History Readings

Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.

And income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent.

Conservatives may bemoan the size of our government; in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.

Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.

All told, social spending in the United States is below the average of that of the wealthiest countries. And other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics

The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.

, on the programmatic side, among the many meritorious aspects of the much-maligned Affordable Care Act are its redistributionist elements: higher taxes on investment income and some health care businesses are being used to provide low-cost or free health care to a projected 26 million Americans near the bottom of the income scale.

more can and should be done — like raising the minimum wage nationwide and expanding the earned-income tax credit (a step supported by Republicans).

Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.

When George Bush left office in 2008, some worried that Stewart would run out of material. This proved as shortsighted as the hope that Obama would be America’s grand salvation. Stewart, who describes himself as “a leftist”, has always hammered the Democrats with the vigour of a disappointed supporter, and subjected Obama to one of his most damaging interviews during his first term: the president admitted that his 2008 slogan probably should have been “Yes We Can, But...” At the time, Stewart laughed, but today he admits with a shrug, “It was heartbreaking. It’s generally heartbreaking – that’s what the gig is.”

His seemingly effortless interview with Tony Blair in 2008 cut through Blair’s crusader mentality in a mere six minutes, as Stewart calmly rejected Blair’s theory that any kind of military action can keep the west safe. As Blair stammered, huffed and shifted in his seat, Stewart concluded that: “19 people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough, to make the world safe enough, that 19 people wouldn’t want to do harm to us. So it seems like we have to rethink a strategy that is less military-based.”

it’s also fair to say that some of the interviews, generally those with actors and authors, seem like mere puffery, a point with which Stewart agrees (he embraces criticism as eagerly as he deflects compliments).

How often does he really connect with his interviewees? “Have you seen the show? Mostly, I’m not even listening. But I can bullshit anyone for six minutes.”

It is a delicious irony that in the world of American TV news, one populated by raging egotists and self-aggrandisers, the person who is generally cited as the most influential is Stewart – a man so disinterested in his own celebrity, he often didn’t bother to collect his 18 Emmys, preferring to stay at home with his family.

“Honestly, it was a combination of the limitations of my brain and a format that is geared towards following an increasingly redundant process, which is our political process. I was just thinking, ‘Are there other ways to skin this cat?’ And, beyond that, it would be nice to be home when my little elves get home from school, occasionally.”

Stewart likes to credit “the team”, but given that he has always been deeply involved in the script (unusually for a host), writing and rewriting drafts right up to the last minute, the show will be a pretty different beast without him

He can be brutal about the leftwing media, too (CNN has been a frequent target, for being mediocre and too attached to pointless computer graphics). MSNBC, the liberal 24-hour news network, is, Stewart says, “better” than Fox News, “because it’s not steeped in distortion and ignorance as a virtue. But they’re both relentless and built for 9/11. So, in the absence of such a catastrophic event, they take the nothing and amplify it and make it craziness.”

Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”

Now that he is leaving The Daily Show, is there any circumstance in which he would watch Fox News again? He takes a few seconds to ponder the question. “Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family. I might glance at it for a moment until I realise, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.”

Isn’t he being a bit faux modest, I ask, especially when he insists that what he does is comedy and not news? That comes with a certain profile. He thinks about this for a few seconds. “It’s not that I… I mean, it’s satire, so it’s an expression of real feelings. So I don’t mean that in the sense of, ‘I don’t mean this.’ What I mean is, the tools of satire should not be confused with the tools of news. We use hyperbole, but the underlying sentiment has to feel ethically, intentionally correct, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”

When you click to show the list of people who “liked” a post, you probably think you’re getting a list of people who expressed positive sentiment toward a particular combination of sentences. But computationally, what you’re getting is slightly different. “Show me a list of the people who liked a Facebook post” is actually a command more like “Display a list of FirstName and LastName for usernames where the flag LikedThisPost = True.” There are a lot of assumptions built in there.

