The Uniswap Labs core team keeps a closed Slack for internal coordination and is not active in the Discord. This is not problematic per se, but is representative of how updates to the protocol are shared (or not) with the broader ecosystem. The core protocol roadmap is exempt from oversight of community governance, and updates are designed, built, and released without community input. Occasionally, forthcoming features and other internal updates are shared with the Discord moderator team when relevant, but not to Discord users prior to a formal announcement.

Uniswap's protocol, and the product offerings built on top of it, are widely used in the crypto space, driving a need to provide a high quality user experience on the product and support front. This is compounded by prominent forks such as Sushiswap, which additionally place Uniswap Labs under significant competitive pressure. But treating community members as end-users conflicts with the desire to treat them as stakeholders, discussion participants, or governance leaders. This conflict is visible in the Discord where support crowds out other conversations, but also in the fragmentation of stakeholder types across different platforms, as we address in the next section.

These challenge illustrate a larger problem: the fundamental tension between the pressure faced by Uniswap Labs to have a coherent and competitive product offering, and its aspiration to create a thriving community culture.

Imagine if a portion of that 12+ trillion USD that central banks made went to set up local food systems that sequestered carbon and ended world hunger.

With SEEDS the people become the de-central-ized bank — and instead of creating trillions to subsidize oil and gas (4.7 TRILLION!!!) and other harmful industries (like war ~2 TRILLION!) the people (that’s you) can decide what we as a society direct our shared wealth towards (like solving our climate crises, hunger and inequality for starters).

Now let me just preface this next bit by clarifying that I don’t have any idea what I’m talking really. I’m not an investor and I don’t understand the stock market beyond generally that it’s there to make rich people richer and fuck over poor people.

The prototype elaborated by P2P Models is called “Open.Smart”. Basically, the prototype is designed as a transparent database which serves to collect and order Smart member data. This data is supplemented by other records and documents required for subscription and is saved and encrypted in the blockchain. Open.Smart is an external app that relies on a digital wallet called Metamask that makes it possible to interact with the Smart platform (Figure 3 illustrates the beta version of Open.Smart)

What I learnt from Francesco Nachira and his interest in constructivism and theories of language and cognition is that decentralisation can never be just about decentralising infrastructures. One always needs to have a requisite strategy for decentralising institutions as well.So that’s why we always aimed at the decentralisation of economic and political power as the necessary condition of possibility that was needed to deliver on the true emancipatory potential of decentralising digital infrastructures. When I look at the promises made by the proponents of DAOs and NFTs, they seem to believe that technology itself would somehow do the job: once we code a DAO correctly, it will ensure a new institutional form and that form would have revolutionary effects, etc. This seems to me short-sighted and also very inward-looking.It’s not, of course, only about decentralising power. It’s also about creating new institutions to keep old power – which, by now, has taken on new forms – in check. Where are these new institutions when it comes to crypto and Web3? Everyone seems to believe that big tech platforms and Wall Street and Hollywood will just stand idle as they are being disrupted by “crypto.” Does this really sound plausible to anyone?

Well, first of all, I don’t see how Web3 – focused as it is on the creator economy and tokenisation – would allow us to deal with questions regarding infrastructural power and the industrial policy of the future… things like broadband, 5G, data centres, cloud computing, AI, quantum computing, microchips, the next generation of batteries. It’s not just the advertising business models of Web 2.0 that should concern us. What does Web3 offer us here? Not much. The Web3 discourse accepts today’s status quo as a fact and moves on to discuss all these other aspects.Most of the stuff about DeFi seems to me just a temporary phenomenon – the result of central banks’ inaction and delay in grasping the threats that come from leaving this industry unregulated. In this sense, China seems to be seeing through all the Web3 rhetoric and asking the right strategic questions, both in terms of controlling the whole stack, from batteries to AI, to establishing control over the FinTech sector in a way that would reduce risks to the country’s overall financial system. Europe, of course, doesn’t operate in the same political climate, so acting so resolutely about Web3 might not be an option (also for geopolitical reasons). It’s hard to imagine Chinese policymakers spending any time discussing Dogecoin.

I’m not. What I find so suspicious about DAOs and tokenisation and Web3 is the idea that they want to tie every institution to the logic of the stock exchange: if things work well, the value goes up – and this creates some kind of a disciplining mechanism. Do we really want to “optimise” our healthcare or education this way? Even when it comes to companies, we still have public companies that have a public mission, and even if they have been privatised this doesn’t somehow eliminate that mission.Tokenisation, for me, is the latest manifestation of what we could call the super-financialisation of everything, enabled by the digitisation of physical processes and objects. Now one can attach IP rights to everything; make smart contracts out of everything; enable transactions in everything. We fought that logic early on, with Decode, when people started making arguments about data being an asset class, something that accrues to individuals, to be bought and sold. We always argued that one could also have a much more social and public take on data, and specify collective access and ownership rights; data doesn’t have to be treated as something proprietary, but as something that can create public value and redistribute wealth and rewards.Can blockchains and crypto be of some help here? Maybe, but one would need to change the entire technological system, then. One would need to say that, instead of using blockchains to create smart contracts that enforce property rights, we want blockchains that enforce the “right to informational self-determination” or “the right to knowledge”? Or even the right to inspect the algorithms in order to assess their impact… for example, this is very relevant today when it comes to collective bargaining and platform workers’ rights in the gig economy. This would require transforming quite a lot of jurisprudence and reining in our notion of the public good and then also somehow fitting it onto the blockchain.

What I find so suspicious about DAOs and tokenisation and Web3 is the idea that they want to tie every institution to the logic of the stock exchange: if things work well, the value goes up – and this creates some kind of a disciplining mechanism. How could we deliver on the promises of decentralisation, decarbonisation, the Solidarity Economy, the new welfare state through the companies that will be created and funded? Likewise, when we think about enabling political participation – to help people fight climate change or even solve their own local problems – how do we do it in a way that goes beyond the logic of the market and doesn’t require turning everyone into an economic agent responding to financial incentives of some kind? How do we do that without financialising politics?

There were, of course, failures. While we managed to scale projects like Decidim, we didn’t manage to achieve a common pan-European initiative on technological sovereignty, linking political, economic, and geopolitical dimensions in a coherent way. There’s still no coherent vision of a digital industrial policy that could liberate even half of the stack that Europe needs, not to mention its entirety. In our defense, we also had very little money; 5 million Euro – this was Decode’s budget, spread across many partners in the project – is not so much given the ambitions.

This purely technical effort at decentralisation also falls short in thinking about the political and social institutions that are needed to take full advantage of this decentralisation. The big questions that I – and you – have been raising over the past decade, with regards to the political economy of data and infrastructures, of technological sovereignty, of the geopolitics of the stacks, all seem to have dropped the agenda completely. What is being “decentralised” is the ability to extract value and make money, incentivising even further the financialisation of social behaviours. Worse, it seems that people pushing the Web3 agenda have learned very little from the experiences of all the other movements, from free software to Indymedia to the rise of digital democratic cities, that did try to build a more decentralised and democratic digital sphere.

DAOstack[13] is a platform that aims to tackle the governance scalability problem.Matan Field, co-founder of DAOstack, states that the bigger a DAO is, the harderit is to manage it [44], which mimics the classical issues of governance in groups. Inprinciple, we can specify DAOs where all decisions are taken by voting and a 51%majority is expected for a proposal to pass. Such model is feasible for small DAOcommunities, where the number of proposals does not escalate further than whatthe number of members can study and decide on. However, the higher the number ofmembers, and thus the number of proposals, the more proposals need to be reviewedby each member in order to participate. A naive solution to this matter could beto reduce the required quorum (i.e., pass proposals with a relative majority), butthis introduces new flaws. For example, an attacker could spam requesting the DAOfunds, i.e. send plenty of proposals in a small time frame. Thus, it may overwhelmthe community, making it easier to get the funds using a lower quorum. Thus,increasing the number of DAO members may reduce the DAO resilience.

Because we can codify the ways in which it is possible to cheat, we can also write executable software rules, with deterministic results, that prevent cheating in the protocols we use to define and transfer value.

Kernel conversations are about humility, presence and a genuine attentiveness towards others, not because you stand to benefit from them, but because cultivating these three capacities within yourself is its own reward, which may allow you to see clearly the complete and perfect sacred core of every person you encounter.

There can be no doubt that it represents an incredibly important moment in the movement towards money as a protocol, the development of new means to create or describe value, and new media by which we can relate that to and with one another in an agreeable fashion.

This is a fantastic bounty, and opens the door to a new kind of philanthropism.

Simona Pop at the Bounties Network is doing great work bringing awareness to the human potential of the blockchain. She is behind the first social impact bounty, #BountiesForTheOcean, which is live now on the Bounties Network.

These issues include minimum economy size, optimized curve parameters, identity/reputation, UX/ease of use, herding, free-riding, collusion and more.

The true benefit of a model like this, however, would be opening up the ability to create these movements to absolutely anyone in the world, with permissionless, direct, incentivized global participation.

There is plenty of evidence that we have reached the effective limits of traditional organizational structures.

With the exception of deliberately fraudulent schemes, this is a good thing. Speculation is often the engine of technological adoption [2]. Both aspects of irrational speculation — the boom and the bust — can be very beneficial to technological innovation.

This is a big shift. The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer.

Anyone can issue tokens for free in a matter of hours - skipping month-long paperwork and massive costs required to list assets on traditional secondary markets.

Tokenholders can access the rapidly developing set of tools for decentralized organizations and 10X their ability to find each other, create a sense of mission and belonging, and coordinate action across geographies.

Mint tokens by depositing collateral to be used at settlement.

KPI options are synthetic (ERC-20) tokens that will pay out rewards if a KPI reaches predetermined targets before the given expiry date. Every KPI option holder has an incentive to improve that KPI because then their option will be worth more.

Crypto has transformed grassroots-level organizing. For the first time in history, it is possible to economically align networks of strangers into working together by using programmable incentives and providing them with tools to make decisions and govern shared resources in a decentralized manner.

Over time, the gap between the ceiling (buying in) and floor (selling out) will get larger. The value of this, for example, is that if the floor is not mapped 100% to the ceiling, it means that buyers aren’t immediately in a profit as soon as new participants enter. They have to keep the tokens for a certain period to ensure they are in a profit (in case they want to exit).These curves are currently exponential curves in order to incentivize early adopters, but it also doesn’t mean that it has to exponential. They can also be linear if there’s a belief that exponential curves will cause unnecessary churn at critical mass.

This setup means that #projectTokens will form and dissolve as necessary. If everyone leaves, all ETH will be refunded and all #projectTokens will cease to exist. If you buy in early, you will get more tokens for the same price. If you buy in later, you will get less tokens for the same price. If you sell back into the pool, you will get less ETH per token vs selling back into the pool when the outstanding supply is higher.The value derived from curved bonding is that it rewards participants for being early and buying tokens in that project. If they leave at a later point, selling their #projectTokens back into the communal pool will net them a reward. The reason you want separate tokens for separate projects is so that it more easily fits the value being produced from these separate projects. The crypto-economic feedback loops necessary to sustain certain systems will only work if the value being produced is mapped to its own token. For more info, read here:

When I first read this explanation in the OlympusDAO documentation, I laughed and laughed. “Well yes right,” I thought, “the way a Ponzi scheme works is that early ‘investors’ get rich as long as later investors keep buying more.” Sure, (3, 3). “If we all keep buying this thing its price will go up and we will be rich” is absolutely the main financial theme of 2021, but it is an irreducibly silly theme and I would be embarrassed to formalize it with game theory. 

