[ed. Great... another stupid, contrived controversy just in time for Christmas. It's a new tradition.]
Friday, December 14, 2018
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Scientists Crack the CRISPR Code for Precise Human Genome Editing
Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute have discovered a set of simple rules that determine the precision of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in human cells. These rules, published in Molecular Cell, could help to improve the efficiency and safety of genome editing in both the lab and the clinic.
Despite the wide use of the CRISPR system, rational application of the technology has been hindered by the assumption that the outcome of genome editing is unpredictable, resulting in random deletions or insertions of DNA regions at the target site.
Before CRISPR can be safely applied in the clinic, scientists need to make sure that they can reliably predict precisely how DNA will be modified.
"Until now, editing genes with CRISPR has involved a lot of guesswork, frustration and trial and error," says Crick group leader Paola Scaffidi, who led the study. "The effects of CRISPR were thought to be unpredictable and seemingly random, but by analysing hundreds of edits we were shocked to find that there are actually simple, predictable patterns behind it all. This will fundamentally change the way we use CRISPR, allowing us to study gene function with greater precision and significantly accelerating our science."
By examining the effects of CRISPR genome editing at 1491 target sites across 450 genes in human cells, the team have discovered that the outcomes can be predicted based on simple rules. These rules mainly depend on one genetic 'letter' occupying a particular position in the region recognized by the 'guide RNA' to direct the molecular scissors, Cas9 . (...)
In this study, the researchers found that the outcome of a particular gene edit depends on the fourth letter from the end of the RNA guide, adjacent to the cutting site. The team discovered that if this letter is an A or a T, there will be a very precise genetic insertion; a C will lead to a relatively precise deletion and a G will lead to many imprecise deletions. Thus, simply avoiding sites containing a G makes genome editing much more predictable. (...)
The team also discovered that how 'open' or 'closed' the target DNA is also affects the outcome of gene editing. Adding compounds that force DNA to open up—allowing Cas9 to scan the genome—led to more efficient editing, which could help when modifications need to be introduced in particularly closed genes.
"The good news is that regardless of the tissue of origin—which influences the degree of DNA 'openness' at specific genes—target regions containing an A or T at the key position show common editing," says Paola. "This means that, if we carefully select the target DNA, we can be pretty confident that we'll see the same effect in different tissues."
Despite the wide use of the CRISPR system, rational application of the technology has been hindered by the assumption that the outcome of genome editing is unpredictable, resulting in random deletions or insertions of DNA regions at the target site.
Before CRISPR can be safely applied in the clinic, scientists need to make sure that they can reliably predict precisely how DNA will be modified.
"Until now, editing genes with CRISPR has involved a lot of guesswork, frustration and trial and error," says Crick group leader Paola Scaffidi, who led the study. "The effects of CRISPR were thought to be unpredictable and seemingly random, but by analysing hundreds of edits we were shocked to find that there are actually simple, predictable patterns behind it all. This will fundamentally change the way we use CRISPR, allowing us to study gene function with greater precision and significantly accelerating our science."By examining the effects of CRISPR genome editing at 1491 target sites across 450 genes in human cells, the team have discovered that the outcomes can be predicted based on simple rules. These rules mainly depend on one genetic 'letter' occupying a particular position in the region recognized by the 'guide RNA' to direct the molecular scissors, Cas9 . (...)
In this study, the researchers found that the outcome of a particular gene edit depends on the fourth letter from the end of the RNA guide, adjacent to the cutting site. The team discovered that if this letter is an A or a T, there will be a very precise genetic insertion; a C will lead to a relatively precise deletion and a G will lead to many imprecise deletions. Thus, simply avoiding sites containing a G makes genome editing much more predictable. (...)
The team also discovered that how 'open' or 'closed' the target DNA is also affects the outcome of gene editing. Adding compounds that force DNA to open up—allowing Cas9 to scan the genome—led to more efficient editing, which could help when modifications need to be introduced in particularly closed genes.
"The good news is that regardless of the tissue of origin—which influences the degree of DNA 'openness' at specific genes—target regions containing an A or T at the key position show common editing," says Paola. "This means that, if we carefully select the target DNA, we can be pretty confident that we'll see the same effect in different tissues."
by The Francis Crick Institute, PhysOrg | Read more:
Image: Nigel Hawtin for the Francis Crick Institute
Toxic Philanthropy: The Spirit of Giving While Taking
A new breed of wealthy do-gooders armed with apps and PowerPoints claim they want to change the world. But with their market-oriented values and often-shortsighted prescriptions, are really they going to change it for the better?
Or change it at all?
Anand Giridharadas, who has traveled first-class in the rarefied realm of 21st-century “philanthrocapitalists,” harbors serious doubts. In his acclaimed book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the business reporter and former McKinsey consultant exposes the willful blindness of bright-eyed social entrepreneurs and TED-talking executives who, having drunk their own late-stage capitalist Kool-Aid, are now ready to serve us all. Compliments of the house.
Doing Good, Masking Bad
British novelist Anthony Trollope once observed, “I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.”
Legendary short seller Jim Chanos, who teaches business students to spot fraud, understands why: when he scrutinizes a company for signs of shady activity, one of the things he looks for is an uptick in philanthropy— a strategy business ethics professor Marianne Jennings has named as one of the “seven signs of ethical collapse” in organizations. Chanos refers to the ruse as “doing good to mask doing bad.”
Such cynical public relations gambits are familiar enough to New Yorkers using Citi Bike, the public-private bike share system funded by Citigroup, whose misdeeds helped spark the global financial crisis of 2007-8. Or visitors to the Sackler Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, named for the family whose members own Purdue, the pharmaceutical company that fueled America’s opioid crisis through deceptive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin.
But another sort of deep-pocketed philanthropist is harder to pin down. The harm she causes seems less direct; her motives more lofty. This type is fond of touting “win-win” solutions to social problems and tossing out terms like “impactful” and “scalable” and “paradigm-shifting” —the kind of lingo fed to business school students in lieu of critical thinking. Members of this group nevertheless refer to themselves as “thought leaders.”
These would-be benefactors of humanity tend to like former president Bill Clinton, whose Clinton Global Initiative became the ultimate road show for eager converts to what Giridharadas calls the faith of “win-winnerism,” i.e. “I’m doing great in this racket, and so can you.” Inhabiting Silicon Valley start-ups, venture capital firms, think tanks, and consulting companies in large metropolitan areas, philanthrocapitalists speak reverently of global poverty, but rarely touch down in places like Appalachia or rural Mississippi.
They are people like John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, whose book “Conscious Capitalism” is the bible for those aspiring to the win-win faith. In his formulation, CEOs are not simply the heads of companies, but transcendent beings that find “great joy and beauty in their work, and in the opportunity to serve, lead, and help shape a better future.” Mackey’s philosophy is one in which the beneficiaries of commerce should dedicate themselves to social improvement because they are obviously the best equipped to do the job. The public is meant to humbly follow.
This last bit, as Giridharadas shrewdly points out, may be far more radical than the old trickle-down philosophy of yesterday’s winners, who lobbied the government to get out of their way so that the bounteous by-products of their cutthroat activities could descend unimpeded to the poor. The new winners want something even more audacious: to replace the role of government as guardian of the common good.
Giridharadas presents searching conversations with well-educated, often well-meaning people floating above and apart from the lives of ordinary Americans, wishing to ease their consciences but failing both to clearly see the problems of society and to notice, for more than a nagging moment, the ways in which their own lives are financed by the fruits of injustice. They end up embracing a warm-and-fuzzy vision of changing the world that leaves brutal underlying structures securely in place.
The author has said what few who have traveled in this world have said plainly, lest their passport be revoked: the efforts of philanthrocapitalists are largely disruptive, rather than beneficial, to public life.
You can see it in the kind of ideas they embrace. Lecture slots at Davos don’t get doled out for discussing the need to expand popular, time-tested programs like Social Security and Medicare that are proven to reduce poverty and economic inequality. Such sensible fare is not nearly “innovative” or exotic enough—and besides, it might require the wealthy to pay additional taxes. Better are schemes like universal basic income that tend to favor elite interests (such as continuing to pay workers inadequate wages) or creating technological solutions like the one offered in the book by a young win-winnerist: an app that charges workers to manage the unpredictable cash flow caused by erratic work schedules.
And what of campaigning to outlaw the exploitative business practice that causes the problem in the first place? Notsomuch.
Talking about victims plays well on the philanthrocapitalist circuit, but pointing out perpetrators is largely forbidden. You can wow the crowd by peddling for-profit schemes to help the poor, but you won’t get the same applause by calling to jail criminal executives. Yet, as Giridharadas makes clear, even the fanciest app will not erase the feeling among ordinary people that the system has been captured by a small group of the rich and powerful—a feeling that drives them away in disgust from establishment politics and makes them very angry indeed.
by Lynn Parramore, INET | Read more:
Or change it at all?
Anand Giridharadas, who has traveled first-class in the rarefied realm of 21st-century “philanthrocapitalists,” harbors serious doubts. In his acclaimed book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the business reporter and former McKinsey consultant exposes the willful blindness of bright-eyed social entrepreneurs and TED-talking executives who, having drunk their own late-stage capitalist Kool-Aid, are now ready to serve us all. Compliments of the house.
Doing Good, Masking Bad
British novelist Anthony Trollope once observed, “I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.”
Legendary short seller Jim Chanos, who teaches business students to spot fraud, understands why: when he scrutinizes a company for signs of shady activity, one of the things he looks for is an uptick in philanthropy— a strategy business ethics professor Marianne Jennings has named as one of the “seven signs of ethical collapse” in organizations. Chanos refers to the ruse as “doing good to mask doing bad.”Such cynical public relations gambits are familiar enough to New Yorkers using Citi Bike, the public-private bike share system funded by Citigroup, whose misdeeds helped spark the global financial crisis of 2007-8. Or visitors to the Sackler Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, named for the family whose members own Purdue, the pharmaceutical company that fueled America’s opioid crisis through deceptive marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin.
But another sort of deep-pocketed philanthropist is harder to pin down. The harm she causes seems less direct; her motives more lofty. This type is fond of touting “win-win” solutions to social problems and tossing out terms like “impactful” and “scalable” and “paradigm-shifting” —the kind of lingo fed to business school students in lieu of critical thinking. Members of this group nevertheless refer to themselves as “thought leaders.”
