History Readings

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

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 combination of old and new media worked in concert to raise their profiles, certifying them as plausible choices. “It’s not cable TV per se” that matters, Socolow said, but the meme culture that it feeds. Television’s future “is through viral-meme creation and social-media circulation.”

Instead of being rendered obsolete by social media, TV news has achieved a sort of symbiosis with it, in which television is the dominant species.

The upshot is that new-media sources appear more likely to take their place alongside television than to replace it. If that’s the case, it rebukes the long-standing conventional wisdom that TV news was doomed by senescence and technology.

a community of like-minded thinkers who take calculated risks for a living. These people, from poker players to venture capitalists — I call them the River, and they are from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sports betting, crypto — make decisions based not on what they know at the moment but on expected value

For them, when it is time to make a decision, the question is: Do the risks outweigh the rewards?

The River is the rival of the group of academics, journalists and policy wonks that I call the Village. This term might be more familiar: It’s the East Coast expert class. Harvard and Yale. The New York Times and The Washington Post. Together, these communities make up only a small percent of the population — in short, they are elites.

Most voters say they have not heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the Yale data, and fewer than half believe it will help them or the country.

“I definitely wish Taylor Swift was calling this the ‘Climate Kick Ass Act’ or something like that,” said Chakraborty. “That would just reach everybody and resonate with everybody.”

“We have to be really smart about explaining the really wonky, long-term, monumental policy legacy that Biden left behind, which has actually really created jobs and really created a more breathable future,” Chakraborty said.

“The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical,” he told the crowd. “They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.”

The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.

America’s leaders — from both parties — have long been guided by what’s often called the neoliberal consensus: the idea that “barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation and empowered citizen-consumers would be the keys to prosperity, happiness and strong democracy,” as Mr. Murphy put it. More simply, it’s a shared assumption that what’s good for markets is good for society.

Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,

Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty)

These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices

And since the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, people are simply not aware of the full consequences on our everyday life. People are not aware that there is such a thing as a carbon budget, and just how incredibly small that remaining carbon budget is. That needs to change today.

No other current challenge can match the importance of establishing a wide, public awareness and understanding of our rapidly disappearing carbon budget, that should and must become our new global currency and the very heart of our future and present economics.

We must change almost everything in our current societies. The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty. The bigger your platform, the bigger your responsibility.

Harris’s TikTok account, created in late July, gained two million followers in the first 24 hours and now has around 4.5 million followers. The team’s @KamalaHQ TikTok account has grown more than eightfold since being rebranded from @BidenHQ,

The Trump campaign has highlighted the June launch of the former president’s TikTok account, which gained some 2.7 million followers within its first 24 hours and now has more than 10 million followers

Platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as X have reinstated Trump, after previously kicking him off following the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. Those moves restored his reach to now roughly 150 million followers across those three platforms.

In his first term in office, Mr. Trump never realized his expansive vision of using troops to enforce the law on U.S. soil. But as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats.

“In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order — and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops,” Mr. Trump said at a conservative conference in Dallas in August 2022, shortly before announcing that he was running to be that next president.

While governors have latitude to use their states’ National Guards to respond to civil disorder or major disasters, a post-Civil War law called the Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime to use regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.

post-liberalism. And I think that’s a very important term here. It’s also a loosely defined one. And that comes from people like law professor Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen, who is a political theorist at Notre Dame. And they basically take an argument or vision of the world that challenges liberalism’s emphasis on the individual. Instead of saying the state is meant to be an engine for individual self-fulfillment or to allow people to live life as best they want it, they argue that there’s a shared telos, a purpose, a common good to politics. And for them, it’s primarily defined by Catholic doctrine, and the purpose of politics should be moving us toward that goal. And part of that envisions the nation almost as an organic whole rather than a series of discrete individuals making choices. So it’s the question of what is good for the body politic as a unit, and that includes perpetuity, survival, children — hence the natalism that’s so important in Vance’s thought.

You’ve made this point about the differences between what you call sort of the neopatriarchy right and the Barstool conservatism right. And the Barstool conservatism right has been a little less excited about some of what it is hearing from Vance. Can you walk through the difference there?

The neopatriarchal right, the one that Vance has really aligned itself with, is a group that says a major focus of the state should be on fostering traditional morality and family formation. They don’t explicitly say women shouldn’t be working most of the time — though sometimes they do — but it basically means an emphasis on traditional loosely defined family structure. So you got to have kids, you got to get married, you shouldn’t be having sex out of marriage, birth control is probably bad. You can see some of this in the book by the head of the Heritage Foundation, which JD Vance wrote the foreword to. The publications have been delayed, but some of the excerpts have leaked, and he makes exactly this kind of argument about birth control specifically and other family planning choices.

does not exist at the heart of the Democratic Party.

Democrats are united in their belief that the government can, and should, act on behalf of the public. To be on the party’s far left is to believe the government should do much more. To be among its moderates is to believe it should do somewhat more. But all of the people elected as Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senator Joe Manchin, are there for the same reason: to use the power of the government to pursue their vision of the good.

there is always room for negotiation because there is a fundamental commonality of purpose.

and public health impacts, water quality impacts, all the other impacts of our fossil energy system

Now, the challenge of that, of course, is that making fossil energy more expensive is not a very politically attractive proposition. I mean, look how challenging inflation and the run up in energy prices has been for politicians around the world over the last year.

And an alternative strategy to that is to provide an economic role for those industries in the future and to remove their reticence to embrace decarbonization by allowing them to transition, to find a way that they can transition to play a role — a diminished role, I think — but a role in the new net-zero econom

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.

That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.

A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.

DONALD TRUMP:

let’s go back to the the economy, we have to bring energy prices down. Energy started at the price of gasoline.

DONALD TRUMP: Now, your cars don’t require too much gasoline. So, you know, you’re you have a good and you do make a great product. I have to say I have to be honest with you. That doesn’t mean everybody should have an electric car, but these are minor details.

In addition to a litany of false statements and odd non sequiturs, Trump was illogically dismissive of climate concerns: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years and you’ll have more oceanfront property.”

He also lamented the imaginary fact that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle,” an area apparently of deep concern to him; elsewhere he has claimed that Kamala Harris “wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change.”

Neither of these things is remotely true (though farmers forced to sell their cattle due to drought are now eligible for extra tax relief as of 2022).