The world experienced a sort of collective delusion around the worth of what is, essentially, a fabric sack of beans. In hindsight, bubbles rarely make sense. “It’s a flaw in the human character,” says Jeremy Grantham, market historian and bubble expert. “No one is immune, no matter how smart you are.”

I don’t think it would have taken off because this is a gold rush. People have made money through cryptocurrency speculation, those people are interested in spending that cryptocurrency in ways that support their investment while offering additional returns, and so that defines the setting for the market of transfer of wealth.

Partisans of the blockchain might say that it’s okay if these types of centralized platforms emerge, because the state itself is available on the blockchain, so if these platforms misbehave clients can simply move elsewhere. However, I would suggest that this is a very simplistic view of the dynamics that make platforms what they are.

MetaMask doesn’t actually do much, it’s just a view onto data provided by these centralized APIs. This isn’t a problem specific to MetaMask – what other option do they have? Rainbow, etc are set up in exactly the same way. (Interestingly, Rainbow has their own data for the social features they’re building into their wallet – social graph, showcases, etc – and have chosen to build all of that on top of Firebase instead of the blockchain.) All this means that if your NFT is removed from OpenSea, it also disappears from your wallet. It doesn’t functionally matter that my NFT is indelibly on the blockchain somewhere, because the wallet (and increasingly everything else in the ecosystem) is just using the OpenSea API to display NFTs, which began returning 304 No Content for the query of NFTs owned by my address!

Leeds parlayed YouTubes of herself literally playing video games -- The Sims -- into Roblox content into making games into a 1mm+ YouTube following, $8mm game studio, and a $1mm online store. Her quote in Rex Woodbury’s thread captures the Great Online Game beautifully:There’s nothing I’ve done that anybody else can’t do. It’s about learning—learning the code, learning how the game works, & creating. All you have to do is start.

Last year, the New York Times named Todos Santos one of its top 50 travel destinations thanks, in part, to the impending opening of the hotel, and more recently the retailer Madewell launched a partnership with the property. On the weekend I visited, all 32 rooms were fully booked with blissed-out couples in their 20s and 30s wearing colorful serape kimonos and sipping mezcal margaritas by the long, turquoise-tiled pool.

The Grind — Most investors at hedge funds work at a sociopathic pace, especially relative to the west-coast cultures of most VC firms. It is very hard to regularly compete against a team of people who work ~16 hours a day 6-7 days per week.

History will remember technology's leaders not just for exceptional financial results, but for the values and integrity of the companies they built.

A great board member, Dan, called me to say, “Ryan, I’ve never in my career seen a CEO as worn out as you. Please, you need to take a sabbatical — at least six weeks”. He, and other board members, tried so hard to do the right thing and convince me to take care of myself. But after a lifetime of gritting things out, I told myself I didn’t need to take a break. I think an element of my reaction is what Jerry Colonna calls “false grit” in Reboot.

Why I chose to step down as CEO of CircleUpOver the past year, when I began telling team members, investors, LPs and other stakeholders about my transition, their first question was, inevitably, “Why?” I typically explained that the average founder/CEO of a startup is in the seat for less than five years; I had been with CircleUp for nine, and I was exhausted. But there was so much more to it than that.I don’t remember the first time I told our board that I was exhausted and needed to step down as CEO. I imagine it was around 2016 or 2017, a period defined by stressful business decisions and physical and mental health issues. I later realized that the board interpreted my complaints as “typical founder/CEO exhaustion”. I blame myself for that lack of clarity. For years I did a poor job of communicating the depth of my stress and exhaustion, a problem only compounded by the fact that, at times, I wasn’t even sure of my own feelings. There were stretches of time where I felt horrible — lonely; terrified; depressed. Depression exacerbates exhaustion. But I tried to put on a brave face to make sure the board felt comfortable.

Christopher Plowman: We have a great team. It’s very family oriented. There’s lots of humor and humility, but it’s certainly chaotic. Look, I mean, we cost a million bucks a month. There you go, like it’s not cheap doing what we do. We’ve got 120 staff. We’ve got I think 70 people in Australia, we’ve got 40 people in Manila, we’ve got 40 people in Surat, in Northern India. And I’m sitting in Bali in the middle of all of these three teams. And our job is even harder, John, because we take half of the revenue that we earn and we share that with our teachers, right? So you spend a dollar on Insight Timer — because we do have a subscription product, and less than 1% of our users subscribe to that — but that’s kind of what keeps the furnace running. We’re by no means anywhere close to profitable, but if you spend a dollar with us on a subscription, Apple gets a third, and the teachers get a third, and we get a third. So we get 33 cents. So, we are very fortunate to have a group of investors, I think we have about 25 of them now, who pay the bills. Because there is a belief that if we continue to not sell things, that eventually we will build a big enough community that’s sufficiently large so that the 1% of people who do want to pay for long form courses and for one-on-one time with teachers, that our commission on that revenue will be enough to pay the cost of our company. It’s a constant battle. We’re also very fortunate that our investors know that we have to kind of do this the right way. That there’s a conscious and commercial need to co-exist. I talked to you earlier about some of the concerns I have in the subscription business. So, you’re probably familiar with the 7-day free trial that exists on the App Store. What we do, very deliberately, is if you sign up to a 7-day free trial for our courses package, we will send you four emails I think during that period of time saying, ‘Listen, you’ve got a 7-day free trial here and it’s going to automatically bill you on this date. So if you don’t want to be billed, unsubscribe, click here. Here’s the link.’ We send them a link, we send them the button. The other thing we do is before, if you are a subscriber, before your subscription renews after 12 months, is we also communicate with you, saying, ‘Hey, your subscription is going to renew.’ Because we don’t want people on our platform as subscribers who don’t want to be subscribers. But this is not true for most other subscriptions. 

Mirror is the next big change in the long history of symbolic communication. Through a decentralized, user-owned, crypto-based network, Mirror’s publishing platform revolutionizes the way we express, share and monetize our thoughts.

3. The fish farming story from my Non-Libertarian FAQ 2.0: As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well. But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month. A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum. But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit. Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too. Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.” Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit… A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the core of my objection to libertarianism, and that Non-Libertarian FAQ 3.0 will just be this one example copy-pasted two hundred times. From a god’s-eye-view, we can say that polluting the lake leads to bad consequences. From within the system, no individual can prevent the lake from being polluted, and buying a filter might not be such a good idea.

Anyway, I mention all this because there are several senses in which the process and the system around it could be considered to have TMM, or Too Much Money.EA has TMM.SFF had TMM.A lot of people in crypto have TMM.SFF Grants that were too large might cause organizations to have TMM.

In this context, in particular, it seems like delegation is clearly The Way. Thus, if I were to do this again, I would hire assistance to do at least the following:Do a preliminary investigation of every organization, before the recommenders even start looking. Do later deeper dives on the ones that are potentially getting large funding.Assemble key information about the organizations into good and consistent form.Let us ask questions, and attempt to answer them, with or without contacting the organizations for answers as appropriate. Investigate particular questions recommenders are curious about. Summarize papers. Compile histories. Fact checks.Do a sanity check on whatever we write in our notes, and on our evaluations, to look for things that are mistaken, or don’t seem to make sense. Think about what questions we would want to be asking, based on what we’re thinking.Help schedule meetings for us to talk to people at the orgs, as needed.

I know many EAs and consider many of them friends, but I do not centrally view the world in EA terms, or share the EA moral or ethical frameworks. I don’t use what seem to for all practical purposes be their decision theories. I have very large, very deep, very central disagreements with EA and its core components and central organizations and modes of operation. I have deep worries that important things are deeply, deeply wrong, especially epistemically, and results in an increasingly Goodharted and inherently political and insider-biased system. I worry that this does intense psychological, epistemic and life experiential damage to many EAs.

It is also related to the EA movement in that, despite no official relationship between SFF and EA, despite the person who runs SFF not considering himself an Effective Altruist (Although he definitely believes, as I do, in being effective when being an altruist, and also in being effective when not being an altruist), despite SFF not being an EA organization, despite the words ‘altruist’ or ‘effective’ not appearing on the webpage, at least this round of the SFF process and its funds were largely captured by the EA ecosystem. EA reputations, relationships and framings had a large influence on the decisions made. A majority of the money given away was given to organizations with explicit EA branding in their application titles (I am including Lightcone@CFAR in this category). 

Whether or not they would consider themselves EAs as such, the other recommenders effectively thought largely Effective Altruist frameworks, and seemed broadly supportive of EA organizations and the EA ecosystem as a way to do good. One other member shared many of my broad (and often specific) concerns to a large extent, mostly the others did not. While the others were curious and willing to listen, there was some combination of insufficient bandwidth and insufficient communicative skill on our part, which meant that while we did get some messages of this type across on the margin and this did change people’s decisions in impactful ways, I think we mostly failed to get our central points across more broadly.

My interest in psychology intensified, I came across Stanislaw Grof and Ken Wilber. Grof's book 'Realms of the Human Unconscious' opened many doors for me, and Wilber's 'Up from Eden' meant a decisive turning-point in the development of my fundamental worldview. Wilber offered a much more encompassing vision of the evolutionary dynamics of the society than the left. He also provided an alternative utopic vision, focussed on consciousness development rather than on social reforms.

Regular, sustained practice.• This may be one of the most important of all anti-dotes. I have seen some very impressive friends and colleagues fall into traps of stagnation, depression, and addiction. One of the common factors seemed to be that they had given up their daily spiritual practice. Yet continuity of practice is one of the most recurrent refrains across spiritual traditions, as for example, in the advice of the Koran, “Be constant in prayer”

The challenging implication is this: without direct spiritual, transpersonal experience, we may be like the child or ordinary adult looking at the book. We may read about spiritual concepts, we may hear of trans-personal ideas, and we may even appreciate some of the beauty of the higher reaches of the integral model. However, without direct experience of the requisite higher states and stages, their full signifi cance escapes us. And trickiest of all, we will not realize that they are escaping us. Intellectual apprehension alone is not enough in the transpersonal and spiritual domains. Intellectual understanding is important, but is also insuffi cient.Just how important this issue is can be judged from the warnings of both Muhammad and the Buddha. Both of them used animal metaphors to describe religious scholars who do not engage in spiritual disciplines. The Buddha described such people as herders of another person’s cattle, while Muhammad likened a mere scholar to an ass carrying a load of books. So how do we foster direct transpersonal experiences and spiritual insights, and thereby make ourselves better able to appreciate the spiritual heights of Integral Theory? Answer: by engaging in spiritual practices and related practices as fully as we can. This is a key requirement for anyone who aspires to truly understand and communicate the integral vision.

This is a key requirement for anyone who aspires to truly understand and communicate the integral vision.

If one assumes that political reform is long, slow, and painful, hierarchies and centralizing strategies can be productive. After all, they can keep the movement on target and give it some coherent shape. Ideas on their own do not change the world; ideas that are coupled with smart institutions might. “Not by memes alone” would be an apt slogan for any contemporary social movement. Alas, this basic insight—that political reform cannot be reduced to the wars of memes and aesthetics alone, even if the Internet offers an effective platform for waging them—has mostly been lost on the Occupy Wall Street crowd.9 Challenging power requires a strategy that in many circumstances might favor centralization. To reject the latter on philosophical grounds rather than strategic grounds—because it is anti-Internet or anti-Wikipedia—borders on the suicidal.