These would-be benefactors of humanity tend to like former president Bill Clinton, whose Clinton Global Initiative became the ultimate road show for eager converts to what Giridharadas calls the faith of “win-winnerism,” i.e. “I’m doing great in this racket, and so can you.” Inhabiting Silicon Valley start-ups, venture capital firms, think tanks, and consulting companies in large metropolitan areas, philanthrocapitalists speak reverently of global poverty, but rarely touch down in places like Appalachia or rural Mississippi.
They are people like John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, whose book “Conscious Capitalism” is the bible for those aspiring to the win-win faith. In his formulation, CEOs are not simply the heads of companies, but transcendent beings that find “great joy and beauty in their work, and in the opportunity to serve, lead, and help shape a better future.” Mackey’s philosophy is one in which the beneficiaries of commerce should dedicate themselves to social improvement because they are obviously the best equipped to do the job. The public is meant to humbly follow.
This last bit, as Giridharadas shrewdly points out, may be far more radical than the old trickle-down philosophy of yesterday’s winners, who lobbied the government to get out of their way so that the bounteous by-products of their cutthroat activities could descend unimpeded to the poor. The new winners want something even more audacious: to replace the role of government as guardian of the common good.
Giridharadas presents searching conversations with well-educated, often well-meaning people floating above and apart from the lives of ordinary Americans, wishing to ease their consciences but failing both to clearly see the problems of society and to notice, for more than a nagging moment, the ways in which their own lives are financed by the fruits of injustice. They end up embracing a warm-and-fuzzy vision of changing the world that leaves brutal underlying structures securely in place.
The author has said what few who have traveled in this world have said plainly, lest their passport be revoked: the efforts of philanthrocapitalists are largely disruptive, rather than beneficial, to public life.
You can see it in the kind of ideas they embrace. Lecture slots at Davos don’t get doled out for discussing the need to expand popular, time-tested programs like Social Security and Medicare that are proven to reduce poverty and economic inequality. Such sensible fare is not nearly “innovative” or exotic enough—and besides, it might require the wealthy to pay additional taxes. Better are schemes like universal basic income that tend to favor elite interests (such as continuing to pay workers inadequate wages) or creating technological solutions like the one offered in the book by a young win-winnerist: an app that charges workers to manage the unpredictable cash flow caused by erratic work schedules.
And what of campaigning to outlaw the exploitative business practice that causes the problem in the first place? Notsomuch.
Talking about victims plays well on the philanthrocapitalist circuit, but pointing out perpetrators is largely forbidden. You can wow the crowd by peddling for-profit schemes to help the poor, but you won’t get the same applause by calling to jail criminal executives. Yet, as Giridharadas makes clear, even the fanciest app will not erase the feeling among ordinary people that the system has been captured by a small group of the rich and powerful—a feeling that drives them away in disgust from establishment politics and makes them very angry indeed.
Image: uncredited
[ed. This has been going on forever, just a different version of those "charity" functions the rich put on each year to network, dress up, and see and be seen by other squillionaires (not to mention corporate enterprises like the PGA, NFL et al. that tout their millions of dollars in charitable contributions while raking in billions).]
The Opportunity Zone
At an Oval Office gathering earlier this year, President Donald Trump began touting his administration’s new real estate investment program, which offers massive tax breaks to developers who invest in downtrodden American communities. He then turned to one of the plan’s strongest supporters.
“Ivanka, would you like to say something?” Trump asked his daughter. “You’ve been pushing this very hard.”
The Opportunity Zone program promoted by Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner — both senior White House advisers — could also benefit them financially, an Associated Press investigation found.
Government watchdogs say the case underscores the ethical minefield they created two years ago when they became two of the closest advisers to the president without divesting from their extensive real estate investments.
Trump and Kushner jointly own a big stake in a real estate investment firm, Cadre, that recently announced it is launching a series of Opportunity Zone funds that seek to build major projects under the program from Miami to Los Angeles. Separately, the couple owns interests in at least 13 properties held by Kushner’s family firm that could qualify for the tax breaks because they are in Opportunity Zones in New Jersey, New York and Maryland — all of which, a study found, were already coming back.
Six of the Kushner Cos. buildings are in New York City’s Brooklyn Heights area, with views of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline, where a five-bedroom apartment recently listed for $8 million. Two more are in the beach town of Long Branch, N.J., where some oceanfront condos within steps of a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant and a Lululemon yoga shop list for as much as $2.7 million.
There’s no evidence the couple had a hand in selecting any of the nation’s 8,700 Opportunity Zones, and the company has not indicated it plans to seek tax breaks under the new program. But the Kushners could profit even if they don’t do anything — by potentially benefiting from a recent surge in Opportunity Zone property values amid a gold rush of interest from developers and investors. (...)
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told the AP that individual state governors of both parties nominate communities for Opportunity Zone designation “based on what underserved areas would benefit most. … The White House has nothing to do with those decisions.”
The Investing in Opportunity Act, which became law last December as part of the Republican-sponsored tax overhaul, never gained traction when it was first proposed during the Obama administration, but it quickly found favor in a White House headed and dominated by real estate developers and investors. (...)
by Stephen Braun, Jeff Horowitz and Bernard Condon, AP via TPM| Read more:
“Ivanka, would you like to say something?” Trump asked his daughter. “You’ve been pushing this very hard.”
The Opportunity Zone program promoted by Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner — both senior White House advisers — could also benefit them financially, an Associated Press investigation found.
Government watchdogs say the case underscores the ethical minefield they created two years ago when they became two of the closest advisers to the president without divesting from their extensive real estate investments.
Trump and Kushner jointly own a big stake in a real estate investment firm, Cadre, that recently announced it is launching a series of Opportunity Zone funds that seek to build major projects under the program from Miami to Los Angeles. Separately, the couple owns interests in at least 13 properties held by Kushner’s family firm that could qualify for the tax breaks because they are in Opportunity Zones in New Jersey, New York and Maryland — all of which, a study found, were already coming back.Six of the Kushner Cos. buildings are in New York City’s Brooklyn Heights area, with views of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline, where a five-bedroom apartment recently listed for $8 million. Two more are in the beach town of Long Branch, N.J., where some oceanfront condos within steps of a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant and a Lululemon yoga shop list for as much as $2.7 million.
There’s no evidence the couple had a hand in selecting any of the nation’s 8,700 Opportunity Zones, and the company has not indicated it plans to seek tax breaks under the new program. But the Kushners could profit even if they don’t do anything — by potentially benefiting from a recent surge in Opportunity Zone property values amid a gold rush of interest from developers and investors. (...)
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told the AP that individual state governors of both parties nominate communities for Opportunity Zone designation “based on what underserved areas would benefit most. … The White House has nothing to do with those decisions.”
The Investing in Opportunity Act, which became law last December as part of the Republican-sponsored tax overhaul, never gained traction when it was first proposed during the Obama administration, but it quickly found favor in a White House headed and dominated by real estate developers and investors. (...)
Along with the Kushner-tied Cadre Opportunity Zone funds, more than 50 real estate and private equity interests have made plans in recent weeks to create investment funds under the program, including several with ties to the couple and the Trump administration.
Last month, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci launched an opportunity zone fund tied to his Skybridge Capital investment firm, aiming to build projects worth more than $3 billion. Opportunity Zone funds have also been set up recently by New York-based Normandy Real Estate Partners and Heritage Equity Partners, two firms that have worked with Kushner Cos. on real estate ventures.
They are flocking to what financial analysts say are some of the most generous tax benefits they have ever seen. Investors who plow capital gains from previous investments into Opportunity Zone projects can defer taxes on those gains up to 2026.
If they decide not to cash out their investment for seven years, they get to exclude up to 15 percent of those gains from taxes. And they can permanently avoid paying taxes on any new gains from investment in the zones if they hold onto the investment for a decade. With capital gains taxes as high as 23.8 percent, the savings can easily add up.
Government officials have estimated the program would cost $1.5 billion in lost tax revenue over 10 years, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has estimated the zones would attract up to $100 billion in renewal efforts.
While the Opportunity Zone program mostly targets census tracts of high poverty and unemployment, it also allows “contiguous” tracts that might not be low-income, but are close enough to deprived communities to be eligible.
Critics say that could allow developers to cash in by targeting zones already teeming with investment and gentrified neighborhoods. Amazon’s recent decision to locate a new headquarters in the bustling New York City neighborhood of Long Island City, for example, drew rebukes following reports it was in an Opportunity Zone.
A study by the Urban Institute in Washington found that nearly a third of the more than 8,700 Opportunity Zones nationwide — and all 13 of the ones containing Kushner properties — were showing signs of heavy investment and gentrification, based on such factors as rent increases and the percentage of college-educated residents.
Last month, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci launched an opportunity zone fund tied to his Skybridge Capital investment firm, aiming to build projects worth more than $3 billion. Opportunity Zone funds have also been set up recently by New York-based Normandy Real Estate Partners and Heritage Equity Partners, two firms that have worked with Kushner Cos. on real estate ventures.
They are flocking to what financial analysts say are some of the most generous tax benefits they have ever seen. Investors who plow capital gains from previous investments into Opportunity Zone projects can defer taxes on those gains up to 2026.
If they decide not to cash out their investment for seven years, they get to exclude up to 15 percent of those gains from taxes. And they can permanently avoid paying taxes on any new gains from investment in the zones if they hold onto the investment for a decade. With capital gains taxes as high as 23.8 percent, the savings can easily add up.
Government officials have estimated the program would cost $1.5 billion in lost tax revenue over 10 years, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has estimated the zones would attract up to $100 billion in renewal efforts.
While the Opportunity Zone program mostly targets census tracts of high poverty and unemployment, it also allows “contiguous” tracts that might not be low-income, but are close enough to deprived communities to be eligible.
Critics say that could allow developers to cash in by targeting zones already teeming with investment and gentrified neighborhoods. Amazon’s recent decision to locate a new headquarters in the bustling New York City neighborhood of Long Island City, for example, drew rebukes following reports it was in an Opportunity Zone.
A study by the Urban Institute in Washington found that nearly a third of the more than 8,700 Opportunity Zones nationwide — and all 13 of the ones containing Kushner properties — were showing signs of heavy investment and gentrification, based on such factors as rent increases and the percentage of college-educated residents.
by Stephen Braun, Jeff Horowitz and Bernard Condon, AP via TPM| Read more:
Image: TPM
[ed. No wonder it's called the "Opportunity Zone". See also: Let the Looting Begin (TPM)]
The Real Roots of American Rage
Soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts, received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the survey instructed. “Describe the most angry of these experiences.” One woman knew her answer: Recently, her husband had bought a new car. Then he had driven it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase. When the wife found out, she was livid. Furious. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t control. (...)