There’s the assumption that the username corresponds to a single real person, which is not always true—people have multiple Facebook accounts, and some accounts have multiple people posting to them, and some accounts are fake

There’s the assumption that the agent that clicked the like button is the same person referred to by the username—not necessarily true. People often forget to log out of their Facebook accounts on desktops and laptops, or use other people’s phones to browse social media

A like button is merely a tool. Humans use tools in breathtakingly creative ways—this is one of the many exciting and inspiring things about social uses of technology. However, the meaning a person imparts to an action on a social-media platform does not always correspond to the actual intent. In real-life social interactions, nuance is everything. On social media, where that nuance is obscured, we ought to be hyper-critical about the ethical ramifications of using social media data for real-world judgments.

For the kid listed in a gang database, it can be unclear how to get out of it. In the world of human interaction, we accept change through behavior: the addict can redeem himself by getting clean, or the habitual interrupter can redeem himself by not interrupting. We accept behavior change. But in the database world, unless someone has permission to delete or amend a database record, no such change is possible

The National Gang Center, in its list of gang-related legislation, shows only 12 states with policies that specifically address gang databases. Most deny the public access to the information in these databases. Only a few of these twelve mention regular purging of information, and some specifically say that a person cannot even find out if they have a record in the database

. “The last time that the gang unit purged its files, however, was in 1993—approximately 4 years before this study was conducted,” he wrote. “One clerk who is responsible for data entry and dissemination estimated, ‘At a minimum, 400 to 500 gang members would be deleted off the gang list today if we went through the files.

n predict what book I want to buy next, hasn’t this problem already been solved?” The answer is inevitably no. When computer scientists were building the Internet in the late 1990s, there weren’t any widely adopted or established ethical guidelines because we were building these systems for the first time in human history.

We also need to acknowledge that computer systems are not a panacea. “Your program really does stink, and the sooner you get used to the idea, the better,” writes Nathan S. Borenstein in Programming as if People Mattered. “The inadequacies of your software are simply a reflection of your frail, shortsighted, and limited human nature. Every program ever built is doomed to eventual obsolescence.” We need to put people before programs, and if programs don’t reflect our human values, we need to change the code. And if programmers can’t write code that is fair and just, we should consider relying on people instead of programs.

If American law enforcement is going to go deeper into the brave new world of data-driven policing, we need to create systems that have human values embedded in them. If our technological systems are entrapping innocent citizens or tampering with the presumption of innocence, should they be used?

The Koch brothers have put together a coalition that intends to spend almost $1 billion in 2016. Some donors complained after McCutcheon that they'd no longer be able to hide behind limits when they didn't want to give, but the overall landscape has clearly shifted toward those writing the checks.

Members of Congress get the shaft, too, spending up to 12 hours a day dialing for dollars. The simple drag of having to do all that seems like a potent reason for candidates to push back

For extremely wealthy donors who want to elect candidates and influence issues, their newfound power is a godsend. After spending $92 million on super PACs in 2012, Sheldon Adelson can summon any Republican candidate he wants and has their ears to discuss Israel, his pet issue.

The candidates who are doing best at fundraising, or for whom super PACs are likely to raise money effectively, are staying tactfully quiet on the issue.

she also called last week for a constitutional amendment to create limits or mandate transparency for campaign cash.

Peter Schweizer has excited the political world with allegations of quid pro quos, in which foreign governments gave to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton, then serving as secretary of state, did them favors—essentially alleging bribery in foreign affairs

Shadowy organizations funded by multimillionaires, many of which scrupulously cover up their sources of donations, are going to pour huge amounts of money into trying to sway the democratic process—all in an attempt to prove that huge, insufficiently transparent infusions of cash from wealthy donors can corrupt a public servant’s policy decisions. Is this irony lost on the donors and the candidates they back, or does it simply not bother them?

But computers do not just replace humans in the workplace. They shift the balance of power even more in favor of employers.

Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans. Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency.