One is to assume that such remodeling rests on a theoretical fantasy about how social movements work in practice. Another is to concede that, whereas some such decentralization might be feasible, absolutely nothing guarantees that, as far as efficacy is concerned, decentralization beats centralization.The first view—that social movements will never be able to transcend hierarchies and replace them with horizontal networks—was cogently expressed by Jo Freeman in 1972 in her landmark essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Freeman argued that hierarchies are bound to emerge anyway, and that pretending that they do not exist simply lets unacknowledged leaders escape accountability. The Internet has not fundamentally altered these dynamics. If anything, it has only complicated them, as the number of communication channels that elite factions can exploit has exploded. Consider how a participant in the Occupy protests put it in a provocative post for The Daily Kos:One of the consequences of just how difficult and time consuming participating in the movement became is that key players stopped showing up. Well not exactly; they still showed up, but mostly for side conversations, informal gatherings, and the meetings that planned what would happen at the public meetings. Using social media ... they formed an invisible guiding hand that simultaneously got shit done, avoided accountability, and engaged in factional battles with each other ... you know what's worse than regular same-old elites? An [sic] barely visible elite that denies it is an elite and can't ever be called to account.But these elites never provided the kind of efficient centralizing machinery that Occupy Wall Street needed to convert millions of people curious about its cause into card-carrying members of the movement. This failure can be partly ascribed to the absence of coherent demands, but it must also be blamed on the movement’s proud lack of organization, which is how decentralization often ends. So, while Occupy Wall Street may have had plenty of unacknowledged leaders, it had no intermediate structures for scaling up; those—unlike shadow elites—do not just emerge on their own. Another participant in the protests put it this way:Systems did emerge to engage newcomers. But those systems.... were not nearly as effective as the moment demanded ... some of the email addresses floated around as a primary point of contact were left unchecked, accumulating more than 11,000 unanswered emails.... Meetings would be announced at a particular location and then held somewhere else. Newcomers would show up for working group meetings, add their name to a list passed around for future contact, and never hear from anyone again. It's nearly four months since the occupation and there still isn't a clearly labeled sign up page. Hell, there isn't even an official public facing website that represents OWS.

But Johnson is completely blind to the virtues of centralization. In discussing 311, he lauds the fact that tipsters calling the hotline help to create a better macro-level view of city problems. But this is a trivial insight compared with the main reason why 311 works: Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to centralize—not decentralize—previous models of reporting tips. Here is how Accenture, the firm that assisted New York in its switch to the 311 system, describes the origins of that project: “[Before 311], customers looking for government assistance were confronted with more than 4,000 entries on 14 pages of the NYC telephone book, and more than 40 resource-intensive call centers were required to direct inquiries to the right city offices. The Mayor’s vision was that of a high-performance, centralized, all-purpose call facility, accessible through the simple-to-remember 3-1-1 phone number.”Johnson’s internet-centric worldview is so biased toward all things decentralized, horizontal, and emancipatory that he completely misses the highly centralized nature of 311. The same criticism applies to his treatment of the Internet. Had Johnson chosen to look closer at any of the projects he is celebrating, he would find plenty of centralization efforts at work.7 Consider Google: when it comes to user data, today Google runs a much more centralized operation than five years ago. Back in 2008, my Google searches were not in any way connected to my favorite YouTube videos or to events on my Google Calendar. Thanks to Google’s new privacy policy, today they are all connected—and Google, having centralized its previously disparate data reservoirs, can show me more precise ads as a result. But don’t count on Internet-centrists to include this trend under that mystical category of “Internet logic.”

Second, we must acknowledge and reform philanthropy’s own dependence on techno-solutionism. The tech sector’s runaway financial success—enabled by a deafening regulatory silence—has propped up the economy, and philanthropy’s endowments, for the last two decades. This has birthed a new class of philanthropists informed directly by the tech-solutionist logic of the tech industry. During this time, philanthropy has spent uncounted millions advancing and funding a narrative that posits new technologies as the solution to our most pressing social problems. Completing the cycle of globalization, American tech companies and philanthropic organizations have come together to export that narrative to much of the rest of the world, driving the agenda of both humanitarian aid agencies and development organizations

First, it must use its power, influence, and money to dismantle“techno-solutionism”—the idea that technological solutions are the key to strengthening American (or any) democracy. Technology is not and never will be the solution to social and political problems, but the fetishism of technology in the public sector has been extremely lucrative for many private companies

One of the obvious challenges of Ecological Economics (in the search for solutions to the ecological crisis) is thus not only to be open to what other disciplines have to say in the natural and social sciences (regarding both the theoretical challenges at play and thedocumenting of alternative worldviews), but to open the space for other forms of knowledgeinorder to createalternative realities (including sustainable alternatives to the modern development project), beyond the current and pervasive dilemma between development and sustainability5–an arguably urgent task in the face of the 21st century’s ecological crisis

his is exactly what the ontological turn does not do; and is consistent with the premises of Ecological Economics which ‘accepts the existence of a reality independent of human cognition’ (Spash, 2015: 36)

ontological turn undertook a necessary shift in wording from ‘culture’ to ‘ontology’,

ontology

If the modern divide is the problem, then worldviews which are not built on a separation between nature and humans surely are of paramount importance in the design of such alternatives.

particular their diagnosis of the current global ecological crisis as a crisis of capitalism, inherently damaging of nature and humans and built on the modern divide nature/culture1

a strong case can be made that the ‘special relationship with nature’ that some indigenous groups have maintained (both in worldviews and practices) should not be understood in terms of an essential ‘difference’ but rather as a fundamental aspect of our common human nature, which has been distorted in some places2and has the potential to be distorted everywhere3

Marxist analysis of Political Economy (see Burkett, 2006; Foster, John, 2015; Foster, John Bellamy, 2000; Saito, 2017; Saroja Sundararajan, 1996)(which both Political Ecology and Ecological Economics are consistent with) and, in particular, considering the capitalist system as a historically situated inversion of the natural unity between humansand nature (Wolff, 2003),

And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life.

Overall, between 50 million and 70 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders or sleep deprivation, according to the Institute of Medicine, which advises public policy. Adults typically need between seven and nine hours of sleep a night, but more than a third of adults get less, according to the CDC.In the new report, sleeping pill use started climbing among people in their 40s and 50s, with at least 5 percent resorting to the drugs. It was highest among those with more education -- and among women, with 5 percent reporting taking the pills, compared with 3.1 percent of men, the authors found.That may reflect the strain of modern life, with people, particularly women, trying to juggle the growing demands of work and family, only to find it takes a toll on their sleep patterns, said Dr. Roneil Malkani, an assistant professor of neurology at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.“We know that insomnia is more prevalent among women than men,” he said. “I think that there are people who don’t get enough sleep because they have responsibilities and jobs and expectations.”

Desperate for rest in a frenzied world, at least 8.6 million Americans take prescription sleeping pills to catch some Zzzs, according to the first federal health study to focus on actual use.Between 2005 and 2010, about 4 percent of U.S. adults aged 20 and older popped popular prescription drugs such as Lunesta and Ambien in the previous month, say government researchers who tracked 17,000 people to their homes and peered into their medicine cabinets.

Net CO2 emissions can fall below gross CO2 emissions, if CDR is brought into the mix. Studies have looked at mitigation and CDR in combination to identify strategies for limiting warming to 1.5°C (Sanderson et al., 2016; Ricke et al., 2017)204204. CDR, which may include net negative AFOLU CO2 emissions, is deployed by all 1.5°C-consistent pathways available to this assessment, but the scale of deployment and choice of CDR measures varies widely (Section 2.3.4). Furthermore, no CDR technology has been deployed at scale yet, and all come with concerns about their potential (Fuss et al., 2018)205205, feasibility (Nemet et al., 2018)206206 and/or sustainability (Smith et al., 2015; Fuss et al., 2018)207207 (see Sections 2.3.4, 4.3.2 and 4.3.7 and Cross-Chapter Box 7 in Chapter 3 for further discussion).

For example, based on alternative future fertility, mortality, migration and educational assumptions, population projections vary between 8.5 and 10.0 billion people by 2050 and between 6.9 and 12.6 billion people by 2100 across the SSPs. An important factor for these differences is future female educational attainment, with higher attainment leading to lower fertility rates and therefore decreased population growth up to a level of 1 billion people by 2050 (Lutz and KC, 2011; Snopkowski et al., 2016; KC and Lutz, 2017)

All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified and, in most cases, also to achieve net negative emissions to return global warming to 1.5°C following a peak (high confidence). The longer the delay in reducing CO2 emissions towards zero, the larger the likelihood of exceeding 1.5°C, and the heavier the implied reliance on net negative emissions after mid-century to return warming to 1.5°C (high confidence).

Policies reflecting a high price on emissions are necessary in models to achieve cost-effective 1.5°C pathways (high confidence). Other things being equal, modelling studies suggest the global average discounted marginal abatement costs for limiting warming to 1.5°C being about 3–4 times higher compared to 2°C over the 21st century, with large variations across models and socio-economic and policy assumptions. Carbon pricing can be imposed directly or implicitly by regulatory policies. Policy instruments, like technology policies or performance standards, can complement explicit carbon pricing in specific areas.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C implies reaching net zero CO2 emissions globally around 2050 and concurrent deep reductions in emissions of non-CO2 forcers, particularly methane (high confidence). Such mitigation pathways are characterized by energy-demand reductions, decarbonization of electricity and other fuels, electrification of energy end use, deep reductions in agricultural emissions, and some form of CDR with carbon storage on land or sequestration in geological reservoirs.

Pathways that aim for limiting warming to 1.5°C by 2100 after a temporary temperature overshoot rely on large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures, which are uncertain and entail clear risks.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C depends on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the next decades, where lower GHG emissions in 2030 lead to a higher chance of keeping peak warming to 1.5°C (high confidence). Available pathways that aim for no or limited (less than 0.1°C) overshoot of 1.5°C keep GHG emissions in 2030 to 25–30 GtCO2e yr−1 in 2030 (interquartile range). This contrasts with median estimates for current unconditional NDCs of 52–58 GtCO2e yr−1 in 2030.

I did not fully appreciate that our minds are embodied, and Awakening is never going to alter that fact, or that these bodies are subject to sickness, injury, aging and death. More importantly, because it may be less obvious, even the most Awakened of embodied minds still possess a primal reflexive component, a hardwired instinctive reptilian component, and an emotional layer that extends into and interacts with every other layer of the mind/brain above and below. There is also a massive accumulation of automatic, conditioned response patternstailored to adaptively fit a huge variety of possible circumstances. All of these deeper layers operate independently of conscious intention, Awakened or otherwise. Therefore, as lay practitioners in the world, we must consciously acknowledge, explore, understand and work with all of these layers