Other replies soon began flooding his mailbox, so many that Averill had trouble reading them all. “It was the best-performing survey I’ve ever conducted,” he told me. “Some people even attached thank-you notes. They were so pleased to talk about being angry.”(...)
Other respondents described more mundane arguments, over who ought to take out the trash, or curfews for teenagers, or snappish tones at the dinner table. People were eager to talk about their daily indignations, in part because they felt angry so frequently. “Most people report becoming mildly to moderately angry anywhere from several times a day to several times a week,” Averill later wrote, summing up his research in American Psychologist.
Most surprising of all, these angry episodes typically took the form of short and restrained conversations. They rarely became blowout fights. And contrary to Averill’s hypothesis, they didn’t make bad situations worse. Instead, they tended to make bad situations much, much better. They resolved, rather than exacerbated, tensions. When an angry teenager shouted about his curfew, his parents agreed to modifications—as long as the teen promised to improve his grades. Even the enraged wife’s confrontation with her unfaithful husband led to a productive conversation: He could keep the mistress, as long as she was out of sight and as long as the wife always took priority.
In the vast majority of cases, expressing anger resulted in all parties becoming more willing to listen, more inclined to speak honestly, more accommodating of each other’s complaints. People reported that they tended to be much happier after yelling at an offending party. They felt relieved, more optimistic about the future, more energized. “The ratio of beneficial to harmful consequences was about 3 to 1 for angry persons,” Averill wrote. Even the targets of those outbursts agreed that the shouting and recriminations had helped. They served as signals for the wrongdoers to listen more carefully and change their ways. More than two-thirds of the recipients of anger “said they came to realize their own faults,” Averill wrote. Their “relationship with the angry person was reportedly strengthened more often than it was weakened, and the targets more often gained rather than lost respect for the angry person.”
Anger, Averill concluded, is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion. And it does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront problems we might otherwise avoid.
Subsequent studies have found other benefits as well. We’re more likely to perceive people who express anger as competent, powerful, and the kinds of leaders who will overcome challenges. Anger motivates us to undertake difficult tasks. We’re often more creative when we’re angry, because our outrage helps us see solutions we’ve overlooked. “When we look at the brains of people who are expressing anger, they look very similar to people who are experiencing happiness,” says Dacher Keltner, the director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. “When we become angry, we feel like we’re taking control, like we’re getting power over something.” Watching angry people—as viewers of reality television know—is highly entertaining, so expressing anger is a surefire method for capturing the attention of an otherwise indifferent crowd.
In the years after his survey, Averill watched as anger studies became the focus of academic specialties and prestigious journals. In 1992 alone, social scientists published almost 25,000 studies of anger.
Then, in early 2016, Averill was watching newscasts about the presidential primaries. The election season had barely started, and the Republican field was still crowded. Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, giving the Republican rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, took a subtle jab at one of her party’s candidates—a clownish figure the establishment hoped to marginalize.
“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation,” Haley told voters. “Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That’s just not true.”
Soon afterward, reporters swarmed Donald Trump to ask how he felt about such a public renunciation. “Well, I think she’s right, I am angry,” Trump told CNN. “I’m angry, and a lot of other people are angry, too, at how incompetently our country is being run.” Trump continued: “As far as I am concerned, anger is okay. Anger and energy is what this country needs.”
As Averill watched, he felt a shock of recognition. Everyone believed Trump would be out of the race soon. But Averill wasn’t so sure. “He understands anger,” he thought to himself, “and it’s going to make voters feel wonderful.”
Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted. It has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives. It is directed less often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize. These far-off targets may or may not have earned our ire; either way, they’re apt to be less invested in resolving our differences. The tight feedback loop that James Averill observed in Greenfield has been broken. Without the release of catharsis, our anger has built within us, exerting an unwanted pressure that can have a dark consequence: the desire not merely to be heard, but to hurt those we believe have wronged us.
We have learned a great deal about anger since Averill began studying it, and for all its capacity to improve our lives, it can also do great harm. The scholarship of Averill and his successors shows how ordinary anger can be sharpened, manipulated, and misdirected—and how difficult it is for us to resist this process. Under certain conditions, the emotion can transform from a force that helps keep society knitted together into something that tears it apart.
by Charles Duhigg, The Atlantic | Read more:
Other replies soon began flooding his mailbox, so many that Averill had trouble reading them all. “It was the best-performing survey I’ve ever conducted,” he told me. “Some people even attached thank-you notes. They were so pleased to talk about being angry.”(...)
Other respondents described more mundane arguments, over who ought to take out the trash, or curfews for teenagers, or snappish tones at the dinner table. People were eager to talk about their daily indignations, in part because they felt angry so frequently. “Most people report becoming mildly to moderately angry anywhere from several times a day to several times a week,” Averill later wrote, summing up his research in American Psychologist.Most surprising of all, these angry episodes typically took the form of short and restrained conversations. They rarely became blowout fights. And contrary to Averill’s hypothesis, they didn’t make bad situations worse. Instead, they tended to make bad situations much, much better. They resolved, rather than exacerbated, tensions. When an angry teenager shouted about his curfew, his parents agreed to modifications—as long as the teen promised to improve his grades. Even the enraged wife’s confrontation with her unfaithful husband led to a productive conversation: He could keep the mistress, as long as she was out of sight and as long as the wife always took priority.
In the vast majority of cases, expressing anger resulted in all parties becoming more willing to listen, more inclined to speak honestly, more accommodating of each other’s complaints. People reported that they tended to be much happier after yelling at an offending party. They felt relieved, more optimistic about the future, more energized. “The ratio of beneficial to harmful consequences was about 3 to 1 for angry persons,” Averill wrote. Even the targets of those outbursts agreed that the shouting and recriminations had helped. They served as signals for the wrongdoers to listen more carefully and change their ways. More than two-thirds of the recipients of anger “said they came to realize their own faults,” Averill wrote. Their “relationship with the angry person was reportedly strengthened more often than it was weakened, and the targets more often gained rather than lost respect for the angry person.”
Anger, Averill concluded, is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion. And it does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront problems we might otherwise avoid.
Subsequent studies have found other benefits as well. We’re more likely to perceive people who express anger as competent, powerful, and the kinds of leaders who will overcome challenges. Anger motivates us to undertake difficult tasks. We’re often more creative when we’re angry, because our outrage helps us see solutions we’ve overlooked. “When we look at the brains of people who are expressing anger, they look very similar to people who are experiencing happiness,” says Dacher Keltner, the director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. “When we become angry, we feel like we’re taking control, like we’re getting power over something.” Watching angry people—as viewers of reality television know—is highly entertaining, so expressing anger is a surefire method for capturing the attention of an otherwise indifferent crowd.
In the years after his survey, Averill watched as anger studies became the focus of academic specialties and prestigious journals. In 1992 alone, social scientists published almost 25,000 studies of anger.
Then, in early 2016, Averill was watching newscasts about the presidential primaries. The election season had barely started, and the Republican field was still crowded. Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, giving the Republican rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, took a subtle jab at one of her party’s candidates—a clownish figure the establishment hoped to marginalize.
“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation,” Haley told voters. “Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That’s just not true.”
Soon afterward, reporters swarmed Donald Trump to ask how he felt about such a public renunciation. “Well, I think she’s right, I am angry,” Trump told CNN. “I’m angry, and a lot of other people are angry, too, at how incompetently our country is being run.” Trump continued: “As far as I am concerned, anger is okay. Anger and energy is what this country needs.”
As Averill watched, he felt a shock of recognition. Everyone believed Trump would be out of the race soon. But Averill wasn’t so sure. “He understands anger,” he thought to himself, “and it’s going to make voters feel wonderful.”
***
America has always been an angry nation. We are a country born of revolution. Combat—on battlefields, in newspapers, at the ballot box—has been with us from the start. American history is punctuated by episodes in which aggrieved parties have settled their differences not through conversation, but with guns. And yet our political system was cleverly designed to maximize the beneficial effects of anger. The Bill of Rights guarantees that we can argue with one another in the public square, through a free press, and in open court. The separation of powers forces our representatives in government to arrive at policy through disagreement, negotiation, and accommodation. Even the country’s mythology is rooted in anger: The American dream is, in a sense, an optimistic reframing of the discontent felt by people unwilling to accept the circumstances life has handed them.Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted. It has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives. It is directed less often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize. These far-off targets may or may not have earned our ire; either way, they’re apt to be less invested in resolving our differences. The tight feedback loop that James Averill observed in Greenfield has been broken. Without the release of catharsis, our anger has built within us, exerting an unwanted pressure that can have a dark consequence: the desire not merely to be heard, but to hurt those we believe have wronged us.
We have learned a great deal about anger since Averill began studying it, and for all its capacity to improve our lives, it can also do great harm. The scholarship of Averill and his successors shows how ordinary anger can be sharpened, manipulated, and misdirected—and how difficult it is for us to resist this process. Under certain conditions, the emotion can transform from a force that helps keep society knitted together into something that tears it apart.
by Charles Duhigg, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic
Congress May Have Fallen for Facebook’s Trap, but You Don’t Have To
In recent weeks, Facebook confronted yet another privacy scandal, in light of leaked court documents suggesting that its staff discussed the idea of selling user data as long ago as 2012. Facebook's director of developer platforms and programs, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, responded, “To be clear, Facebook has never sold anyone’s data.” It was the same denial that Mark Zuckerberg issued before the Senate in April 2018: “We do not sell data to advertisers. We don’t sell data to anyone.”
As a data scientist, I am shocked that anyone continues to believe this claim. Each time you click on a Facebook ad, Facebook sells data on you to that advertiser. This is such a basic property of online targeted advertising that it would be impossible to avoid, even if Facebook somehow wanted to.
Or even better, let Mr. Zuckerberg explain, as he did to the Senate in April: “What we allow is for advertisers to tell us who they want to reach, and then we do the placement. So, if an advertiser comes to us and says, ‘All right, I am a ski shop and I want to sell skis to women’ … we can show the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser.”
Let’s take a closer look at Mr. Zuckerberg’s ski shop example. The ski shop pays Facebook to show a targeted ad to women and sends the women to the ski shop’s website if the women click on the ad. Mr. Zuckerberg describes this process as showing “the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser.” But this isn’t true: If a ski shop pays Facebook to show an ad only to women, then Facebook automatically reveals to the ski shop that all people who clicked on the link must be women.