This is the way technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them

regardless of whether unemployment has gone up or down, real wages have been stagnant or declining in the United States for decades. Most people no longer have the leverage to bargain.

In the 1980s, the Harvard social scientist Shoshana Zuboff examined how some workplaces used technology to “automate” — take power away from the employee — while others used technology differently, to “informate” — to empower people.

For academics, software developers and corporate and policy leaders who are lucky enough to live in this “informate” model, technology has been good. So far.

It’s easy to imagine an alternate future where advanced machine capabilities are used to empower more of us, rather than control most of us. There will potentially be more time, resources and freedom to share, but only if we change how we do things.

This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another.

These predictions have enormous implications for the millennial generation now entering the workforce. They have never known a world not defined by Moore’s Law. But unlike their generational predecessors, to this new cohort social networks and iPhone apps are old hat.

What obsesses them is hardware—drones, robots, 3-D printing—that is even more closely connected to the fortunes of Moore’s Law. Their careers will rise and fall on how well they ride the curve of an equation devised during the Johnson administration

And what a curve it will be. Moore’s Law is creative destruction on steroids. It regularly fosters the next wave of entrepreneurial opportunities made possible by the latest jump in chip performance. It can be blamed for much of the 90% mortality rate of electronics startups.

The great turning took place a decade ago, while we were all distracted by social networking, smartphones and the emerging banking crisis. Its breathtaking climb since tells us that everything of the previous 40 years—that is, the multi-trillion-dollar revolution in semiconductors, computers, communications and the Internet—was likely nothing but a prelude, a warm-up, for what is to come. It will be upon this wall that millennials will climb their careers against almost-unimaginably quick, complex and ever-changing competition.

Crowd-sharing, crowdfunding, bitcoin, micro-venture funding, cloud computing, Big Data—all have been early attempts, of varying success, to cope with the next phase of Moore’s Law. Expect many more to come. Meanwhile, as always, this new pace will become the metronome of the larger culture.

Rigid command-and-control structures in every walk of life, from corporations to governments to education, become vulnerable to competition by adaptive and short-lived alliances and confederacies. Now that process is going to attack every corner of society.

Even the human brain will be challenged by artificial intelligence—the latter enjoying the advantage of continuously improving at the pace of Moore’s Law.

Millennials face one of the greatest opportunities any generation has ever known: to completely remake the world through boundless digital technology.

The good news is that this generation seems to be already, often unconsciously, preparing for this adventure—through robotics competitions, gatherings of tech enthusiasts, engineers and tinkerers at Maker Faires and other do-it-yourself events, and playing with new applications for their drones and 3D printers. Having lived their entire lives at the pace of Moore’s Law, they seem to sense that the time has come to hit the accelerator. If millennials don’t entirely get it yet, they soon will.

“It was obvious that a negotiated solution was not a possibility,” Ms. Vestager said in the phone interview. “So I felt we should go in another direction.”

That direction was filing formal charges, called a statement of objection, accusing Google of favoring its own comparison shopping service, called Google Shopping. In practical terms, the commission found that when a consumer used Google to search for shopping-related information, the site systematically displayed the company’s own comparison product at the top of the search results — “irrespective of whether it is the most relevant response to the query,” Ms. Vestager said in a commission-issued statement about the charges.

In addition to the formal complaint related to Google Shopping, Ms. Vestager said her office was still looking into accusations that Google had restricted its advertising partners from using rival platforms and that it scraped online content from competitors. She also announced a separate “in-depth investigation” into accusations of anticompetitive company practices regarding Google’s relationships with device manufacturers that rely on its Android operating system.

Longtime observers of Ms. Vestager theorized that she had chosen to initially pursue a narrow case in which she had the most confidence, while keeping pressure on her adversary to settle by opening parallel lines of inquiry.

“It’s about power. Any deal she makes, it’s about how much power she has and how much power her adversary has,” says Martin Krasnik, the host of a late-night current affairs show on Danish national television who describes Ms. Vestager as the most impenetrable politician he has ever interviewed.