30to unfold as they would. Nancy kept asking for exactly the kind of certainty I so clearly understood could never be possible.I’m sure it was both difficult and exhausting for herto keep up with the continuously shifting process that was me amid the constantly changing circumstances of my life (travel and teaching activities, cancer prognosis and other health issues, etc.).She was trying to make plans for the future, but the situation kept changing around her. I, on the other hand, was just riding the waves of change. This was one more thing at play with Nancy, and may well have been for W, the Board members and others who were around and involved in everything that happened from 2015 through 2020.Dharma practice producesmajorshifts in perception. Thatis its purpose. Shifts in perceptionaffecthow we process complex and interconnected life events as they unfold. In particular, we come to live much more in the present. Living in the present means not dwelling on the past or future. To not be constantly telling ourselves stories about what might and should have been but wasn’t, or what might or should be in the future. In the words of Ram Das, “Be here now.” For years I’dlivedmostlyin the present moment, more in the ongoing awareness of suchness and emptiness than narrative and form. I’d stopped“thinkingabout myself,”creating the“story of me.”I now realize that,while freed of the enormous burdens of “if only” and “what if,” I’d also lost a certain kind of perspective thatcomes withthosenarratives. In consequence, I found myself unableto counter what Nancy and the Boardconfrontedme with by providing my own perspective,“my story” regarding events that had happened so many years before! I’d completely lost theperspective and context that comes out ofthose longer term and larger scale autobiographical narratives. I was also unable to appropriately contextualize Nancy’s increasing pain and frustration, so I simply dealt with it in the moment, as it arose. Months after the last of those painful and frustrating confrontations it struckme that I’d been doing the same thing even during those confrontations.I’dstill been so much in the present, simply meeting events as they unfolded in front of and around me, that it never occurred to me to ask, “Why are we talking about things that happened so many years ago?”“Why are we talking about things that have so little to do with anything that has happened sinceor is happening now?” Instead, lacking anappropriatechronological perspective, I totally failed to recognizethat we were focusing onlong pastevents and missing the very real problems and difficulties thatNancy and I were experiencingin this new present.Itdidn’t occur to methat they believed these to be recent or even current events, and most especially that they knew nothing of the larger context -the state of our marriage,our decision to live separately, and everything else that had happened since.Thus I failed tounderstand the underlying motivations for these accusations.I hadbasically been livingin two different worldsfor years, but more in the now and onlystepping into the world of linear time and narrative when and as needed. Never fully in–just enough to deal with something then gone again. The narratives I did generate were minimal and incomplete, enough for the moment or the hour, and for series of related events that mightspandays, weeks, or even months. But not sufficient for anything like personal autobiography.By embracing the now in the way I had, I can now seehowI’d alsolost sight of not only the value, but the practical necessityofthat other world of linear time and narrative

My inability to respond appropriately when confronted by theDharma Treasure Board made me acutely aware of mylackofpersonal narrative. I was being presented by myaccuserswitha biographical narrativeof mylife that they had created. I knew it was wrong, not even vaguely consistent with my lived experience, but I had no autobiographical narrative of my ownto counter it with. While such narratives may ultimately be mere empty fabrications, they are also indispensable to our ability to function effectively in the realm of conventional realityand interpersonal relationships. All Ihad were the pieces fromwhich thosenarratives are usually constructed. Iwas hopelessly unsuccessful inmy attempts to put them together on the spur of the momentto provide a more accurate counterpart to the distorted narrative Iwas being confronted with.The more limited short-term narratives necessary for day to day functioning came easily and were unavoidable. So,the change that had taken place wasn’t particularly obvious to others, although I think my wife noticed and wastroubled by it. It certainly affected the quality of our communication. I had become completely comfortable with uncertainty and allowing things just

There is a tendency to hold unrealistic expectations regarding “spiritual”leaders and teachers, and likewise for what spiritual practice might eventually do for ourselves. One is that mindfulness and Insightcan somehow magically transcend the causes and conditions that shaped ourlives and personalities. To paraphrase the Buddha, what arises in dependence on causes and conditions onlyceases dueto causes and conditions! Meditation and dharma practice create the specific causes and conditions for certain things to arise and others to pass away–but not everythingwe might wish for. Ihave discovereddeeply embeddedautomatic patterns of respondingin fundamentally unhealthy waysto certain situations. Theseautomatic response patterns are the productof an extreme emotionally, psychologically, and physically traumatic childhood, compounded by coping methods I developed in the decade or so after leaving home at 15. From being a homeless adolescent living on the streets, never attending much less graduating high school, I obtained a PhD andhaveled a successful and rewarding professional and spiritual life. However, those conditioned response patterns and coping strategies that had served me well in a life with such difficult beginningswere ultimately disastrous –in my interactions with my wife,then whenconfronted bythe Board of Dharma Treasure. Within themlies the root of much of my unskillfulness.The personal work and therapy I’m doing now continues to clarify these. Becoming aware of them has allowed me to make progress in overcoming them.What I realized through working with my therapist and a life coach was that, for all my life,I’ve had almost no ability to establish and maintain clearpersonal boundariesin interpersonal interactions. If someone was upset, angry, hurt, disappointed, afraidorwhatever, I tendedtotakepersonal responsibilityfor their mental state. Regardless of the cause, or whether or not I hadanything to do with their being upset.Or even the reasonableness or unreasonableness of their reactions!Iwouldbecome inappropriately over-committed to relieving their distress, and likewise inappropriately over-committed in every other part of my life as well. I havealsobeenextremelyconflictavoidant.When confronted with angerand/or aggression,I woulddo almost anything to placate. Itendedto avoid conflict by beingexcessively compliant, acquiescingtoo quickly, andengaginginvariousconflict avoidance strategies.I too readily acceptedtheviews ofothers,or triedto find waysto side-step issues of conflict, to relieve another’s pain and anger whiledisregarding the cost to myself or future consequences. If attempts to placate failed, and full-blown conflict seemedinevitable, I wouldoften disengage, withdraw, surrender, and even take a beating if necessary.

a monastic or reclusive setting, but can be potential pitfalls for a lay practitioner.Inmy case, aconfluence of uniquely personalpsychological predispositions with one such “developmental plateau” onthe Path created just such a problem. I emphasize the “uniquely personal” aspect, because it holds the key to understandingthe situation I found myself in. Extrapolating from this, the larger truth seems to bethat each of ushas our ownunique, deeply embedded personality characteristics that arepotentially problematic in certain circumstances. The effectsof the practice arenot at all primary in causingthese problems,butcanplay a significant role in compounding them.

Over the past yearand a half, I’ve had an opportunity to learn a lot about myself that I didn’t know before. I’ve also learned to appreciate certain profound depths to this dharma that I knew about, but hadn’t fully understood and applied before. In the process, I’ve also come to understand how certain “plateaus” in the progress of Awakening can create problems. These problems are of a sort that seem far less likely to arise in

Later, in the negotiations between the ministers, stakeholders, lobbyists and citizens, many recommendations were eliminated or watered down. In the end, considering the bill on ‘climate and resilience’ proposed to the Parliament as well as direct executive directives, 10% of the CCC’s recommendations were accepted by the government without modification, 37% were modified or watered down, and 53% were rejected

Like everything to do with climate and ecological justice, we need the politicians to step up to the mark before time runs out. 

What is clear, is that the collective intelligence of a diverse group of people coming together to find solutions for the common good are up to the task

Ultimately, having access to the top political decision makers and using biased studies, the industrial lobbies have managed to sabotage the reforms the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat called for. A context and tactic we are only too familiar with.

“Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximised their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back . . . There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right,” Ubben told the Financial Times.

PG&E’s own records clearly establish wind has long been classified as one of the top causes of structure failure on both transmission and distribution lines. PG&E’s own records also establish the Feather River Canyon is known for high and sometimes extreme winds. Based upon PG&E wind records, the Exponent Report stated “Maximum (or peak) wind speeds in the areas of the chosen lines are generally found to vary between 60 to 100 mph, as measured and reported in “Extreme Wind Speed Estimates Along PG&E Transmission Line Corridors” across one-minute time intervals and at an elevation of 33 feet above ground level, over a 50-year return period.” According to data pulled from the Jarbo Gap RAWS111 by Meteorologist Kris Kuyper the highest number of high wind events occur in the month of October. The inherent weakness of comparative risk analysis is its subjective nature. Data can be manipulated to achieve a desired result. Based upon the evidence the 2014 RIBA process exposes the manipulation of comparative risk analysis by PG&E personnel.

No records were ever located to support The RIBA team member’s conclusion that the Shoe Fly poles would most likely fail due to heavy rain. According to the Manager in Transmission Asset Management, The RIBA team member was an expert on the RIBA process who was assigned to assist “the engineer walk through the process.” Based upon the records the Manager in Transmission Asset Management identified the engineer as the engineer most familiar with the overall project and assigned to do the RIBA scoring for the project. According to an undated PG&E Org Chart, the engineer assigned to score the project was a Senior Engineer assigned to Transmission Asset Development and reported directly to the Manager in Transmission Asset Management. According to the notes on the scoring sheet, as interpreted by the Manager of Transmission Asset Development, “the concern here is the note says that the structures would go down during rainy and wet storm. And what’s not shown here is that the wildfire is not likely, because on the wet ground not likely to have wildfire.” No records in support of Senior Engineer’s conclusion were ever located. On the other hand, the TL Relocate 10 Towers project scored 581. According to the scoring sheet, the Senior Engineer was also the engineer assigned to score this project. Despite the fact that by 2014 the scope of the project was limited to the replacement of insulators so that money spent on the project prior to cancellation could be charged to the Capital Budget, the project scored 18 points out of 10,000 possible points for safety110. Despite the fact that the project involves the same Caribou-Palermo line the Reliability Risk Score is 562. 434 of those points are justified because “WRDI is possible contact with public leading or to other facilities causing potential injuries to few employees” according to the notes on the scoring sheet. The 2014 RIBA scoring is used to highlight the subjective nature of the comparative risk analysis. Because they are subjective the risk scores are easily manipulated. PG&E was highly motivated to complete the TL Relocate 10 Towers project in order to be able to charge the budget overruns, money already spent, to the capital budget. By 2014 the Replace 5 Damaged Towers project was about future spending. The best example of the manipulation is the WRDI justifications. One of the oft-stated justifications for the TL Relocate 10 Towers Project was the fact that the ten towers were located in a remote, inaccessible location. The towers were so inaccessible that PG&E had to use helicopters to fly personnel to the towers. Also, there was no evidence that any of the ten towers was on the verge of collapse according to the 2009 email from the manager who cancelled the project in 2009. On the other hand, the Shoe Fly was built on Camp Creek Road and any, or all of those poles, could reasonably be expected to fall down within a year. Another example of manipulation of facts in the 2014 RIBA was the RIBA team member’sconclusion, apparently based upon the Senior Engineer’s scoring note that “structures would go down only if it is rainy and wet”; and restated several times by the Manager in Transmission Asset Management that the wood Shoe Fly poles would probably only collapse during heavy rain

These metrics do not consider a country’s wisdom as important when ranking and measuring success.

Uncategorized

We have started thinking about a Wise Metrics Project

According to a study published last year by researchers at the University of California San Diego, more than three-quarters of American adults now experience moderate to high levels of loneliness — rates that have more than doubled over the last 50 years. Despite rising housing costs across the country, more Americans are living alone today than ever before. As Boone Wheeler, a 33-year-old member of East Wind, told me, “There are literal health consequences to loneliness: Your quality of life goes down due to lack of community — you will die sooner.”

IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.”

C.1.3. Limiting global warming requires limiting the total cumulative global anthropogenic emissions of CO2 since the pre-industrial period, that is, staying within a total carbon budget (high confidence).1414By the end of 2017, anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the pre-industrial period are estimated to have reduced the total carbon budget for 1.5°C by approximately 2200 ± 320 GtCO2 (medium confidence). The associated remaining budget is being depleted by current emissions of 42 ± 3 GtCO2 per year (high confidence).

Quick Start

Installation

A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence had led to “a sort of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a leftist ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged.’’

The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel has said that race had become a “bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely “subjective data.’’

Behind the attacks on American universities — led by aging white male intellectuals

Writing to van Breda Kolff from Tokyo in his capacity as captain-elect, Bradley advised his coach that they should prepare themselves for “the stern challenge ahead.” Van Breda Kolff doesn’t vibrate to that sort of tune. “Basketball is a game, he says. “It is not an ordeal. I think Bradley’s happiest whenever he can deny himself pleasure.”

Van Breda Kolff says that Bradley is “a great mover,” and points out that the basis of all these maneuvers is footwork. Bradley has spent hundreds of hours merely rehearsing the choreography of the game—shifting his feet in the same patterns again and again, until they have worn into his motor subconscious. “The average basketball player only likes to play basketball,” van Breda Kolff says. “When he’s left to himself, all he wants to do is get a two-on-two or a three-on-three going. Bradley practices techniques, making himself learn and improve instead of merely having fun.”