And in practice, the advertisers make requests that are much more nuanced. They may ask Facebook to show their ad to “liberal Latina women without college education who live in San Antonio and recently got married.” And then they might place a separate ad that is shown only to “conservative African-American women with college educations who live in Austin and are single.” When you click on an ad and are sent to an advertiser’s website, the advertiser knows which ad you saw and thus which bucket you fall in.
Facebook has a lot of data on their users and is eager to monetize it. The advertisers are encouraged to selectively target people according to a mind-boggling range of personal characteristics. Some, such as age, gender or location, are not overly intimate. Others, such as your political views, family size, education, occupation, marital status or interest in a gay dating app, are highly personal.
Facebook would even let advertisers target you based on facts that you may not be aware of, such as that you are a close friend of a soccer fan or of someone who got recently engaged. In a recent study we published, my colleagues and I discovered that advertisers can target users based on their intimate psychological traits, such as personality. If you can think of an important personal characteristic, there’s a good chance it’s targetable on Facebook. Through this ad-targeting system, Facebook discloses facts about you to advertisers, in exchange for money, every time you click on an ad. I’d call that “selling data,” and I bet that you would, too.
But Facebook is extremely clever at dodging this issue. When the company argues that it is not selling data, but rather selling targeted advertising, it’s luring you into a semantic trap, encouraging you to imagine that the only way of selling data is to send advertisers a file filled with user information. Congress may have fallen for this trap set up by Mr. Zuckerberg, but that doesn’t mean you have to. The fact that your data is not disclosed in an Excel spreadsheet but through a click on a targeted ad is irrelevant. Data still changes hands and goes to the advertiser.
Facebook's claiming that it is not selling user data is like a bar’s giving away a free martini with every $12 bag of peanuts and then claiming that it’s not selling drinks. Rich user data is Facebook’s most prized possession, and the company sure isn’t throwing it in for free.
Importantly, this problem is not limited to Facebook. Other Big Tech companies, including Google and Amazon, have similar ad platforms. If a platform can be used to target specific users, then it reveals those users’ data. The advertiser could easily create its own data file based on this information, or merge the information with any other data it has on a customer.
The potential for abuse is obvious. As we suspected in 2016, plenty of groups buy Facebook ads to cause trouble or sow discord, rather than “merely” to sell you things. If advertisers can effectively buy data about Facebook users in the manner I’ve described, they can discriminate or target propaganda ever more effectively — both inside and outside the Facebook advertising ecosystem. They could even take the information they’ve gleaned from Facebook, combine it with advanced machine-learning algorithms and build predictive models for other sensitive traits, like religious and political views, personality, intelligence, sexual orientation, happiness, use of drugs or parental separation.
by Michal Kosinski, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nicolás Ortega
As a data scientist, I am shocked that anyone continues to believe this claim. Each time you click on a Facebook ad, Facebook sells data on you to that advertiser. This is such a basic property of online targeted advertising that it would be impossible to avoid, even if Facebook somehow wanted to.
Or even better, let Mr. Zuckerberg explain, as he did to the Senate in April: “What we allow is for advertisers to tell us who they want to reach, and then we do the placement. So, if an advertiser comes to us and says, ‘All right, I am a ski shop and I want to sell skis to women’ … we can show the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser.”Let’s take a closer look at Mr. Zuckerberg’s ski shop example. The ski shop pays Facebook to show a targeted ad to women and sends the women to the ski shop’s website if the women click on the ad. Mr. Zuckerberg describes this process as showing “the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser.” But this isn’t true: If a ski shop pays Facebook to show an ad only to women, then Facebook automatically reveals to the ski shop that all people who clicked on the link must be women.
And in practice, the advertisers make requests that are much more nuanced. They may ask Facebook to show their ad to “liberal Latina women without college education who live in San Antonio and recently got married.” And then they might place a separate ad that is shown only to “conservative African-American women with college educations who live in Austin and are single.” When you click on an ad and are sent to an advertiser’s website, the advertiser knows which ad you saw and thus which bucket you fall in.
Facebook has a lot of data on their users and is eager to monetize it. The advertisers are encouraged to selectively target people according to a mind-boggling range of personal characteristics. Some, such as age, gender or location, are not overly intimate. Others, such as your political views, family size, education, occupation, marital status or interest in a gay dating app, are highly personal.
Facebook would even let advertisers target you based on facts that you may not be aware of, such as that you are a close friend of a soccer fan or of someone who got recently engaged. In a recent study we published, my colleagues and I discovered that advertisers can target users based on their intimate psychological traits, such as personality. If you can think of an important personal characteristic, there’s a good chance it’s targetable on Facebook. Through this ad-targeting system, Facebook discloses facts about you to advertisers, in exchange for money, every time you click on an ad. I’d call that “selling data,” and I bet that you would, too.
But Facebook is extremely clever at dodging this issue. When the company argues that it is not selling data, but rather selling targeted advertising, it’s luring you into a semantic trap, encouraging you to imagine that the only way of selling data is to send advertisers a file filled with user information. Congress may have fallen for this trap set up by Mr. Zuckerberg, but that doesn’t mean you have to. The fact that your data is not disclosed in an Excel spreadsheet but through a click on a targeted ad is irrelevant. Data still changes hands and goes to the advertiser.
Facebook's claiming that it is not selling user data is like a bar’s giving away a free martini with every $12 bag of peanuts and then claiming that it’s not selling drinks. Rich user data is Facebook’s most prized possession, and the company sure isn’t throwing it in for free.
Importantly, this problem is not limited to Facebook. Other Big Tech companies, including Google and Amazon, have similar ad platforms. If a platform can be used to target specific users, then it reveals those users’ data. The advertiser could easily create its own data file based on this information, or merge the information with any other data it has on a customer.
The potential for abuse is obvious. As we suspected in 2016, plenty of groups buy Facebook ads to cause trouble or sow discord, rather than “merely” to sell you things. If advertisers can effectively buy data about Facebook users in the manner I’ve described, they can discriminate or target propaganda ever more effectively — both inside and outside the Facebook advertising ecosystem. They could even take the information they’ve gleaned from Facebook, combine it with advanced machine-learning algorithms and build predictive models for other sensitive traits, like religious and political views, personality, intelligence, sexual orientation, happiness, use of drugs or parental separation.
by Michal Kosinski, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Nicolás Ortega
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
Kelly Slater’s Shock Wave
The best surfer in history made a machine that creates perfect conditions on demand. Will his invention democratize surfing or despoil it?
The first few hours I spent at the W.S.L. Surf Ranch, a wave pool built for surfing in the farmlands south of Fresno, California, were for me a blur. I was fine on arrival, hiking through a little forest of scaffolding, eucalyptus, and white tents with a publicist from the Kelly Slater Wave Company, which built and runs the place. The valley heat was fierce but dry. House music rode on a light northwest breeze. We passed a bright-red antique row-crop tractor parked on wood chips. Then I looked to my right and felt my mind yaw. The wave was probably six hundred yards away, a sparkling emerald wall, with a tiny surfer snapping rhythmic turns off the top. I had come expecting to see this wave, out here in cotton fields a hundred-plus miles from the coast. Still, my reaction to it was involuntary. Kelly’s Wave, as it’s known, seems designed to make someone who surfs, which I do, feel this way: stunned, turned on, needy. Surfers spend much of their lives looking for high-quality waves. Now a machine has been invented that churns out virtually flawless ones on command. “We call it the smile machine,” someone, possibly the publicist, said. I had trouble paying attention. Every four minutes, I had to turn and crane to watch a wave make its way the length of the pool.
Kelly Slater, who is forty-six, is the best surfer in history. He’s won eleven world titles. He was the youngest-ever world champion and the oldest-ever world champion. When he stormed into the competitive spotlight, in the late eighties, I couldn’t understand what he was doing. He seemed to be always recovering from nearly falling off his board. Slater had grown up riding Florida’s small, scarce waves, and emerged with a style built to stuff the maximum number of hyper-athletic maneuvers into the least possible space. As he surfed better waves, the power and the creativity of his surfing deepened, until he dominated the pro circuit so completely that he grew bored and retired. A few years later, he returned to full-time competition and won five more world titles.
Inseparable from his surfing was his thinking—about what could be done on a wave, about board design, fin design, competition. Slater might turn up at the Pipe Masters, one of the most watched events on the pro tour, riding a bizarrely small and odd-shaped board, and brusquely shove back the frontiers of performance. He’s still doing it. Early this year, a video was released showing Slater slashing through powerful Hawaiian waves on a tiny double-bat-winged board. It was futuristic surfing, and the board he rode, called the Cymatic, is now one of the world’s most sought-after models. Never mind that very few people have the chops to ride it.
Slater has been thinking for decades about building an artificial wave. In an as-told-to memoir, from 2003, he noted, “Surfers have dreamed of creating the ultimate wave machine. The perfect setup would take surfing to every town in America and make the sport as mainstream as soccer.” Wave pools have been around since the nineteenth century, when Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria, had a wave machine built on a lake at one of his palaces. Pools built specifically for surfing began to appear in the late nineteen-sixties, but even the best of them produced only weak, short, messy waves. Slater got serious about developing his ideas in 2006, and began working with scientists at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering.
Finally, in December, 2015, an astonishing video was released. Called “Kelly’s Wave,” it showed Slater, warmly dressed in a quilted jacket and a gray wool beanie, arriving at a misty pond at daybreak. In a voice-over, he calls it “our little secret spot” and admits to nervousness after “working on something for ten years.” As the first wave rolls, the camera stays on Slater’s face. His reaction to what he sees goes from anxious wonder to wide-eyed joy. “Oh, my God!” He throws out his arms, bounding in place. The next wave, when it comes peeling toward us, is coffee-colored, thin-lipped, impossibly clean. It’s breaking so precisely that it’s hard to tell if the film is running in slow motion. Slater puts on a wetsuit, paddles out, and catches one. Now there’s a little wind on it, ruffling the surface, and it looks more like a great ocean wave that happens to be the color of French roast—perhaps the best California point break on the best day in history. Your eye bounces around the frame, trying to place this spot—shaggy pine trees, fences, what look like farm outbuildings. It could be anywhere. Slater appears in a closeup, crouched inside a shining tube, looking thoughtfully up at the pitching lip, now semitransparent. An unobtrusive caption comes onscreen: “Waves roll all day.” Slater’s business partners say that there were more than a million views on YouTube in two days. I say that there were at least that number of texts flying around among surfers, expressing some version of “WTF?!?”
