History Readings

The story was explosive, explaining that, in fact, there was no mystery behind the inflation that Americans were experiencing, inflation in everyday items paired with skyrocketing corporate profits. There was a conspiracy, orchestrated by some of the richest men in the country.

Median asking rents had spiked by as much as 18% in the spring of 2022, and that was outrageous. Moreover, rents are just out of control more broadly. As the Antitrust Division notes, "the percentage of income spent on rent for Americans without a college degree increased from 30% in 2000 to 42% in 2017."

Policymakers also responded. Seventeen members of Congress, and multiple Democratic Senators, such as Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Amy Klobuchar, asked government enforcers to look into the allegations. Senator Ron Wyden introduced Federal legislation to ban the use of RealPage to set rents, which the Kamala Harris Presidential campaign recently endorsed. At a local level, San Fransisco just prohibited collusive algorithmic rent-setting, and similar legislation is being considered in a bunch of states and cities.

The Phaethon myth and Goethe’s poem fail to provide useful advice because they misconstrue the way humans gain power. In both fables, a single human acquires enormous power, but is then corrupted by hubris and greed. The conclusion is that our flawed individual psychology makes us abuse power.

What this crude analysis misses is that human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans. Accordingly, it isn’t our individual psychology that causes us to abuse power.

Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. Humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way our networks are built predisposes us to use power unwisely

Epidemiologists said in interviews that they do not endorse a lackadaisical approach, particularly for those spending time around older people and those who are immunocompromised. They still recommend staying home for a couple of days after an exposure and getting the newly authorized boosters soon to become available

But they said that some elements of this newfound laissez faire attitude were warranted. While Covid cases are high, fewer hospitalizations and deaths during the surges are signs of increasing immunity — evidence that a combination of mild infections and vaccine boosters are ushering in a new era: not a post-Covid world, but a post-crisis one.

Epidemiologists have long predicted that Covid would eventually become an endemic disease, rather than a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what ‘endemic’ means, exactly, you’ll probably get about 12 answers,

In truth, there isn’t much difference between the AfD and the other right-wing populist parties that have spread across Europe in recent years. Like Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece, the AfD relies on a toxic combination of xenophobia, militarism and nostalgia to win votes.

But this is Germany, the last country anyone wants to make great again.

Even now, the amount of concrete political power the AfD stands to gain next month is unclear. A shift of a few percentage points in the results could well make the difference between another coalition of established centrist parties and a state government led by far-right extremists.

To sum up the facilitator model: It’s not that students don’t have rights; it’s just that safety comes first. Instead of restricting students for the sake of their moral character or its academic standards, the university has reinstated control under the aegis of health and safety.

Protection from an ever-expanding conception of harm did not stop at campus alcohol and anti-hazing policies; it necessitated the campus speech codes of the 1980s and 1990s, the expansive Title IX bureaucracy of the 2010s and the diversity mandates of the 2020s.

These social controls are therapeutic rather than punitive; they are the “gentle parenting” of university-student relations. These days, it is less common for students (and faculty members) to face real consequences for rule violations than to be assigned to H.R. trainings, academic remediation or counseling.

Later, when human nature rather than the natural world became central to people’s concerns, the belief in the static nature of societies persisted, with unchanging human nature taking the place of unchanging nature. The historian and economist Robert Heilbroner cites Machiavelli, who wrote early in the sixteenth century, “Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same result.

This idea, of course, exhorts those seeking to foresee the future to look at history—but for very different reasons than we would imagine now. Reading history would not show the seeds of the current situation and help one think about how it might grow into the future. It would simply be an opportunity to look at some documentation of essentially the same stasis as that in which we currently reside, to understand people of the past who are the same as people today

Despite our modern concept of the prophet as one who can look ahead, the ancients were not deeply concerned with even knowing the future, and certainly not with making it. As Heilbroner writes, “Resignation sums up the Distant Past’s vision of the future.”

Large-scale democracies became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.

This partly explains the current worldwide crisis of democracy. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans can hardly agree on even the most basic facts, such as who won the 2020 presidential election

In particular, algorithms tasked with maximizing user engagement discovered by experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs that if you press the greed, hate or fear button in the brain, you grab the attention of that human and keep that person glued to the screen.

Mr. Larson promptly identifies the one and only cause of disunion: Southern slavery. Using vivid and harrowing examples of injustices small and great, the author contends that slavery’s intractability made it almost inevitable that the election of anyone but a pro-Southern Democrat in 1860—a “doughface” in the manner of James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce—would have triggered Southern states to secede and take up arms in rebellion.

L'étrange hypothèse qui structure ce livre est que la seule chose plus dangereuse que la guerre pour la nature et le climat, c'est la paix

Nous sommes en effet les héritiers d'une histoire intellectuelle et politique qui a constamment répété l'axiome selon lequel créer les conditions de la paix entre les hommes nécessitait d'exploiter la nature, d'échanger des ressources et de fournir à tous et toutes la prospérité suffisante. Dans cette logique, pour que jalousie, conflit et désir de guerre s'effacent, il fallait d'abord lutter contre la rareté des ressources naturelles. Il fallait aussi un langage universel à l'humanité, qui sera celui des sciences, des techniques, du développement.

Ces idées, que l'on peut faire remonter au XVIIIe siècle, ont trouvé au milieu du XXe une concrétisation tout à fait frappante. Au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le développement des infrastructures fossiles a été jumelé à un discours pacifiste et universaliste qui entendait saper les causes de la guerre en libérant la productivité. Ainsi, la paix, ou l'équilibre des grandes puissances mis en place par les États-Unis, est en large partie un don des fossiles, notamment du pétrole.