His jump shot, for example, has had two principal influences. One is Jerry West, who has one of the best jumpers in basketball. At a summer basketball camp in Missouri some years ago, West told Bradley that he always gives an extra hard bounce to the last dribble before a jump shot, since this seems to catapult him to added height. Bradley has been doing that ever since. Terry Dischinger, of the Detroit Pistons, has told Bradley that he always slams his foot to the floor on the last step before a jump shot, because this stops his momentum and thus prevents drift. Drifting while aloft is the mark of a sloppy jump shot. Bradley’s graceful hook shot is a masterpiece of eclecticism. It consists of the high-lifted knee of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Darrall Imhoff, the arms of Bill Russell, of the Boston Celtics, who extends his idle hand far under his shooting arm and thus magically stabilizes the shot, and the general corporeal form of Kentucky’s Cotton Nash, a rookie this year with the Lakers. Bradley carries his analyses of shots further than merely identifying them with pieces of other people. “There arc five parts to the hook shot,” he explains to anyone who asks. As he continues, he picks up a ball and stands about eighteen feet from a basket. “Crouch,” he says, crouching, and goes on to demonstrate the other moves. “Turn your head to look for the basket, step, kick, follow through with your arms.” Once, as he was explaining this to me, the ball curled around the rim and failed to go in.

People thrive in a wide range of climates. The projected climate change is small relative to the diurnal cycle. It is therefore rather peculiar to conclude that climate change will be disastrous. Those who claim so have been unable to explain why. https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1313182006310731776?s=20

These predictions are absurd. A 3°C increase could trigger, and a6°C increase would trigger, every “tipping element” shown in Table 2. The Earth would have a climate unlike anything our species has experienced in its existence, and the Earth would transition to it hundreds of times faster than it has in any previous naturally-driven global warming event (McNeall et al., 2011). The Tropics and much of the globe’s temperate zone would be uninhabitable by humans and most other life forms. And yet Nordhaus thinks it would only reduce the global economy by just 8%?Comically, Nordhaus’s damage function is symmetrical — it predicts the same damages from a fall in temperature as for an equivalent rise. It therefore predicts that a 6°C fall in global temperature would also reduce GGP by just 7.9% (see Figure 3). Unlike global warming, we do know what the world was like when the temperature was 6°C below 20th century levels: that was the average temperature of the planet during the last Ice Age (Tierney et al., 2020), which ended about 20,000 years ago. At the time, all of America north of New York, and of Europe north of Berlin, was beneath a kilometre of ice. The thought that a transition to such a climate in just over a century would cause global production to fall by less than 8% is laughable.Again, I found myself in the position of a forensic detective, trying to work out how on Earth could otherwise intelligent people come to believe that climate change would only affect industries that are directly exposed to the weather, and that the correlation between climate today and economic output today across the globe could be used to predict the impact of global warming on the economy? The only explanation that made sense is that these economists were mistaking the weather for the climate.

If human beings really were able to take the long view — to consider seriously the fate of civilization decades or centuries after our deaths — we would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.

These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

Johnson: Earlier I interviewed you about patrilocal residence patterns and how that alters women’s sexual choices. In contrast, matrilocal societies are more likely to be egalitarian. What are the factors that lead to the differences between these two systems?Hrdy: I think in societies where women have more say, and that does tend to be in societies that are matrilocal and with matrilineal descent or where, as it is among many small scale hunter-gatherers, you have porous social boundaries and flexible residence patterns. If I had to say what kind of residence patterns our ancestors had it would have been very flexible, what Frank Marlowe calls multilocal.

As a result, American politics has fallen into a pattern that is characteristic of many developing countries, where one portion of the elite seeks to win support from the working classes not by sharing the wealth or by expanding public services and making sacrifices to increase the common good, but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants) and want to take away what little they have. This pattern builds polarization and distrust and is strongly associated with civil conflict, violence and democratic decline.

American exceptionalism was founded on cooperation — between the rich and the poor, between the governors and the governed. From the birth of the nation, the unity across economic classes and different regions was a marvel for European observers, such as St. John de Crèvecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville. This cooperative spirit unraveled in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to the first “Age of Discord” in American history. It was reforged during the New Deal as an unwritten but very real social contract between government, business and workers, leading to another age of prosperity and cooperation in postwar America. But since the 1970s, that contract has unraveled, in favor of a contract between government and business that has underfunded public services but generously rewarded capital gains and corporate profits.

Writing in the journal Nature in 2010, we pointed out that such trends were a reliable indicator of looming political instability and that they “look set to peak in the years around 2020.” In Ages of Discord, published early in 2016, we showed that America’s “political stress indicator” had turned up sharply in recent years and was on track to send us into the “Turbulent Twenties.” The Political Stress Index (PSI) combines the three crisis indicators in the Goldstone-Turchin theory: declining living standards, increasing intra-elite competition/conflict and a weakening state. Growing PSI indicates increased likelihood of political violence. The Well-Being Index indicates greater equality, greater elite consensus and a more legitimate state.

But the ideological polarization the American Political Science Association had in mind has, in recent decades, been eclipsed among the public by political sectarianism.

Nonethel ess, scholars have begun to iden-tify procedures that can potentially mitigate political sectarianism. These in clude efforts to help Americans comprehend opposing partisans regardless of their level of agree-ment, such as by focusing on commonalities rather than differences (e.g., “we’re all Amer-icans”; SM) or communicating in the moral language of the other side (e.g., when liberals frame the consequences of climate change in terms of sanctity violations; SM).

INSIGHTS|POLICY FORUM536 30 OCTOBER 2020 • VOL 370 ISSUE 6516sciencemag.orgSCIENCERather, the goal of these interventions is to move toward a system in which the public forcefully debates political ideals and policies while resisting tendencies that undermine democracy and human rights. Gi

Is motivated partisan cognition bipartisan?The extent to which each side exhibits motivated partisan (or biased) cognition is a focus of ongoing debate. Some scholars argue for symmetry (SM). For example, a recent meta-analysis demonstrates equivalent levels of motivated partisan cognition across 51 experiments investigating the tenden cy to evaluate otherwise identical in-formation more favorably when it supports versus challenges one’s political beliefs or allegiances (14). In an illu strative experiment, liberals and conservatives viewed a film clip of a political demonstration in which protestors clashed with police. Despite view-ing the identical clip, liberals rated the protesters as more violent when they believed it was an anti-abortion protest (a conservative cause) rather than a gay-rights protest (a liberal cause), whereas conservatives exhibited the opposite pattern (SM). Other scholars argue for asymmetry. For example, some evidence suggests that, relative to Democrats, Republicans have a higher need for order and greater trust in their gut-level intuitions. Such tendencies appear to motivate them to favor explana-tions that are straightforward and intuitive rather than complex and abstract, even when the latter types of explanation might be more accurate (15) (SM). Such findings are representative of the existing evidence, but conclusions remain tentative.

Third, i n contrast to the equivocal ideo-logical-polarization trends among the pub-lic, politici ans and other political elites have unambiguously polarized recently on ideo-logical grounds, with Republican politicians moving further to the right than Democratic politicians have moved to the left (SM). This ide ological divergence is driven in part by ex-treme economic inequality in America today, especially in conjunction with candidates be-coming increasingly reliant on ideologically extreme donors. As polit icians chase cam-paign dollars, these extreme voices garner disproportionate influence (SM).

In addition, emotional and mor-alized posts—those containing words like “hate,” “shame,” or “greed”—are especially likely to be retweeted within rather than be-tween partisan networks (9). Social-m edia technology employs popularity-based algo-rithms that tailor content to maximize user engagement, increa sing sectarianism within homogeneous networks (SM)

n recent years, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have played an influential role in political discourse, inten-sifying political sectarianism. Scholars from sociology, political science, economics, psy-chology, and computational social science debate whether such web platforms create polarizing echo chambers (7) (SM). However, a recent field experiment offers intriguing ev-idence that Americans who deactivate their Facebook account become less politically po-larized (8).

The decl ine of the broadcast news era, during which impartiality was prized, began in the 1980s, driven in part by the Reagan admin-istration’s termination of the Federal Com-munications Commission (FCC) “fairness doctrine” in 1987. This doctrine, introduced in 1949, required that broadcasters discuss controversial topics in a manner that the FCC assesses as unbiased. Among th e first media figures to leverage the demise of the fairness doctrine was Rush Limbaugh, whose influen-tial conservative radio program went into na-tional syndication in 1988 (SM).

On American exceptionalism SOCIALSCIENCEPolitical sectarianism in AmericaA poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization poses a threat to democracyPOLICY FORUMA recent study offers valuable international perspective on political polarization, leveraging data from 1975 through 2017 in nine Western democracies to examine feel-ings toward copartisans and opposing partisans. The study controls statistically for the number of parties and offers a valuable, albeit noncomprehensive, comparison set (13). Four nations—America, Canada, New Zealand, and Switzerland—exhibit increasing sectarianism over time, with the rate steepest in America. By contrast, Australia, Britain, Norway, Sweden, and Germany exhibit decreasing sectarianism over time. The most notable findings pertain to out-party hate [increasingly “frigid” evaluations of opposing partisans, via a “feeling thermometer” (see main text)]. Across the eight other nations, the mean rate of change in out-party hate was 0.004° per year (range: –0.2° to +0.2°) on the 0°-to-100° scale. In the United States, the rate of change was –0.6° per year. By 2017, out-party hate was stronger in America than in any other nation.

Sectarianism, Jacobson continued in an email,feeds on itself; it is exacerbated by the ideologically fragmented media environment. It also reflects real differences in beliefs and values and conceptions of what American is, or should be, all about. Cleavages of race, region, education, religion, occupation, and community type now put people more consistently on one side or the other, feeding the culture wars and aggravating negative partisanship.

The Amish outperform the English on every measured health outcome. 65% of Amish rate their health as excellent or very good, compared to 58% of English. Diabetes rates are 2% vs. 8%, heart attack rates are 1% vs. 6%, high blood pressure is 11% vs. 31%. Amish people go to the hospital about a quarter as often as English people, and this difference is consistent across various categories of illness (the big exception is pregnancy-related issues – most Amish women have five to ten children). This is noticeable enough that lots of health magazines have articles on The Health Secrets of the Amish and Amish Secrets That Will Add Years To Your Life. As far as I can tell, most of the secret is spending your whole life outside doing strenuous agricultural labor, plus being at a tech level two centuries too early for fast food. But Amish people also die earlier. Lots of old studies say the opposite – for example, this one finds Amish people live longer than matched Framingham Heart Study participants. But things have changed since Framingham. The Amish have had a life expectancy in the low 70s since colonial times, when the rest of us were dying at 40 or 50. Since then, Amish life expectancy has stayed the same, and English life expectancy has improved to the high 70s. The most recent Amish estimates I have still say low seventies, so I think we are beating them now. If they’re healthier, why is their life expectancy lower? Possibly they are less interested in prolonging life than we are. R&D write: Amish people are more willing to stop interventions earlier and resist invasive therapies than the general population because, while they long for healing, they also have a profound respect for God’s will. This means taking modest steps toward healing sick bodies, giving preference to natural remedies, setting common-sense limits, and believing that in the end their bodies are in God’s hands. The Amish health care system has an easier job than ours does. It has to take care of people who are generally healthy and less interested in extreme end-of-life care. It also supports a younger population – because Amish families have five to ten children, the demographics are weighted to younger people. All of these make its job a little bit simpler, and we should keep that in mind for the following sections.