Matt Warshaw, surfing’s unofficial historian, says that the sport now has only two eras, Before Kelly’s Wave and After. It did feel as if something basic had changed—as if technology had, improbably, outdone nature. Still, the artificial wave was not met with universal acclaim. Many surfers felt that the future suddenly had a dystopian cast—mechanized, privatized, soulless. Yes, surfing might now become “mainstream,” with Slater’s magic wave reproduced in pools across the planet, but that is the last thing that most actual surfers want. The critics saw our pointless, difficult, obsessive pastime becoming exponentially more popular, and beloved home breaks ruined by terminal overcrowding. At the same time, there was virtually no one who surfs who didn’t ache to ride it. (...)
I arrived on the first day of the maiden Surf Ranch Pro. The early rounds of the contest were in progress, but there was no really good place from which to watch the surfing. The pool is seven hundred yards long, perhaps a hundred across, and the wave runs both north and south, so at least half the time you’re looking at the back of a wave. Often, live viewers were reduced to watching one of several jumbo screens erected above the eastern wall of the pool. We could hear bits of the Webcast commentary: “Carissa . . . power gouge to set up the pit.” Slater was already leading the men. The big screens filled the long minutes between waves with highlight replays and commercials for Jeep and Michelob and Hurley.
I found the replays deeply confusing. A slow-motion closeup of a great surfer like Carissa Moore tucking into a spiralling barrel was mesmerizing, but not because of what Moore was doing—she was, after all, invisibly deep for most of the clip. Instead, I found myself bug-eyed, forgetting to breathe, silently shouting, “Look at that wave!” The relentless precision of the spilling lip was the news. It was a once-in-a-lifetime wave. Of course, I was being absurd. Every wave here did that.
Kelly Slater, who is forty-six, is the best surfer in history. He’s won eleven world titles. He was the youngest-ever world champion and the oldest-ever world champion. When he stormed into the competitive spotlight, in the late eighties, I couldn’t understand what he was doing. He seemed to be always recovering from nearly falling off his board. Slater had grown up riding Florida’s small, scarce waves, and emerged with a style built to stuff the maximum number of hyper-athletic maneuvers into the least possible space. As he surfed better waves, the power and the creativity of his surfing deepened, until he dominated the pro circuit so completely that he grew bored and retired. A few years later, he returned to full-time competition and won five more world titles.Inseparable from his surfing was his thinking—about what could be done on a wave, about board design, fin design, competition. Slater might turn up at the Pipe Masters, one of the most watched events on the pro tour, riding a bizarrely small and odd-shaped board, and brusquely shove back the frontiers of performance. He’s still doing it. Early this year, a video was released showing Slater slashing through powerful Hawaiian waves on a tiny double-bat-winged board. It was futuristic surfing, and the board he rode, called the Cymatic, is now one of the world’s most sought-after models. Never mind that very few people have the chops to ride it.
Slater has been thinking for decades about building an artificial wave. In an as-told-to memoir, from 2003, he noted, “Surfers have dreamed of creating the ultimate wave machine. The perfect setup would take surfing to every town in America and make the sport as mainstream as soccer.” Wave pools have been around since the nineteenth century, when Ludwig II, the Mad King of Bavaria, had a wave machine built on a lake at one of his palaces. Pools built specifically for surfing began to appear in the late nineteen-sixties, but even the best of them produced only weak, short, messy waves. Slater got serious about developing his ideas in 2006, and began working with scientists at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering.
Finally, in December, 2015, an astonishing video was released. Called “Kelly’s Wave,” it showed Slater, warmly dressed in a quilted jacket and a gray wool beanie, arriving at a misty pond at daybreak. In a voice-over, he calls it “our little secret spot” and admits to nervousness after “working on something for ten years.” As the first wave rolls, the camera stays on Slater’s face. His reaction to what he sees goes from anxious wonder to wide-eyed joy. “Oh, my God!” He throws out his arms, bounding in place. The next wave, when it comes peeling toward us, is coffee-colored, thin-lipped, impossibly clean. It’s breaking so precisely that it’s hard to tell if the film is running in slow motion. Slater puts on a wetsuit, paddles out, and catches one. Now there’s a little wind on it, ruffling the surface, and it looks more like a great ocean wave that happens to be the color of French roast—perhaps the best California point break on the best day in history. Your eye bounces around the frame, trying to place this spot—shaggy pine trees, fences, what look like farm outbuildings. It could be anywhere. Slater appears in a closeup, crouched inside a shining tube, looking thoughtfully up at the pitching lip, now semitransparent. An unobtrusive caption comes onscreen: “Waves roll all day.” Slater’s business partners say that there were more than a million views on YouTube in two days. I say that there were at least that number of texts flying around among surfers, expressing some version of “WTF?!?”
Matt Warshaw, surfing’s unofficial historian, says that the sport now has only two eras, Before Kelly’s Wave and After. It did feel as if something basic had changed—as if technology had, improbably, outdone nature. Still, the artificial wave was not met with universal acclaim. Many surfers felt that the future suddenly had a dystopian cast—mechanized, privatized, soulless. Yes, surfing might now become “mainstream,” with Slater’s magic wave reproduced in pools across the planet, but that is the last thing that most actual surfers want. The critics saw our pointless, difficult, obsessive pastime becoming exponentially more popular, and beloved home breaks ruined by terminal overcrowding. At the same time, there was virtually no one who surfs who didn’t ache to ride it. (...)
I arrived on the first day of the maiden Surf Ranch Pro. The early rounds of the contest were in progress, but there was no really good place from which to watch the surfing. The pool is seven hundred yards long, perhaps a hundred across, and the wave runs both north and south, so at least half the time you’re looking at the back of a wave. Often, live viewers were reduced to watching one of several jumbo screens erected above the eastern wall of the pool. We could hear bits of the Webcast commentary: “Carissa . . . power gouge to set up the pit.” Slater was already leading the men. The big screens filled the long minutes between waves with highlight replays and commercials for Jeep and Michelob and Hurley.
I found the replays deeply confusing. A slow-motion closeup of a great surfer like Carissa Moore tucking into a spiralling barrel was mesmerizing, but not because of what Moore was doing—she was, after all, invisibly deep for most of the clip. Instead, I found myself bug-eyed, forgetting to breathe, silently shouting, “Look at that wave!” The relentless precision of the spilling lip was the news. It was a once-in-a-lifetime wave. Of course, I was being absurd. Every wave here did that.
by William Finnegan, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ben Lowy
[ed. See also: Finnegan's Pulitzer prize-winning book Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (excellent review here). Probably the best book on surfing ever written.]
How Two Times Reporters Covered the Hunt for Oil in Alaska
Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 19 million acres of pristine land in northeast Alaska, may soon be open to oil drilling. Last December, Congress approved a measure to open the refuge’s coastal plain, known as the 1002 Area, to oil exploration. As early as next year, the Interior Department could be selling drilling leases.
In a recent front-page story, Steve Eder, an investigative reporter for The Times, and Henry Fountain, a Times climate reporter, examined how the region went from off-limits to open for business. Among their findings: The 2017 tax overhaul bill provided a rare opportunity to open the refuge for drilling; plans at the Interior Department are being overseen by appointees with deep ties to Alaska; and environmental evaluations have been fast-tracked by the Trump administration.
Mr. Eder and Mr. Fountain recently discussed their reporting. Their answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How did this story originate?
HENRY FOUNTAIN This whole issue of drilling in the refuge has been around for 40 years, but it’s come to a head in the last year or so with the Trump administration.
There’s been this whole train of reporting this year about the Trump administration moving to undo Obama-era policies. So this was another example of it, and a really interesting one, because it’s happening so fast. This is also a very specific example of something that has been outlawed, and all of a sudden it’s being undone.
STEVE EDER I think there was recognition that this was an important topic and something that we ought to delve into and try to help explain to readers what’s happening and why it’s happening.
The idea was to pair up Henry’s scientific understanding and Alaska knowledge — he’s written a book about the 1964 Alaska earthquake and has spent a considerable amount of time there — with my background in delving deeply into this kind of topic. We both went to Alaska. We were on the ground together.
What was your trip to Alaska like?
FOUNTAIN We stayed in Anchorage; had a lot of breakfasts at this one great breakfast place, Snow City Cafe. And we made a quick trip to Fairbanks for more reporting.
EDER We ate a lot of salmon. We were so busy and focused on reporting, and when we weren’t reporting, we tended to be talking about what we were finding and trying to digest things as we went. It was my first time in Alaska, and Henry’s obviously been many times. So at the end of the week, we took an afternoon to explore a little bit, drive around. We went for a mini-hike in the Chugach Mountains just outside the city.
FOUNTAIN When we got back to New York, we and our editors realized that it would be important for the story to get a sense of what the refuge looks like now. The place isn’t easy to get to; there are no roads into or within it. It’s only reachable by plane, and winter weather can disrupt flights. But we got a freelance photographer, Katie Orlinsky, to take a bush flight up there from Fairbanks. She came back with beautiful photos and helped us describe the place.
What did being in Alaska allow you to bring to the article?
FOUNTAIN You get a sense that Alaskans don’t want people outside of the state telling them what to do. They’re very proud of their state and all the incredible places they have. It’s huge, and most of it’s wild and great and beautiful. So there’s a real sense of, “We’re in Alaska; we want to do what we want to do.” I got a sense of that talking to people directly. You wouldn’t get it so much on the phone. So I think going there was well worth it.
by Katie Van Syckle, NY Times | Read more:
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 19 million acres of pristine land in northeast Alaska, may soon be open to oil drilling. Last December, Congress approved a measure to open the refuge’s coastal plain, known as the 1002 Area, to oil exploration. As early as next year, the Interior Department could be selling drilling leases.
In a recent front-page story, Steve Eder, an investigative reporter for The Times, and Henry Fountain, a Times climate reporter, examined how the region went from off-limits to open for business. Among their findings: The 2017 tax overhaul bill provided a rare opportunity to open the refuge for drilling; plans at the Interior Department are being overseen by appointees with deep ties to Alaska; and environmental evaluations have been fast-tracked by the Trump administration.
Mr. Eder and Mr. Fountain recently discussed their reporting. Their answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
How did this story originate?
HENRY FOUNTAIN This whole issue of drilling in the refuge has been around for 40 years, but it’s come to a head in the last year or so with the Trump administration.
There’s been this whole train of reporting this year about the Trump administration moving to undo Obama-era policies. So this was another example of it, and a really interesting one, because it’s happening so fast. This is also a very specific example of something that has been outlawed, and all of a sudden it’s being undone.
