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Antiblack racism continues not despite, but because of, the disappearance of blacks; this is only a paradox if the construction of blackness is seen as being essentially related to skin colour as opposed to economics. To bolster this position, Matthew emphasises the discourse of “blood purity”—as discussed in the…
Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper…
Over a decade of writing and thinking about modern work and its opportunity costs, I have generally mentioned the “problem of leisure” only in passing, largely because I would like to believe that it is soluble. Yet the political situation in the United States (and some other industrialised democracies) demands a…
In her book, Montell offers evidence that these linguistic tactics have seeped out from cults and into wider society. Propelled by capitalist demands and the reach of social media, the language of cults, she says, is now everywhere. If you question the business model of a multi-level marketing scheme, well, that's…
Over the past century, we’ve seen relatively steady, though slowing, technological progress. Sustaining this progress is the result of a balancing act: every year, further progress gets harder, but every year we exponentially increase the number of researchers and engineers. For instance, in the United States…
We live in an era that involves an extraordinary amount of change. To see this, consider the rate of global economic growth, which in recent decades averaged around 3 percent per year.51 This is historically unprecedented. For the first 290,000 years of humanity’s existence, global growth was close to 0 percent per…
As the gamer becomes attuned to the game, they become one event, one action; an oscillating between the line dividing self from other, and the line connecting them as one substance. If the line dividing provides a moment of autonomous self; the line connecting provides a moment of selfless purpose. In games, action…
Surprisingly (to economists, anyway), even though these communities remain decimated, many people have still refused to leave them. Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that it was only foreign-born workers and native workers ages 25 to 39 who were likely to leave. Everyone else basically stayed, even if the economic rug was…
Back then, many theorists believed that a progressive reduction of work time was the inevitable byproduct of mechanization and increased efficiency. Even John M. Keynes, noted father of modern mass-consumption economics, argued in 1931 that, within two generations, industry would satisfy the real needs of humanity and…
The growing importance of knowledge as an economic resource reflects the fact that, as economies and production technologies develop, they become ever more complex and specialized, leading to increasing coordination costs. In the language of information economics, the organizational or informational task of…
For most of the last century, wages in poorer parts of America rose faster than wages in richer places, as inventions were put to work in the hinterlands. After Henry Ford invented the Model T, for example, workers on assembly lines all over the Midwest built it. Now it’s just the opposite. Bright young people from…
Games hold a mirror to civilization. In the Afghan game of buzkashi, groups of fierce horsemen contend in a no-holds-barred struggle for possession of a beheaded calf. The object is to carry off the slippery carcass, defending it against all challengers, and bring it around the field to the goal. As Jacob Bronowski…
The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education. The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during…
Scienti
The facts are as follows. The rate of violent crime is lower now than it was at any time between 1966 and 2009. Immigrants have a lower rate of violent crime than American citizens. Terrorists kill just three-tenths of one percent of all American homicide victims. The rate of death from terrorism in the United States…
Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don’t understand…
In 2011, economist Guy Standing coined the term “precariat” to refer to workers whose jobs were insecure, underpaid, and mobile, who had to engage in substantial “work for labor” to remain employed, whose survival could, at any time, be compromised by employers (who, for instance held their visas) and who therefore…
The escape velocity cusp is closer than you might guess. Since we are already so long lived, even a 30% increase in healthy life span will give the first beneficiaries of rejuvenation therapies another 20 years—an eternity in science—to benefit from second-generation therapies that would give another 30%, and so on ad…
Let’s be clear: Trump is no fluke. Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker. Was it not the party’s wild…
You would think that the disappearance of the gravest threat in the history of humanity would bring a sigh of relief among commentators on world affairs. Contrary to expert predictions, there was no invasion of Western Europe by Soviet tanks, no escalation of a crisis in Cuba or Berlin or the Middle East to a nuclear…