Amish people spend only a fifth as much as you do on health care, and their health is fine. What can we learn from them?

I’m fascinated by how many of today’s biggest economic problems just mysteriously failed to exist in the past. Our grandparents easily paid for college with summer jobs, raised three or four kids on a single income, and bought houses in their 20s or 30s and never worried about rent or eviction again. And yes, they got medical care without health insurance, and avoided the kind of medical bankruptcies we see too frequently today. How did this work so well? Are there ways to make it work today? The Amish are an extreme example of people who try to make traditional systems work in the modern world, which makes them a natural laboratory for this kind of question.

It seems to also highlight how much our governments, banks and big corporations roles play into the state of our planet, how much we need them to change so that our individual choices can actually make a significant difference. Read more

Proponents of so-called green growth—economic growth that uses natural resources in a sustainable manner—must show that it is possible to effectively eliminate carbon emissions from developed economies in the space of little more than a decade with no impact at all on economic expansion. This challenge cannot be answered solely by an appeal to technology. The question is not whether technological measures such as energy efficiency and solar power are possible (they clearly are); nor whether, in the past, countries have managed to harness these technologies sufficiently (they clearly haven't); but rather, whether countries can now achieve sufficient gains in a short enough time to allow the pursuit of economic growth indefinitely, while still remaining within the safe operating space of the planet.In a sense, this once again raises the question of whether economic value is something completely separate from—or at least separable from—physical and material flows. Certainly, in the past, the two things have gone hand in hand. According to economics, monetary value surely has something to do with activity. According to physics, activity is impossible without the expenditure of energy. There may well be efficiencies to be had, but these will ultimately be constrained by thermodynamic limits, as all activity is. Those who believe that this is not a constraint on expansion typically appeal to the massive quantities of solar energy that flood Earth. But it remains true that these flows are diffuse (rather than concentrated, as fossil fuels are) and must be captured using material devices.

After the threat from Google+ had passed,and afteryears of promoting open access to Facebook Platform, Facebook increasingly turned toPlatformas a toolto monitor, leverage, and harm (via rescindingAPI access)apps that Facebook viewed as actual or potential competitive threats.201.In 2013, Facebook amended its Platform policy(described above)to forbid applications that “replicat[e] [Facebook’s] core functionality,” with no explanation as to what Facebook considered its core functionality, or how such policies would apply when Facebook expanded its functionality to a new area.

Facebook was aware that access to its Platform APIs, especially its Find Friends API, was particularly important to potential rivals. In 2011, Facebook adopted a policy aimed at forbidding “competing social platforms,” and any apps that linked or integrated with competing social platforms, from accessing its APIs. Facebook adopted this policy to prevent Google+ from gaining traction:doing sodiscourageddevelopers from creating apps that bridged the two networks, which would have reduced switching costsfor users.

Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp thus substantially lessened competition andfurther entrenched Facebook’s monopoly power in the Personal Social Networking Services market. Moreover, Facebook’s subsequent degradation of the acquired firm’s privacy features reduced consumer choice by eliminating a viable, competitive, privacy-focused option.

Although valuations of WhatsApp had varied widely over the years, neitherFacebook’s nor those of industry analysts had approached anywhere close to $19 billion. Two years before the acquisition, Zuckerberg had received word that another company offered to purchase WhatsApp for $100 million. At that time, Zuckerberg wrote to Zoufonoun, “I’d pay $1b for them if we could get them.”Zoufonoun agreed.

In April 2013, Facebook had entered into a licensing agreement with Onavo. During the negotiation of this licensing agreement, Facebook demanded that a provision be included that gaveFacebook the rightto notice and an opportunity to bid in the event Onavo considered being acquired by another company. Onavo founder Guy Rosen told the Onavo board that such a demand “has become [Facebook’s] standard M.O.these days with startups.”

Zuckerberg’s success in convincing Systrom to sell was based in no small part upon Zuckerberg’s growing reputation for wielding Facebook’s power as a sword. After the initial overture by Zuckerberg in February, Systrom contacted Instagram investor Matt Cohler for advice.Systrom asked: “you know him better than I do ....Will he go into destroy mode if I say no.” Cohler’s response was blunt: “probably (and probably also if we just don’t engage at all).” Systrom summed up the futility of trying to fend off Facebook once it had entered “destroy mode” by saying: “bottom line I don’t think we’ll ever escape the wrath of mark... it just depends how long we avoid it....” Because Instagram relied in significant part on Facebook for exposureand distribution,invoking Zuckerberg’s “wrath” would have negative consequences for the company.

inspired our success), [sic] but at a high enough price –like $500m or $1b –they’d have to consider it. (Emphasis added)115.Ebersman reacted to the idea cautiously in light of the high price. He asked for further explanation on the motivation for the proposedacquisition. Specifically, he probed whether Zuckerberg was trying to “1) neutralize a potential competitor?...2) acquire talent? ...3) integrate their products with ours in order to improve our service? ... [or]4) other?” In response, Zuckerberg admitted: “It’s a combination of (1) and (3)” (Emphasis added). He went on to explain that “what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs [sic] up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again....[T]hose new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale” (Emphasis added).

On August 10, 2009, FriendFeed accepted Facebook’s offer. As Facebook employees internally discussed via email on the day of the acquisition, “I remember you said to me a long time (6 months ago): ‘we can just buy them’ when I said to you that Friendfeed is the company I fear most. That was prescient! :).”

DealBook: How to Fix AmericaLast Updated Dec. 4, 2020, 6:05 a.m. ET43 minutes ago43 minutes ago

At historical rates of equity returns of 8 percent annually, a $6,750 at-birth retirement account — which would cost the government $26 billion a year based on the average number of children born in the U.S. each year — would provide retirement assets of more than $1 million at age 65, or $2 million at age 74.

Zak Stein, who is a contributor to the aforementioned book Metatheory for the 21st Century, is one of the strongest proponents of post-Integral metamodernism in terms of ‘social justice’ (a term that the IDW has helped nullify). In the Integral conference debate in 2015, the “weak argument” Stein proposes is that Integral should at least become more informed about what capitalism is. The “strong argument” is that Integral should be, at the very least, post-capitalist. Given that Integral was doing neither, the way people used terms like “green meme” and “second tier” became, Stein says, substitutions for actual thought.

On the podcast Emerge, Daniel Thorson interviews Robert MacNaughton on Learnings from the Life and Death of the Integral Center (2019) which survey the history of tensions within the community itself. And in a no holds barred interview, Jamie Wheal vividly discusses The Legacy of Integral (2019), with its ample pros and cons, saying 2nd Tier created far more problems than it solved. People got a “contact high” from reading Wilber, Wheal says, which “resulted in a bunch of dissociated eggheads masquerading as Jedi and thinking they could solve the world from the position of a whiteboard.”

Radicals thus find themselves under fire from opposite directions. If they refuse to debate what kind of cultural policies might flourish under socialism, for example, they are being shifty; if they hand you a thick bunch of documents on the question, they are guilty of blue-printing. Perhaps it is impossible to draw a line between being too agnostic about the future and being too assured about it. The Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin reminds us that the ancient Jews were forbidden to make icons of what was to come, rather as they were forbidden to fashion graven images of Yahweh. The two prohibitions are closely related, since for the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh is the God of the future, whose kingdom of justice and friendship is still to come. Besides, the only image of God for Judaism is human flesh and blood. For Benjamin, seeking to portray the future is a kind of fetishism. Instead, we are driven backwards into this unexplored territory with our eyes fixed steadily on the injustice and exploitation of the past. Knowing exactly where we are going is the surest way of not getting there. In any case, the energies we invest in envisaging a better world might consume the energies we need to create it. Marx had no interest in human perfection. There is nothing in his work to suggest that post-capitalist societies would be magically free of predators, psychopaths, free-loaders, Piers Morgan-types or people who stow their luggage on aircraft with surreal slowness, indifferent to the fact that there are 50 people queuing behind them. The idea that history is moving ever onwards and upwards is an invention of the middle-class Enlightenment, not of the left.

“There’s fear. It’s real fear. And I understand if you’re not a conservative it’s hard to be empathetic and it seems like an exaggeration,” Ms. Stuckey said. “But like the same kind of fear on the left that Trump is a unique threat to the country, there’s a real fear on the right, especially I would say from Christians, of what the country would look like under a Democratic president.”

have increasingly become the parties of educated metropolitan elites. As their traditional working-class base has eroded, the influence of globalized professionals, the financial industry, and corporate interests has risen. The problem is not just that these elites often favor economic policies that leave middle and lower-middle classes and lagging regions behind. It is also that their cultural, social, and spatial isolation renders them incapable of understanding and empathizing with the worldviews of the less fortunate.

Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic … That was challenging as someone who was a founder of a media outlet but not a manager of it.”

In our interview, Yglesias explained why pushing back against the “dominant sensibility” in digital journalism is important to him. He said he believes that certain voguish positions are substantively wrong—for instance, abolishing or defunding police—and that such arguments, as well as rhetorical fights over terms like Latinx, alienate many people from progressive politics and the Democratic Party.

But the pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

Today I sent my intention to resign from The Intercept, the news outlet I co-founded in 2013 with Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras, as well as from its parent company First Look Media.The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here. Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative. But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine. And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

Since I closed down the Dish, my bloggy website, five years ago, after 15 years of daily blogging, I have not missed the insane work hours that all but broke my health.

Anditisclearthatthislackofsocialconsciousnessisinfactadistincteconomiclossinaveryconcretesense,aswellofcourseasalossinthepossiblewell-runningofapoliticalsystem.IapproachthisfromthepointofviewofaneconomistsoIspeakofthefail-uresofthepricesystem;Iamsureonecouldcometothesameendfromotherpointsofview.Butstartingfromthispointofview,thefactthatwecannotmediateallourre-

Thereisstillanothersetofinstitutions,ifthatistherightword,Iwanttocalltoyourattentionandmakemuchof.Theseareinvisibleinstitutions:theprinciplesofethicsandmorality.Certainlyonewayoflookingatethicsandmorality,awaythatiscompatiblewiththisattemptatrationalanaly-sis,isthattheseprinciplesareagreements,consciousor,inmanycases,unconscious,tosupplymutualbenefits.Theagreementtotrusteachothercannotbebought,asIhavesaid;itisnotevennecessarilyveryeasyforittobeachievedbyasignedcontractsayingthatwewillworkwitheachother.

Outcomes
   ---
Technology
   ---
Institutions
    ---
Culture
     ---
Pyscho-Ontology

Societiesintheirevolutionhavedevelopedimplicitagree-mentstocertainkindsofregardforothers,agreementswhichareessentialtothesurvivalofthesocietyoratleastcontributegreatlytotheefficiencyofitsworking.Ithasbeenobserved,forexample,thatamongthepropertiesofmanysocietieswhoseeconomicdevelopmentisbackwardisalackofmutualtrust.

Therearemanyotherorganizationsbesidethegovern-mentandthefirm.Butallofthem,whetherpoliticalpartyorrevolutionarymovement,universityorchurch,sharethecom-moncharacteristicsoftheneedforcollectiveactionandtheallocationofresourcesthroughnonmarketmethods.

Butinternally,andespeciallyatlowerlevels,therelationsamongtheemployeesofafirmareverydifferentfromthearm’slengthbargainingofourtextbooks.AsHer-bertSimonhasobserved,anemploymentcontractisdifferentinmanywaysfromanordinarycommoditycontract;anemployeeissellingwillingnesstoobeyauthority,aconceptofcentralimportancetowhichIwillreturninalaterchapter.