STEVE EDER I think there was recognition that this was an important topic and something that we ought to delve into and try to help explain to readers what’s happening and why it’s happening.
The idea was to pair up Henry’s scientific understanding and Alaska knowledge — he’s written a book about the 1964 Alaska earthquake and has spent a considerable amount of time there — with my background in delving deeply into this kind of topic. We both went to Alaska. We were on the ground together.
What was your trip to Alaska like?
FOUNTAIN We stayed in Anchorage; had a lot of breakfasts at this one great breakfast place, Snow City Cafe. And we made a quick trip to Fairbanks for more reporting.
EDER We ate a lot of salmon. We were so busy and focused on reporting, and when we weren’t reporting, we tended to be talking about what we were finding and trying to digest things as we went. It was my first time in Alaska, and Henry’s obviously been many times. So at the end of the week, we took an afternoon to explore a little bit, drive around. We went for a mini-hike in the Chugach Mountains just outside the city.
FOUNTAIN When we got back to New York, we and our editors realized that it would be important for the story to get a sense of what the refuge looks like now. The place isn’t easy to get to; there are no roads into or within it. It’s only reachable by plane, and winter weather can disrupt flights. But we got a freelance photographer, Katie Orlinsky, to take a bush flight up there from Fairbanks. She came back with beautiful photos and helped us describe the place.
What did being in Alaska allow you to bring to the article?
FOUNTAIN You get a sense that Alaskans don’t want people outside of the state telling them what to do. They’re very proud of their state and all the incredible places they have. It’s huge, and most of it’s wild and great and beautiful. So there’s a real sense of, “We’re in Alaska; we want to do what we want to do.” I got a sense of that talking to people directly. You wouldn’t get it so much on the phone. So I think going there was well worth it.
by Katie Van Syckle, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Katie Orlinsky
[ed. OMG. Reporters interviewing reporters about their intrepid trip to the Wilds (which, it sounds like, mainly consisted of a short visit to Anchorage, eating at a yuppie breakfast joint, hiking near the city and a brief flight to Fairbanks.... oh, and eating lots of salmon). I don't know how many times I've heard journalists, bureaucrats, politicians, even scientists talk about being "out in the field" whenever they came to Anchorage (pop. 300,000), even while staying downtown at the Hotel Captain Cook. Here's the story: In the Blink of an Eye, a Hunt for Oil Threatens Pristine Alaska.]
Monday, December 10, 2018
When Did Parties Become So Boring?
Adults are not always so fun. Sometimes I go to parties filled with mature people who know things and act their age and I’m quickly filled with despair. I walk in the door and greet the host and mill about, but in the pit of my stomach I know that leaving home was a huge mistake. I will not be surprised and delighted. I will not learn something new. I will not even enjoy the sound of my own voice. I will be lulled into a state of excruciating paralysis and self-hatred and other-people hatred.
Let’s be honest, some days, sensible middle-aged urban liberal adult professionals are the most tedious people in the world. I know that I should feel grateful that these people, my peers, are enlightened, that they listen to NPR and read The Atlantic, that they join book clubs and send their kids to the progressive preschool and the Italian-immersion magnet. I should feel cheered by the fact that I know human beings who hold national grants to improve government policy on something or other, or who work with troubled teenagers. These people are informed and intelligent. These are the people I should want to know. But I am an ingrate.
My lack of gratitude might be a product of despair, which pairs badly with my lukewarm Hawaiian-surfer-themed microbrew. I should be thankful that almost everyone at this party skimmed The New York Times this morning. I should feel glad that they read the latest book by Donna Tartt so they can tell me that they didn’t think it was all that good, in the vaguest terms possible. I should see this as an opportunity to hear myself say words out loud about the latest book by Donna Tartt, throwing in specific arguments about what qualifies as good writing and what makes a book worthwhile—but without insulting anyone or swearing for no reason or making spit fly out of my mouth in the process. But I might get long-winded and say too much. There is a palpable pressure to never say too much here. There is an imaginary egg timer for every comment. The sand runs out, the eyes go dead.
I should be glad just to be here, to be invited out of the house so I can stand beside a table of food I didn’t personally prepare, all of those bad salads with the quinoa and the mushy bits of avocado and the overcooked pasta and the giant lumps of bland feta and the little bits of green stuff that have no discernible flavor. I should feel thankful to be slowing down in sync with this diverse and informed tribe, to be aging gracefully among these mild-mannered international humans in their denim shirts, in their linens, in their comfortable shoes, in their terrible newsboy caps, holding their beers until they sweat and grow warm, sipping their glasses of pinot grigio but never having a second glass, helping themselves to an intolerably weak margarita that needs a sign that says Adults Only on the side because it is served in small blue Dixie cups and it looks and tastes exactly like lemonade. After one cup I quickly calculate that I will need to drink the whole pitcher of Adults Only Lemonade to catch a buzz. For a while I try to do this.
But catching a buzz is not the point at a gathering like this one. In fact, the point is to avoid catching a buzz. Sure, these professional adults once used to drink too much and say the wrong things when they were much younger. But they’ve accumulated enough experience over the years to realize that the more appropriate thing is to resist such an impulse, to file down their more unsightly edges, to blend in. It’s not that they don’t still have unpopular opinions and bad urges. They’re just mature enough to know these things make people uncomfortable, end friendships, hijack careers. You can’t go to a party and act like you’re at a party. You’re too old for that. You might speak out of turn or contradict yourself or offend someone. That’s not how adults do it.
Among adults, everything must exist within clearly defined boundaries and limits: No heels are uncomfortably high (and everyone leaves their shoes at the front door anyway), no music is too loud, no lipstick is too dark, no food is too spicy, no drink is too strong, no conversation lasts too long. No one yells or points or mocks, even just for fun. No one has any obvious personality disorders. No one is quiet or seems lonely. No one looks desperate or sweaty. No one is inappropriate or has lipstick on her teeth or is wearing overly large statement jewelry. No one is calling attention to himself for no reason. No one is anxious to cause a stir. No one feels trapped, not outwardly. Such feelings—the longing, the anger, the envy—all of that should have been lifted away decades ago, evaporated, whisked away by linen blends and decaf coffee drinks and probiotics.
Everyone should appear calm and properly hydrated now. Everyone should claim to feel just right in their terrible shorts, their legs crossed like Europeans, their temples graying by the minute, their pleasant expressions saying, “I see your point, I understand, that is also true.” Everyone should be smiling with their eyes and talking with their hands.
They’d like more pasta, but they could also live without it.
I can’t do it. The quiet restraint, the lack of discernible needs or desires, the undifferentiated sea of dry-cleaned nothingness, the small sips, the half smiles, the polite pauses, the autopilot nodding. It feels like we’re all voluntarily erasing ourselves, as if that’s the only appropriate thing to do.
[ed. See also: The Best Advice Columnist of Her Generation Gives Zero F*cks About Your Judgment.]
Let’s be honest, some days, sensible middle-aged urban liberal adult professionals are the most tedious people in the world. I know that I should feel grateful that these people, my peers, are enlightened, that they listen to NPR and read The Atlantic, that they join book clubs and send their kids to the progressive preschool and the Italian-immersion magnet. I should feel cheered by the fact that I know human beings who hold national grants to improve government policy on something or other, or who work with troubled teenagers. These people are informed and intelligent. These are the people I should want to know. But I am an ingrate.
My lack of gratitude might be a product of despair, which pairs badly with my lukewarm Hawaiian-surfer-themed microbrew. I should be thankful that almost everyone at this party skimmed The New York Times this morning. I should feel glad that they read the latest book by Donna Tartt so they can tell me that they didn’t think it was all that good, in the vaguest terms possible. I should see this as an opportunity to hear myself say words out loud about the latest book by Donna Tartt, throwing in specific arguments about what qualifies as good writing and what makes a book worthwhile—but without insulting anyone or swearing for no reason or making spit fly out of my mouth in the process. But I might get long-winded and say too much. There is a palpable pressure to never say too much here. There is an imaginary egg timer for every comment. The sand runs out, the eyes go dead.I should be glad just to be here, to be invited out of the house so I can stand beside a table of food I didn’t personally prepare, all of those bad salads with the quinoa and the mushy bits of avocado and the overcooked pasta and the giant lumps of bland feta and the little bits of green stuff that have no discernible flavor. I should feel thankful to be slowing down in sync with this diverse and informed tribe, to be aging gracefully among these mild-mannered international humans in their denim shirts, in their linens, in their comfortable shoes, in their terrible newsboy caps, holding their beers until they sweat and grow warm, sipping their glasses of pinot grigio but never having a second glass, helping themselves to an intolerably weak margarita that needs a sign that says Adults Only on the side because it is served in small blue Dixie cups and it looks and tastes exactly like lemonade. After one cup I quickly calculate that I will need to drink the whole pitcher of Adults Only Lemonade to catch a buzz. For a while I try to do this.
But catching a buzz is not the point at a gathering like this one. In fact, the point is to avoid catching a buzz. Sure, these professional adults once used to drink too much and say the wrong things when they were much younger. But they’ve accumulated enough experience over the years to realize that the more appropriate thing is to resist such an impulse, to file down their more unsightly edges, to blend in. It’s not that they don’t still have unpopular opinions and bad urges. They’re just mature enough to know these things make people uncomfortable, end friendships, hijack careers. You can’t go to a party and act like you’re at a party. You’re too old for that. You might speak out of turn or contradict yourself or offend someone. That’s not how adults do it.
Among adults, everything must exist within clearly defined boundaries and limits: No heels are uncomfortably high (and everyone leaves their shoes at the front door anyway), no music is too loud, no lipstick is too dark, no food is too spicy, no drink is too strong, no conversation lasts too long. No one yells or points or mocks, even just for fun. No one has any obvious personality disorders. No one is quiet or seems lonely. No one looks desperate or sweaty. No one is inappropriate or has lipstick on her teeth or is wearing overly large statement jewelry. No one is calling attention to himself for no reason. No one is anxious to cause a stir. No one feels trapped, not outwardly. Such feelings—the longing, the anger, the envy—all of that should have been lifted away decades ago, evaporated, whisked away by linen blends and decaf coffee drinks and probiotics.
Everyone should appear calm and properly hydrated now. Everyone should claim to feel just right in their terrible shorts, their legs crossed like Europeans, their temples graying by the minute, their pleasant expressions saying, “I see your point, I understand, that is also true.” Everyone should be smiling with their eyes and talking with their hands.