Mr. Hoenig devised a list of three criteria for banks that could be exempted from some regulations without posing risks to the financial system and taxpayers.The winners: banks that hold no trading assets or liabilities, those that have no derivatives positions other than plain-vanilla interest-rate swaps and foreign exchange derivatives and, finally, banks whose notional value of all derivatives exposures totals less than $3 billion.

Roughly 6,100 of the more than 6,500 commercial banks would pass this test, according to the F.D.I.C. Of the remaining 400 that would not, many are behemoths: 310 of them have more than $250 million in assets.Clearly, this is a regulatory relief proposal that benefits bankers on Main Street, not Wall Street.

it’s not only small banks that could catch a break on regulations under the Hoenig plan. His office said it had identified 18 banks with total assets greater than $10 billion that would qualify

Banks meeting the criteria set out by Mr. Hoenig would not be exempt from the Volcker Rule, which was intended to separate banks’ risk-taking trading desks from their federally insured units. That’s because these banks aren’t engaging in these kinds of practices.

The clamor for regulatory relief from large and politically connected financial institutions has been a constant ever since Dodd-Frank was enacted five years ago. First, these institutions worked to water down the rules as the regulators were writing them. Now they are pushing for repeal.

Experts say that is giving rise to a more chaotic global shift, especially toward China, which even Obama administration officials worry is extending its economic influence in Asia and elsewhere without following the higher standards for environmental protection, worker rights and business transparency that have become the norms among Western institutions.

: “The fastest-growing markets, the most populous markets, are going to be in Asia, and if we do not help to shape the rules so that our businesses and our workers can compete in those markets, then China will set up the rules that advantage Chinese workers and Chinese businesses.”

But China’s rising sway in Africa, South Asia, and even Latin America could blunt efforts by the United States and its allies on a range of issues, from stemming violent extremism to slowing climate change.For much of Washington and the world’s economic leaders, China’s creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank crystallized the choice policy makers face. Earlier this month, Lawrence Summers, who was a top economic adviser for both President Bill Clinton and Mr. Obama, declared that China’s establishment of a new economic institution and Washington’s failure to keep its allies from joining it signaled “the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system.”

In 2010, Mr. Obama brokered a deal to raise China’s stake in the I.M.F. to 6 percent from 3.8 percent, still far below the United States’ vetoing share of 16.5 percent but enough to give Beijing a larger say. Congress has blocked the proposed adjustment.

Fred P. Hochberg, who heads the Export-Import Bank, said that in the last two years alone, Chinese state-run lenders have lent $670 billion. Ex-Im has lent $590 billion since it was created during the Depression of the 1930s.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, plans to offer $46 billion to Pakistan for infrastructure assistance that would open new transportation routes across Asia and challenge the United States as the dominant power in the region.

The leader of the opposition both to the I.M.F. reforms and the Export-Import Bank has been Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, backed by the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party

“The network of international rules and institutions is a peculiarly U.S. creation” that has helped foster peace and prosperity for decades, he said. “The U.S. has built this up, not only for our own benefit but for the world. That we are now stepping back from a leadership role is highly, highly problematic.”

Any Democrat would try to preserve the 2010 financial reform, which has recently been looking much more effective than critics suggested. Any Republican would seek to roll it back, eliminating both consumer protection and the extra regulation applied to large, “systemically important” financial institutions.

And any Democrat would try to move forward on climate policy, through executive action if necessary, while any Republican — whether or not he is an outright climate-science denialist — would block efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

How did the parties get this far apart? Political scientists suggest that it has a lot to do with income inequality. As the wealthy grow richer compared with everyone else, their policy preferences have moved to the right — and they have pulled the Republican Party ever further in their direction. Meanwhile, the influence of big money on Democrats has at least eroded a bit, now that Wall Street, furious over regulations and modest tax hikes, has deserted the party en masse. The result is a level of political polarization not seen since the Civil War.