Iamnotinterestedheresomuchinthesespecificexamplesastoshowthatsomethinglikethisoccursinmoresubtlecontexts.Considerwhatisthoughtofasahigherormoreelusivevaluethanpollutionorroads:trustamongpeople.Nowtrusthasaveryimportantpragmaticvalue,ifnothingelse.Trustisanimportantlubricantofasocialsystem.Itisextremelyefficient;itsavesalotoftroubletohaveafairdegreeofrelianceonotherpeople’sword.Unfortunatelythisisnotacommoditywhichcanbeboughtveryeasily.Ifyouhavetobuyit,youalreadyhavesomedoubtsaboutwhatyou’vebought.Trustandsimilarvalues,loyaltyortruth-telling,areexamplesofwhattheeconomistwouldcall“ex-ternalities.”Theyaregoods,theyarecommodities;theyhavereal,practical,economicvalue;theyincreasetheefficiencyofthesystem,enableyoutoproducemoregoodsormoreofwhatevervaluesyouholdinhighesteem.Buttheyarenotcommoditiesforwhichtradeontheopenmarketistech-nicallypossibleorevenmeaningful.

Rationality,afterall,hastodowithmeansandendsandtheirrelation.Itdoesnotspecifywhattheendsare.Itonlytriestomakeusawareofthecongruenceordissonancebetweenthetwo.Soultimatelyanyvaluediscussionmustcometoaresttemporarilyonunanalyzedpostulates.

AllItrytoinsisthereisthatsomesenseofrationalbalancingofendsandmeansmustbeunderstoodtoplayamajorroleinourunderstandingofourselvesandoursocialrole.Letmeil-lustratebypresentingor,moreprecisely,caricaturingsomethoughttendencies.Wehaveone,looselycalled“thenewLeftthought,”notsonewperhaps;someofuswhohavereadalittlebitofthehistoryofthoughthaveheardofanarcho-syndicalismbefore.BakuninandSorelhadspokentothesamepointmanyyearsago.Butitisarealone.Thereisademandforwhatmightbetermedsincerity,foracompleteunity

TheNewRight,initslibertarianrepresentatives,alsoresolvestheconflictinitsownway.Itseekstodeny,oratleastminimize,theroleofthestateandofcollectiveactionandresponsibility,andsubstitutesfortheseclaims,withtheirdifficultmoralandpowerconsequences,theworshipofthemarket.

to explain the world of interactions and outcomes occurring at multiple levels, we also have to be willing to deal with complexity instead of rejecting it. some mathematical models are very useful for explaining outcomes in particular settings. We should continue to use simple models where they capture enough of the core underlying structure and incentives that they usefully predict outcomes. When the world we are trying to explain and improve, however, is not well described by a simple model, we must continue to improve our frameworks and theories so as to be able to understand complexity and not simply reject it.

B. The Central Role of Trust in Coping with Dilemmaseven though arrow (1974) long ago pointed to the crucial role of trust among participants as the most efficient mechanism to enhance transactional outcomes, collective-action theory has paid more attention to payoff functions than to how individuals build trust where others are recip-

simply assuming that humans adopt norms, however, is not sufficient to predict behavior in a social dilemma, especially in very large groups with no arrangements for communication. even with strong preferences to follow norms, “observed behavior may vary by context because the perception of the ‘right thing’ would change” (de oliveira, croson, and eckel 2009: 19). various aspects of the context in which individuals interact affect how indi-viduals learn about the situation they are in and about the others with whom they are interacting. individual differences do make a difference, but the context of interactions also affects behavior over time (Walker and ostrom 2009). Biologists recognize that an organism’s appearance and behavior are affected by the environment in which it develops.for example, some plants produce large, thin leaves (which enhance photosynthetic photon harvest) in low light, and narrow, thicker leaves (which conserve water) in high light; certain insects develop wings only if they live in crowded conditions (and hence are likely to run out of adequate food in their current location). such environmentally contingent development is so commonplace that it can be regarded as a universal property of living things. (Pfennig and ledón-rettig 2009: 268)social scientists also need to recognize that individual behavior is strongly affected by the context in which interactions take place rather than being simply a result of individual differences.

428their role in climate change-related emissions and carbon sequestration (canadell and raupach 2008), the biodiversity they contain, and their con-tribution to rural livelihoods in developing countries. a “favorite” policy rec-ommendation for protecting forests and biodiversity is government-owned protected areas (terborgh 1999). in an effort to examine whether govern-ment ownership of protected areas is a necessary condition for improving forest density, hayes (2006) used ifri data to compare the rating of forest density (on a five-point scale) assigned to a forest by the forester or ecologist who had supervised the forest mensuration of trees, shrubs, and ground-cover in a random sample of forest plots.9of the 163 forests included in the analysis, 76 were government-owned forestslegally designated asprotected forestsand 87 were public, private, or communally owned forested lands used for a diversity of purposes. no statistical difference existed between the forest density in officially designated protected areas versus other forested areas. Gibson, Williams, and ostrom (2005) examined the monitoring behav-ior of 178 forest user groups and found a strong correlation between the level of monitoring and a forester’s assessment of forest density even when controlling for whether users were formally organized, whether the users were heavily dependent on a forest, and the level of social capital within a group.chhatre and agrawal (2008) have now examined the changes in the condition of 152 forests under diverse governance arrangements as affected by the size of the forest, collective action around forests related to improve-ment activities, size of the user group, and the dependence of local users on a forest. they found that “forests with a higher probability of regeneration are likely to be small to medium in size with low levels of subsistence depen-dence, low commercial value, high levels of local enforcement, and strong collective action for improving the quality of the forest” (ibid.: 1327). in a second major analysis, chhatre and agrawal (2009) focus on factors that affect tradeoffs and synergies between the level of carbon storage in forests and their contributions to livelihoods. they find that larger forests are more effective in enhancing both carbon and livelihoods outcomes, particularly when local communities also have high levels of rule-making autonomy.

since the design principles are described extensively in e. ostrom (1990, 2005), i will list only a brief updated list as developed by cox, arnold, and villamayor-tomás (2009):1a.User Boundaries: clear and locally understood boundaries between legitimate users and nonusers are present.1B. resource Boundaries: clear boundaries that separate a specific common- pool resource from a larger social-ecological system are present.2a. congruence with local conditions: appropriation and provision rules are congruent with local social and environmental conditions.2B. appropriation and Provision: appropriation rules are congruent with provision rules; the distribution of costs is proportional to the distribution of benefits.3. collective-choice arrangements: Most individuals affected by a resource regime are authorized to participate in making and modifying its rules.4a. Monitoring Users: individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the appropriation and provision levels of the users.4B. Monitoring the resource: individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the condition of the resource.5.Graduated sanctions: sanctions for rule violations start very low but become stronger if a user repeatedly violates a rule.6. conflict-resolution Mechanisms: rapid, low-cost, local arenas exist for resolving conflicts among users or with officials.7.Minimal recognition of rights: the rights of local users to make their own rules are recognized by the government.8. nested enterprises: When a common-pool resource is closely connected to a larger social-ecological system, governance activities are organized in multiple nested layers.the design principles appear to synthesize core factors that affect the prob-ability of long-term survival of an institution developed by the users of a re-source. cox, arnold, and villamayor-tomás (2009) analyzed over 100 studies by scholars who assessed the relevance of the principles as an explanation of the success or failure of diverse common-pool resources.

schlager and ostrom (1992) drew on the earlier work of John r. commons ([1924] 1968) to conceptualize property-rights systems as containing bundles of rights rather than a single right. the meta-analysis of existing field cases helped to identify five property rights that individuals using a common-pool resource might cumulatively have: (1) access – the right to enter a specified property,4 (2) Withdrawal – the right to harvest specific products from a re-source, (3) Management – the right to transform the resource and regulate

in cPr dilemmas where individuals do not know one another, cannot communicate effectively, and thus cannot develop agreements, norms, and sanctions, aggregate predictions derived from models of rational individuals in a noncooperative game receive substantial support. these are sparse environments and full rationality appears to be a reasonable assumption in them. (e. ostrom, Gardner, and Walker 1994: 319)

this was an immense effort. More than two years was devoted to develop-ing the final coding manual (e. ostrom et al. 1989). a key problem was the minimal overlap of variables identified by case study authors from diverse dis-ciplines. the team had to read and screen over 500 case studies in order to identify a small set of cases that recorded information about the actors, their strategies, the condition of the resource, and the rules-in-use.3a common set of variables was recorded for 44 subgroups of fishers who harvested from inshore fisheries (schlager 1990, 1994) and 47 irrigation systems that were managed either by farmers or by a government (tang 1992, 1994).of the 47 irrigation systems included in the analysis, 12 were managed by governmental agencies of which only 40 percent (n = 7) had high perfor-mance. of the 25 farmer-managed, over 70 percent (n = 18) had high perfor-mance (tang 1994: 234). rule conformance was a key variable affecting the adequacy of water over time (ibid.: 229). none of the inshore fishery groups analyzed by schlager were government-managed and 11 (25 percent) were not organized in any way. the other 33 subgroups had a diversity of informal rules to define who was allowed to fish in a particular location and how har-vesting was restricted (schlager 1994: 260)

the national research council (nrc) established a commit-tee in the mid-1980s to assess diverse institutional arrangements for effective conservation and utilization of jointly managed resources.

netting 1972

4. are rational individUals helPlessly traPPed in social dileMMas?the classic assumptions about rational individuals facing a dichotomy of or-ganizational forms and of goods hide the potentially productive efforts of in-dividuals and groups to organize and solve social dilemmas such as the over-harvesting of common-pool resources and the underprovision of local public goods. the classic models have been used to view those who are involved in a Prisoner’s dilemma game or other social dilemmas as always trapped in the situation without capabilities to change the structure themselves. this ana-lytical step was a retrogressive step in the theories used to analyze the human condition. Whether or not the individuals who are in a situation have capaci-ties to transform the external variables affecting their own situation varies dramatically from one situation to the next. it is an empirical condition that varies from situation to situation rather than a logical universality. Public in-vestigators purposely keep prisoners separated so they cannot communicate. the users of a common-pool resource are not so limited

in the 1970s, the earlier work on effects of diverse ways of organizing the provision of water in metropolitan areas was extended to policing and public safety. We found that while many police departments served 80 metropolitan areas that we studied, duplication of services by more than one department to the same set of citizens rarely occurred (e. ostrom, Parks, and Whitaker 1978). further, the widely held belief that a multiplicity of departments in a metropolitan area was less efficient was not found. in fact, the “most efficient producers supply more output for given inputs in high multiplicity metropolitan areas than do the efficient producers in metropolitan areas with fewer producers” (e. ostrom and Parks 1999: 287). Metropolitan areas with large numbers of autonomous direct service producers achieved higher

‘Polycentric’ connotes many centers of decision making that are formally independent of each other. Whether they actually function independently, or instead constitute an interdependent system of relations, is an empirical question in particular cases. to the extent that they take each other into account in competitive relationships, enter into various contractual and cooperative undertakings or have recourse to central mechanisms to resolve conflicts, the various political jurisdictions in a metropolitan area may function in a coherent manner with consistent and predictable patterns of interacting behavior. to the extent that this is so, they may be said to function as a ‘system’. (v. ostrom, tiebout, and Warren 1961: 831–32)drawing on the concept of a public service industry (Bain 1959; caves 1964; v. ostrom and e. ostrom 1965), several studies of water industry performance were carried out in diverse regions of california during the 1960s (v. ostrom 1962; Weschler 1968; Warren 1966; e. ostrom 1965). substantial evidence was found that multiple public and private agencies had searched out productive ways of organizing water resources at multiple scales contrary to the view that the presence of multiple governmental units without a clear hierarchy was chaotic. further, evidence pointed out three mechanisms that increase productivity in polycentric metropolitan areas: (1) small- to medium-sized cities are more effective than large cities in monitor-ing performance of their citizens and relevant costs, (2) citizens who are dissatisfied with service provision can “vote with their feet” and move to jurisdictions that come closer to their preferred mix and costs of public services, and (3) local incorporated communities can contract with larger producers and change contracts if not satisfied with the services provided, while neighborhoods inside a large city have no voice.