They’d like more pasta, but they could also live without it.
I can’t do it. The quiet restraint, the lack of discernible needs or desires, the undifferentiated sea of dry-cleaned nothingness, the small sips, the half smiles, the polite pauses, the autopilot nodding. It feels like we’re all voluntarily erasing ourselves, as if that’s the only appropriate thing to do.
by Heather Havrilesky, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Penguin Random House LLC[ed. See also: The Best Advice Columnist of Her Generation Gives Zero F*cks About Your Judgment.]
If People Talked to Other Professionals the Way They Talk to Teachers
“Ah, a zookeeper. So, you just babysit the animals all day?”
- - -
“My colon never acts this way at home. Are you sure you’re reading the colonoscopy results correctly? Did you ever think that maybe you just don’t like my colon?”
- - -
“I’d love to just play with actuary statistics all day. That would be so fun! I bet you don’t even feel like you’re at work!”
- - -
“You’re a sanitation worker, huh? I hated my garbage collectors when I was growing up. One of them once yelled at me when I stood directly in front of their truck and kept it from completing its appointed rounds, and ever since then I’ve just loathed all of them, everywhere.”
- - -
“So you run a ski lodge? Do you just, like, chill during the summer? Must be nice.”
- - -
“Since my singer-songwriter thing isn’t taking off yet, I’ve been thinking about going into lawyer-ing. I mean, how hard can it be? I know criminals like me, or at least the two that I see once a year at Thanksgiving do.”
- - -
“I bet that’s the best part of being a banker — all the free money!”
- - -
“Do you even read your patients’ charts, or do you just assign them a random dosage based on how nice they’ve been to you?”
- - -
“Before you give me a ticket, Officer, I just wanted to mention: My taxes pay your salary.”
by Shannon Reed, McSweeny's | Read more:
US Regulators Have Essentially Become Do-Nothing Institutions
Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong with American capitalism. This argument, put forth by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, lies at the heart of their explosive new book The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition. Instead of delivering on its stated promise to provide more opportunity, prosperity and choice, they argue, Americans today are subjected to a system that encourages and rewards predatory behavior, in which corporate monopolists and oligopolists are allowed to bleed consumers dry (and sometimes literally make them bleed) with impunity because the government has been “captured to rig the rules of the game for the strong at the expense of the weak.”
The two, it should be noted, are no Marxists—quite the opposite. A staunch and passionate advocate for free markets, Tepper is the founder of Variant Perception, an investment research firm that caters to hedge funds, banks, asset mangers and family offices. A senior fellow at The American Conservative, he has previously worked at SAC Capital and Bank of America (where was he was Vice President in proprietary trading).
How does a self-professed fan of markets end up writing a book titled “The Myth of Capitalism”? For one, argues Tepper, what is often called capitalism today is not, in fact, capitalism: competition is the essence of capitalism, and there is almost no competition in the American economy today. “Capitalism,” write Tepper and Hearn, “has been the greatest system in history to lift people out of poverty and create wealth, but the ‘capitalism’ we see today in the United States is a far cry from competitive markets.” Instead, the US economy has been overtaken by a “fake version of capitalism,” with government officials allowing (even cultivating) the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of few powerful monopolists who “cozy up to regulators to get the kind of rules they want and donate to get the laws they desire.”
A clear and incisive indictment of the United States’ increasingly monopolized economy, where rising market power has led to less competition, lower productivity, lower wages and staggering inequality, The Myth of Capitalism is also an urgent call to action for both the left and the right to support the restoration of America’s antimonopoly ideals. [We published an excerpt from the book last week. Read it here.]
In a recent interview with ProMarket, Tepper talked about the rise of America’s oligopoly problem, explained why he believes antimonopoly is not a left-right issue, and called on those who believe in free markets to support meaningful reforms. “If the people who love capitalism and competition don’t reform markets,” he warns, “people who don’t like capitalism are going to do it, and I think that we’ll all be worse off.”
by Asher Schechter, ProMarket | Read more:
Image: via
The two, it should be noted, are no Marxists—quite the opposite. A staunch and passionate advocate for free markets, Tepper is the founder of Variant Perception, an investment research firm that caters to hedge funds, banks, asset mangers and family offices. A senior fellow at The American Conservative, he has previously worked at SAC Capital and Bank of America (where was he was Vice President in proprietary trading).
How does a self-professed fan of markets end up writing a book titled “The Myth of Capitalism”? For one, argues Tepper, what is often called capitalism today is not, in fact, capitalism: competition is the essence of capitalism, and there is almost no competition in the American economy today. “Capitalism,” write Tepper and Hearn, “has been the greatest system in history to lift people out of poverty and create wealth, but the ‘capitalism’ we see today in the United States is a far cry from competitive markets.” Instead, the US economy has been overtaken by a “fake version of capitalism,” with government officials allowing (even cultivating) the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of few powerful monopolists who “cozy up to regulators to get the kind of rules they want and donate to get the laws they desire.”A clear and incisive indictment of the United States’ increasingly monopolized economy, where rising market power has led to less competition, lower productivity, lower wages and staggering inequality, The Myth of Capitalism is also an urgent call to action for both the left and the right to support the restoration of America’s antimonopoly ideals. [We published an excerpt from the book last week. Read it here.]
In a recent interview with ProMarket, Tepper talked about the rise of America’s oligopoly problem, explained why he believes antimonopoly is not a left-right issue, and called on those who believe in free markets to support meaningful reforms. “If the people who love capitalism and competition don’t reform markets,” he warns, “people who don’t like capitalism are going to do it, and I think that we’ll all be worse off.”
Q: You start the book with David Dao, the passenger that was a beaten and forcibly removed from a United flight last year for refusing to give up his seat. What is it that makes what happened to Dao “a metaphor for American capitalism in the twenty-first century,” as you call it?
First, I think the episode clearly resonated with the public because people feel that something’s changed in the airline industry, that airlines are nickel and diming them, and that part of it is also tied to increasing concentration and market power.
But the main reason [David Dao] came to my mind is that in the days after, I was reading the news and there were quite a few articles pointing out how airlines are now an oligopoly and that you have no choice, and most of the Wall Street research houses were putting out similar notes, so the stock went up. The idea was that it just doesn’t matter what you do in terms of public relations or how you treat customers—if you have a lock on the customers, they have no choice.
So you have the passenger who was bloodied, and that’s horrific. But what was almost more horrific was that once everyone started focusing on the fact that it was an oligopoly, the stock went up. (...)
Q: And yet you argue that what we have in the United States today is a “grotesque, deformed version of capitalism.” What is the difference between capitalism, as you see it, and today’s US economy?
Jeremy Grantham once said that “profit margins are the most mean-reverting series in finance. If margins don’t revert, something has gone wrong with capitalism.” Given that we have record-high corporate profit margins and very little mean reversion, it is a sign that we aren’t seeing a lot of competition. It’s not just obvious that we don’t have a lot of competition from new entrants, but there’s relatively little competition in many industries—a lot of markets are divided up geographically, or there’s collusion.
Capitalism is not just having private property and not being communists, but rather it’s actually having competition. Competition is what creates clear price signals that help drive supply and demand. So the absence of competition, the absence of contestability, is troubling. (...)
Q: There has been a lot of talk in the media about America’s monopoly problem in recent years, but you argue that the US doesn’t have a monopoly problem so much as an oligopoly problem. Why is oligopoly the more pressing problem?
Having four players is not vastly better than having one. Some people say that only monopolies are bad and therefore if you don’t have a monopoly, things are totally fine. The truth is there are sectors in the economy where you have duopolies or an oligopoly with three, four, even five players. What ends up happening is that you end up with tacit collusion, where companies play repeated games with each other and have no incentive to compete on price.
You’d think that if one of them hikes prices, the others might then want to capture some market share, but basically competitors tend to move in lockstep. You don’t even have to do that by speaking to each other—it’s pretty well understood that you can use company conference calls and establish essentially what you’re going to do in terms of trying to chase market share or not, or your levels of pricing and all that.
In the book, I quote one of the world’s top pricing experts who wrote a book where he pretty much advises companies to send signals to the market, whether it’s via press releases or quarterly conference calls, but recommends that the readers consult with their lawyers and attorneys first, clearly understanding that speaking directly is illegal but speaking indirectly is not. There’s been research done on airline conference calls and how airlines have used conference calls to indicate whether they’ll expand or not. The FTC was in fact looking into that—but the FTC is a do-nothing institution and I doubt anything will come of it.
But you find this in many other areas. In the book, I compare this to how the mob commission used to divide up the US: One family might have one part of the city and another family might have the other part of the city, and people would stay off each other’s turf. If you look at the way that the insurance markets carved up the United States, where you’ll have one or two dominant insurers per state, or how retail stores divided up the US geographically and tend not to compete head on, it’s very similar. (...)
Q: The US economy you describe in the book is markedly different than what American capitalism looked like 40-50 years ago. How did we end up here?
The counterrevolution which led us to where we are today really started essentially in the 1960s and 1970s, when Robert Bork and others did not like the fact that the antitrust was being vigorously enforced. They thought it was preventing efficiency and some economies of scale, and they did have a point—antitrust was very restrictive, and some minor deals that wouldn’t have caused any competitive issues were blocked.
But the problem is that when you fast forward 40 years later, what started out as possibly a worthwhile effort to allow slightly more mergers has ended up becoming basically a policy that’s become a do-nothing policy, in which K Street law firms, economists-for-hire that go in and out of government at the DOJ and the FTC, and Wall Street firms are all spectacularly well paid to push mergers through.
It’s very much like the NCAA’s Sweet 16, where you start out with 16 teams and then get down to eight, and then four and then two. We’ve had a merger wave in the 1980s that graduated in the 1990s, a merger wave leading up to the 2007 crisis and then a merger wave that peaked around 2015, and in many industries we’ve just basically been eliminating player after player.
That’s really sort of how we got here: a ratchet effect where each merger wave takes out more and more players. The process of getting mergers through is deeply corrupted, with economists-for-hire presenting models showing that prices will go down and studies showing that these models are almost always wrong and that you generally get higher prices. The whole system is essentially a charade.
Q: But also, the government was not a silent player in all this. Many political choices were made along the way.
I completely agree. I think that one of the key issues is that the government completely and radically changed antitrust through the bureaucracy, through the merger guidelines, and then basically by doing nothing and allowing mergers to proceed. Whereas the Sherman Act and Clayton Act were political acts passed by Congress, this is not something that we’ve collectively agreed is what we want. I think that most people are appalled at how things have changed.
