
  • It is the third of four stages to free 104 inmates that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed to let go when the talks were renewed in July. They have been convicted of killing Israeli civilians or soldiers and have spent between 19 and 28 years in prison.
  • We will not sign a final peace deal with Israel before all the prisoners are released,'' he said.
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  • In Israel, though, the release was met with anger. Relatives of Israelis killed in attacks had attempted to prevent the release by petitioning Israel's Supreme Court
  • The 26 inmates were jailed before the signing of the 1993 Oslo accords, which formally launched the Middle East peace process.
  • They include 18 men from the West Bank, three Gazans, and in a concession by Israel, five men from East Jerusalem.
  • The US welcomed the release, with Kerry expressing "his appreciation for Prime Minister Netanyahu's decision to release the third tranche of prisoners," State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said.
  • The Israeli government's commitment to release Palestinian prisoners helped enable the start ... and the continuation of the final status negotiations, and we believe this is a positive step forward in the overall process," she added.
  • "As part of this release he has announced 140,000 additional new settlements in the West Bank," he said
  • "The Palestinians ask, how can you talk to us about being legitimate partners, if you're going to build inside the West Bank?"
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Obama Immigration Speech: The President Fulfills His Promise to Progressives - The Atla... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383022 obama immigration speech activism bipartisan politics history progressive
shared by Javier E on 22 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • In his decision to act, by himself, on immigration, President Obama chose between two sides of his political self.
  • It wasn’t just that he promised both bipartisan reconciliation and progressive change. It’s that Obama understood American history well enough to know that progressive change only arrives through bitter, divisive, even ugly, struggle.
  • The part of Barack Obama that knows how change really happens in America has long been quietly at war with the part that wanted to stay on good terms with Republicans, and with powerful elites in the business and financial worlds.
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  • Now, in what may prove the most consequential decision of his second term, he has done the same. He has decided once again to trigger the hatred of defenders of the status quo because, I suspect, he knows American history well enough to know that real moral progress doesn’t happen any other way.
  • In the most consequential decision of his first term, when he decided to pass healthcare reform via reconciliation, Obama chose identity No. 1 over identity No. 2.
  • In his youth, he wasn’t an aspiring politician. He was an aspiring activist. And it wasn’t politicians who inspired him.
  • The King that inspired Obama was not the sanitized, Disneyfied figure whom everyone now claims. In his youthful passion for the civil-rights movement, Obama discovered the real King
  • Yes, Obama is a pragmatist. Yes, he is professorial. Yes, he wants to be liked by his ideological opponents and by the powers that be. But he also knows that were he in his twenties today—a young man of color with a foreign parent and a foreign-sounding name—he might be among those activists challenging the vicious injustice of America’s immigration system.
  • For progressives, this was always the real promise of Barack Obama. It was the promise that a black man with a Muslim name who had worked in Chicago’s ghettos—a man who had tasted what it means to a stranger in America—would bring that memory with him when he entered the White House. It’s a promise he fulfilled on Thursday night.
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In Los Angeles, a Nimby Battle Pits Millionaires vs. Billionaires - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lionaires-vs-billionaires.html inequality rich conspicuous consumption
shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles
  • “Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.
  • Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”
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  • the market for these Versailles knockoffs is “flight capital.” “It’s oligarchs, oilgarchs, people from Asia, people who came up with the next app for the iPhone,” he said. While global wealth is pouring into other American cities as well, Los Angeles is still a relative bargain, Mr. Hyland said, adding: “Here you can buy the best house for $3,000 a square foot. In Manhattan, you’re looking at $11,000 a square foot and you get a skybox.”
  • In a city traditionally as hostile to architectural preservation as it is hospitable to architectural innovation, the gigamansion trend is accelerating the decimation of residential gems. A midcentury modern home in Bel Air designed by Burton Schutt (best known as the architect of the Hotel Bel-Air) and furnished by the decorator Billy Haines for Earle Jorgensen, a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” and his wife, Marion, was recently razed
  • In the Sunset Strip area, a geometric hacienda built by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta for the actor Ricardo Montalbán was “remodeled” into a hulking glass spec house.
  • As the number of Los Angeles’s buildable lots dwindles and land values soar, houses that are out of scale with their surroundings are popping up everywhere. (
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Chicago gave hundreds of high-risk kids a summer job. Violent crime arrests plummeted. ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...iolent-crime-arrests-plummeted chicago prevention crime youth employment jobs at-risk policy
shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • A couple of years ago, the city of Chicago started a summer jobs program for teenagers attending high schools in some of the city's high-crime, low-income neighborhoods.
  • Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program had 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests over 16 months, compared to students in a control group.
  • Researcher Sara Heller conducted a randomized control trial with the program, in partnership with the city. The study included 1,634 teens at 13 high schools. They were, on average, C students, almost all of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Twenty percent of the group had already been arrested, and 20 percent had already been victims of crime.
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  • The teenagers in the control group participated in neither part of the program.
  • There was a big difference, though, in the violent crime arrest data between the teenagers who got jobs and those who did not:
  • Heller, in fact, found that most of the decline came a few months later:
  • A lot of things could be going on here. Teenagers who might have committed crime to get money would no longer need to when they have a job.
  • If their added income allowed parents to work less, they may also have gotten more adult supervision.
  • It's also possible that students who were busy working simply didn't have idle time over the summer to commit crime — but that theory doesn't explain the long-term declines in violent arrests that occurred well after the summer program was over.
  • Some of the students were given part-time jobs through the program, working 25 hours a week at minimum wage ($8.25 in Illinois) with government or non-profit employers
  • That long-term benefit suggests that students who had access to jobs may have then found crime a less attractive alternative to work. Or perhaps their time on the job taught them how the labor market values education. Or maybe the work experience may have given them skills that enabled them to be more successful — and less prone to getting in trouble — back in school.
  • The results echo a common conclusion in education and health research: that public programs might do more with less by shifting from remediation to prevention.
  • The findings make clear that such programs need not be hugely costly to improve outcomes for disadvantaged youth; well-targeted, low-cost employment policies can make a substantial difference, even for a problem as destructive and complex as youth violence.
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