the market was seen as the optimal institution for the production and exchange of private goods. for nonprivate goods, on the other hand, one needed “the” government to impose rules and taxes to force self-interested individuals to contribute necessary resources and refrain from self-seeking activities. Without a hierarchical government to induce compliance, self-seeking citizens and officials would fail to generate efficient levels of public goods, such as peace and security, at multiple scales (hobbes [1651] 1960; W. Wilson 1885). a single governmental unit, for example, was strongly recommended to reduce the “chaotic” structure of metropolitan governance, increase efficiency, limit conflict among governmental units, and best serve a homogeneous view of the public (anderson and Weidner 1950; Gulick 1957; friesema 1966). this dichotomous view of the world explained patterns of interaction and outcomes related to markets for the production and exchangeof strictly private goods (alchian 1950), but it has not adequately accounted for internal dynamics within private firms (Williamson 1975, 1986). nor does it adequately deal with the wide diversity of institutional arrangements that

Gregor Aisch, Adam Pearce, and Karen Yourish, “The Divide Between Red and Blue America Grew Even Deeper in 2016,” The New York Times, November 10, 2016; See also Gregor Aisch, Adam Pearce, and Karen Yourish, “How Large Is the Divide Between Red and Blue America?,” The New York Times, November 4, 2016; See also David Wasserman, “Purple America Has All But Disappeared,” FiveThirtyEight, March 8, 2017.

What Divides The Parties Now?The parties are divided on both social/identity and economic issues, but more so on identity issues. The gaps between the Clinton and Trump voters on questions of racial resentment, immigration, attitudes toward Muslims, and moral issues are consistently wide. There is very little overlap between the two camps on these issues.By contrast, although the parties are divided on economic issues, there is more overlap. Particularly in the Republican Party, there are a wide range of views on economic issues, now that the party has expanded to include more and more populists who were formerly Democrats.

Though many on the far left argue that Clinton would have won had she been more progressive and excited more Sanders voters, the data here suggest that Clinton may have lost some Democratic voters because her campaign was too left leaning, particularly on the identity and social issues, but perhaps also some issues of government intervention as well.

In Global Catastrophic Risks 2016, we referred to a number used in the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change: a 0.1% annual chance of human extinction. Stern uses this as a modelling assumption for discussing discount rates. There is a small amount of discussion of this figure in the Stern Review. It is clear that Stern did not intend the figure as an estimate. We’ve had a critique of our use of the figure forwarded to us, and we think its analysis is useful. We had no intention of using this figure in a misleading way, and we agree that we made a mistake in how we presented this figure. We should have been clearer about what the status of the number in the Stern Review was and about how we intended to use the comparison. Throughout the rest of the report, we are very explicit that we do not believe it is possible to make robust probability estimates of extinction or catastrophic risk and do not attempt to (except for asteroid and super-volcano risk). This mistake does not affect the validity of the main points of the report – that global catastrophic risks are worth addressing and that there are things we can do to address them. In our report, we originally wrote that: “It is easy to be misled by the apparently low probabilities of catastrophic events. The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year, similar to some rough estimates of accidental nuclear warfare. At first glance, this may seem like an acceptable level of risk. Moreover, small annual probabilities compound significantly over the long term. The annual chance of dying in a car accident in the United States is 1 in 9,395. However, this translates into an uncomfortably high lifetime risk of 1 in 120. Using the annual 0.1% figure from the Stern Review would imply a 9.5% chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.” We were aware that the Stern Review used this figure merely as a modelling assumption, and were trying to give a concise accurate statement. Our intention in using the figure from the Stern Review was not to try to pin down an accurate estimate of the likelihood of global catastrophe, but to demonstrate that existing serious analysis treats the 0.1% probability as a plausible modeling assumption, which would have consequences that are interesting and non-intuitive. We also had a full-page summary pull-quote, which said: “The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year. If this estimate is correct, a typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash.” This implies more confidence in the 0.1% figure than either we felt or expect the Stern Review to have felt, and more than our argument required. The car crash comparison was picked up in The Atlantic, which reported it as an unconditional claim and emphasised it in their article. We did not intend to argue that the 0.1% figure was an accurate estimate of extinction risk (as we did not plan to offer an estimate of extinction risk), so this was inadvertently misleading to Atlantic readers. We believe that in general The Atlantic stood out by doing an excellent job of engaging constructively with our work. We are also sorry in particular that we allowed the word ‘estimate’ to enter the soundbite on the full page. This error occurred at a late stage in the editing; the word was introduced to avoid an ambiguity, but not subjected to proper review. We have carefully reviewed our language concerning the Stern Review, and written to our partners at the Global Challenges Foundation who published the report to change this to: “The probabilities of these catastrophic events are low but not negligible. Moreover, small annual probabilities compound significantly over the long term. We do not know of a robust estimate of the annual probability of global catastrophic risk. Nor do we believe that we are able to create a robust estimate because the uncertainties in key parameters are so large. However, for extinction risks some experts have suggested that a 0.1% annual chance of extinction is within the range of plausible orders of magnitude. A 2008 Oxford survey of expert judgement on the topic implied an average annual extinction risk over the next century of around 0.2%. [1] The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change used 0.1% as an upper bound modeling assumption for annual extinction risk. Now let’s suppose that the chance of extinction were 0.1% per year and consider the consequences. It may seem at first glance that this would be an acceptable level of risk. However, that would mean an individual would be more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event than a car crash. Moreover, these small annual probabilities add up, so that the chance of extinction within the next century under this scenario is 9.5%.  A global catastrophe, which involves the death of 10% of the global population, is more likely than an event that involves human extinction. As a result, even if 0.1% were on the high side for extinction risk, it might be of the appropriate order of magnitude for global catastrophic risk.” We are also correcting a citation and adding a citation to [1] Sandberg, A. & Bostrom, N. (2008): “Global Catastrophic Risks Survey”, Technical. Report #2008-1, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University: pp. 1-5. We are also making the corresponding changes in the one-page soundbite and will also write to The Atlantic to inform them of the inadvertent inaccuracy in the article, and offer to help in correcting the nuance of the article.

(J) removing greenhouse gases from the 19atmosphere and reducing pollution by restoring 20natural ecosystems through proven low-tech so-21lutions that increase soil carbon storage, such 22as land preservation and afforestation;

(C) meeting 100 percent of the power de-18mand in the United States through clean, re-19newable, and zero-emission energy sources, in-20cluding—

2) the goals described in subparagraphs (A) 18through (E) of paragraph (1) (referred to in this 19resolution as the ‘‘Green New Deal goals’’) should 20be accomplished through a 10-year national mobili-21zation (referred to in this resolution as the ‘‘Green 22New Deal mobilization’’) that will require the fol-23lowing goals and projects—

So far this year, regulatory credits account for $1.18 billion, or 7% of total automotive revenue.

Revenue rose to a record $8.77 billion from $6.30 billion a year earlier. Analysts had expected revenue of $8.36 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.Excluding items, Tesla posted a profit of 76 cents per share. It reported net income of $331 million, or $874 million excluding stock-based compensation awards given to Musk.Revenue from the sale of regulatory credits made up $397 million. Without that revenue, Tesla would not have achieved a profitable quarter.

For the past four years, I’ve followed a group of steelworkers in Indiana — men and women, Black and white — who had worked at a factory that moved to Mexico. I watched them agonize about whether to train their Mexican replacements, or stand with their union and refuse. I watched them grieve the plant like a parent. I followed them as they applied for new jobs, some of which paid half as much as they made before.A machinist named Tim carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was. Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner.“We always voted Democrat because they looked after the little man,” Tim told me. “My father went to his grave and I can guarantee you he never voted for a Republican.”Tim had such faith in Democrats that he didn’t worry when President Bill Clinton pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement over the finish line in 1993. Nor did he worry when Mr. Clinton normalized trade with China in 2000. But then the factory where Tim worked moved to Shanghai. And the next one moved to Mexico.Editors’ PicksA Korean Store Owner. A Black Employee. A Tense Neighborhood.The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation5 Things to Avoid on Prime DayAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBy the time I met Tim, he loathed the Clintons and the Democratic Party. Democrats had gotten in bed with the corporations, while no one was looking. Tim felt betrayed, and politically abandoned — until Mr. Trump came along.

It must be able to interface with the current economic system; must be able to move resources from the current system into the transitional system.Must lead to a new attractive basin that moves a critical mass of resources to the new system, that past a tipping point becomes auto-poetic. (This probably requires out-competing the current system, in a way that can scale to everyone, while obsoleting the destructive forms of competition within the new system – the last act of win/lose gaming dynamics as they transcend themselves.)

It must disincentive all activity that could lead towards catastrophic threats, intentionally or unintentionally; must not incent local or near term positives that increase probability of global or long term negatives. This is particularly critical to get right regarding the incentives on the development of exponential technologies.

They are currently all fundamentally inadequate to the scope, urgency, and nature of the issues and dynamics civilization now faces and must undergo a discrete phase shift to axiomatically restructured, higher order systems.

Economics is a facet of social architecture, inseparable from infrastructure, culture, governance, law, defense, information systems, education and human development, etc. These systems co-evolve and co-influence each other.

The complexity science and technological capacity for closed loop regenerative technology ecosystems

The sensor and data science capacity to maintain a real-time balance sheet of the global commons

Computer science innovations (distributed ledgers, public key cryptography, div/merge, matching algorithms, etc) offering solutions to critical issues in game theory (byzantine generals, etc), intellectual property (partial attribution, etc), and information fidelity and access (high signal to noise ratio distributed sense-making), etc.

For all systems of structural incentive, the incentive of any actor (individual or group), must be rigorously aligned with the well-being of all other agents in the system and of the commons writ large. Ie, all externalities must be internalized – all the consequences of activity within the system must be included in the system’s accounting.

Kennedy’s performance was shockingly sub-par and created a clear impression that he had no particular reason, other than personal ambition, for seeking the highest office in the land. “He was running because he wanted to be president,” Carter’s chief of staff later noted. “That was not such an unusual motive, but most aspirants figure out some way to disguise it better.”

Historians and political scientists see the matter differently today. Kennedy’s own vote counters later conceded that he lost 59 out of 70 white precincts in Gary. While Kennedy’s internal polls showed him faring better than might be expected among former supporters of George Wallace’s bid for the Democratic nomination four years earlier, he nevertheless struggled to retain working-class, white ethnic voters and relied instead on robust turnout in minority neighborhoods for his electoral cushion.

Fifth, and most challenging, we can work to reverse the divergence between the centre and the periphery. The previous four elements would help with this. But greater policy efforts are needed to give regions, where possible, a critical mass of knowledge jobs so they can connect with the leading economic activity in national centres.

These changes are not, on the whole, the fault of globalisation, that scapegoat of the populist insurgency, but of technology-driven changes combined with policies that have reinforced the underlying forces of divergence.

Agreement

Life Itself currently has two hubs: Berlin and Bergerac.

weller, wiser

Finally, we believe in Getting Things Done (opens new window). #

it is important to understand some of the key tools and processes that we use

s

“stuff”