In many cases, the people who are pro-merger have also taken over the courts and basically made the burden of proof so high that it’s very difficult to stop mergers. A lot of this is highly, highly ideological, in the sense that most of the pro-merger studies or models that are done before mergers turn out to be wrong, retrospectively. I have loads of footnotes in the book, and I hope people do go and read further studies.
What really happened is basically what I call an orgy of influence-peddling, with people moving in and out of the top of the FTC and the DOJ essentially green-lighting mergers and helping make them happen once they’re out of government. (...)
Q: What is your proposed solution for reforming markets and restoring an open, competitive economy?
In the book, I have a series of principles and specific reforms based on those principles. They’re fairly broad and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. There are many other people that put forward good ideas. Some of the key principles I mention are trying to reduce barriers to entry, to enhance competition, enforcement of antitrust, which means preventing mergers that reduced competition as well as undoing previous mergers that have created less competitive markets. Another key principle is to limit the revolving door. In the case of the US, you want to make sure that companies are limited in terms of how they can influence elections.
Those are just very basic reforms, but they could go a long way if implemented. Markets will not reform themselves. Monopolists are not going to want to give up their power and the current status quo in antitrust, because it pays them very, very well.
I would add that I’m not in favor of more regulation on its own. High levels of regulation create higher barriers to entry, and the most regulated sectors tend to be the ones with the highest concentration. What I’m in favor of is principles-based regulation rather than rules-based regulation. Glass Steagall was 35 pages long and worked for about 70 years, while Dodd-Frank is 2,200 pages and we’ve basically seen almost no new banks. I am also wary of creating new regulators or making regulators more powerful without making them accountable, because then you get regulatory capture. But I do believe we need more vigorous antitrust and a sensible reform of regulations.
First, I think the episode clearly resonated with the public because people feel that something’s changed in the airline industry, that airlines are nickel and diming them, and that part of it is also tied to increasing concentration and market power.
But the main reason [David Dao] came to my mind is that in the days after, I was reading the news and there were quite a few articles pointing out how airlines are now an oligopoly and that you have no choice, and most of the Wall Street research houses were putting out similar notes, so the stock went up. The idea was that it just doesn’t matter what you do in terms of public relations or how you treat customers—if you have a lock on the customers, they have no choice.
So you have the passenger who was bloodied, and that’s horrific. But what was almost more horrific was that once everyone started focusing on the fact that it was an oligopoly, the stock went up. (...)
Q: And yet you argue that what we have in the United States today is a “grotesque, deformed version of capitalism.” What is the difference between capitalism, as you see it, and today’s US economy?
Jeremy Grantham once said that “profit margins are the most mean-reverting series in finance. If margins don’t revert, something has gone wrong with capitalism.” Given that we have record-high corporate profit margins and very little mean reversion, it is a sign that we aren’t seeing a lot of competition. It’s not just obvious that we don’t have a lot of competition from new entrants, but there’s relatively little competition in many industries—a lot of markets are divided up geographically, or there’s collusion.
Capitalism is not just having private property and not being communists, but rather it’s actually having competition. Competition is what creates clear price signals that help drive supply and demand. So the absence of competition, the absence of contestability, is troubling. (...)
Q: There has been a lot of talk in the media about America’s monopoly problem in recent years, but you argue that the US doesn’t have a monopoly problem so much as an oligopoly problem. Why is oligopoly the more pressing problem?
Having four players is not vastly better than having one. Some people say that only monopolies are bad and therefore if you don’t have a monopoly, things are totally fine. The truth is there are sectors in the economy where you have duopolies or an oligopoly with three, four, even five players. What ends up happening is that you end up with tacit collusion, where companies play repeated games with each other and have no incentive to compete on price.
You’d think that if one of them hikes prices, the others might then want to capture some market share, but basically competitors tend to move in lockstep. You don’t even have to do that by speaking to each other—it’s pretty well understood that you can use company conference calls and establish essentially what you’re going to do in terms of trying to chase market share or not, or your levels of pricing and all that.
In the book, I quote one of the world’s top pricing experts who wrote a book where he pretty much advises companies to send signals to the market, whether it’s via press releases or quarterly conference calls, but recommends that the readers consult with their lawyers and attorneys first, clearly understanding that speaking directly is illegal but speaking indirectly is not. There’s been research done on airline conference calls and how airlines have used conference calls to indicate whether they’ll expand or not. The FTC was in fact looking into that—but the FTC is a do-nothing institution and I doubt anything will come of it.
But you find this in many other areas. In the book, I compare this to how the mob commission used to divide up the US: One family might have one part of the city and another family might have the other part of the city, and people would stay off each other’s turf. If you look at the way that the insurance markets carved up the United States, where you’ll have one or two dominant insurers per state, or how retail stores divided up the US geographically and tend not to compete head on, it’s very similar. (...)
Q: The US economy you describe in the book is markedly different than what American capitalism looked like 40-50 years ago. How did we end up here?
The counterrevolution which led us to where we are today really started essentially in the 1960s and 1970s, when Robert Bork and others did not like the fact that the antitrust was being vigorously enforced. They thought it was preventing efficiency and some economies of scale, and they did have a point—antitrust was very restrictive, and some minor deals that wouldn’t have caused any competitive issues were blocked.
But the problem is that when you fast forward 40 years later, what started out as possibly a worthwhile effort to allow slightly more mergers has ended up becoming basically a policy that’s become a do-nothing policy, in which K Street law firms, economists-for-hire that go in and out of government at the DOJ and the FTC, and Wall Street firms are all spectacularly well paid to push mergers through.
It’s very much like the NCAA’s Sweet 16, where you start out with 16 teams and then get down to eight, and then four and then two. We’ve had a merger wave in the 1980s that graduated in the 1990s, a merger wave leading up to the 2007 crisis and then a merger wave that peaked around 2015, and in many industries we’ve just basically been eliminating player after player.
That’s really sort of how we got here: a ratchet effect where each merger wave takes out more and more players. The process of getting mergers through is deeply corrupted, with economists-for-hire presenting models showing that prices will go down and studies showing that these models are almost always wrong and that you generally get higher prices. The whole system is essentially a charade.
Q: But also, the government was not a silent player in all this. Many political choices were made along the way.
I completely agree. I think that one of the key issues is that the government completely and radically changed antitrust through the bureaucracy, through the merger guidelines, and then basically by doing nothing and allowing mergers to proceed. Whereas the Sherman Act and Clayton Act were political acts passed by Congress, this is not something that we’ve collectively agreed is what we want. I think that most people are appalled at how things have changed.
In many cases, the people who are pro-merger have also taken over the courts and basically made the burden of proof so high that it’s very difficult to stop mergers. A lot of this is highly, highly ideological, in the sense that most of the pro-merger studies or models that are done before mergers turn out to be wrong, retrospectively. I have loads of footnotes in the book, and I hope people do go and read further studies.
What really happened is basically what I call an orgy of influence-peddling, with people moving in and out of the top of the FTC and the DOJ essentially green-lighting mergers and helping make them happen once they’re out of government. (...)
Q: What is your proposed solution for reforming markets and restoring an open, competitive economy?
In the book, I have a series of principles and specific reforms based on those principles. They’re fairly broad and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. There are many other people that put forward good ideas. Some of the key principles I mention are trying to reduce barriers to entry, to enhance competition, enforcement of antitrust, which means preventing mergers that reduced competition as well as undoing previous mergers that have created less competitive markets. Another key principle is to limit the revolving door. In the case of the US, you want to make sure that companies are limited in terms of how they can influence elections.
Those are just very basic reforms, but they could go a long way if implemented. Markets will not reform themselves. Monopolists are not going to want to give up their power and the current status quo in antitrust, because it pays them very, very well.
I would add that I’m not in favor of more regulation on its own. High levels of regulation create higher barriers to entry, and the most regulated sectors tend to be the ones with the highest concentration. What I’m in favor of is principles-based regulation rather than rules-based regulation. Glass Steagall was 35 pages long and worked for about 70 years, while Dodd-Frank is 2,200 pages and we’ve basically seen almost no new banks. I am also wary of creating new regulators or making regulators more powerful without making them accountable, because then you get regulatory capture. But I do believe we need more vigorous antitrust and a sensible reform of regulations.
by Asher Schechter, ProMarket | Read more:
Image: via
Sunday, December 9, 2018
Is It Ethical to Use Amazon?
Just about every week, I order a thing from Amazon. Sometimes it is a connector cable or some teabags. Occasionally it is a bag of gummy volcanoes. Checking my order history, I find that most recently it was a pair of lamp harps and a copy of John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail. I have an Amazon Prime account, which not only gets me free two-day shipping but grants me unlimited access to such cinema classics as Atlas Shrugged: Part II. I do not have an Alexa, because they are creepy. But I’ve bought everything from fountain pens to ladybugs and given Jeff Bezos God-knows-how-many of my hard-earned dollars.
All of which raises the question of whether I am a hypocrite who daily violates the principles he most holds dear. Actually, I know I am a hypocrite who violates my dearest principles—I suppose the question is rather: Just how bad of a hypocrite am I? Can one denounce Amazon’s business practices while using its services? Should people feel bad about using Amazon? Should they actively try to avoid it?
Let’s be clear: Amazon is terrible. Just a truly awful company in so many ways. Most recently, of course, they pitted struggling cities around the country against each other in a brutal “race to the bottom” to see how many taxpayer handouts they could get. New York City’s bribes succeeded and now Amazon has granted New York the privilege of having one of its working-class neighborhoods rapidly gentrified, and becoming even more unequal. But Amazon also overworks both its white-collar and blue-collar employees, and threatens to use its economic power to hurt local economies if the people so much as think of trying to make the company pay its fair share in taxes. An Amazon-dominated future is a bleak one: total unaccountable control of the economy in the hands of one fabulously wealthy individual, millions upon millions of people toiling away in his factories and warehouses.
Given all of that, the only ethical path would seem to be to have nothing to do with Amazon. Don’t go near it! Nobody’s making you. Why give money to Jeff Bezos? Amazon is like Walmart, and as with Walmart you should give your money to small businesses instead. Help your local shops, the places that treat their employees well and actually pay their taxes. If you succumb to Amazon’s temptations, you’re complicit in their evil.
And yet: As much as this makes sense to me intuitively, it also seems troublingly close to the conservative line that I reject: If you hate capitalism so much, why do you use an iPhone? (For the record, personally I don’t have an iPhone. I have one of these.) Versions of that kind of thinking strike me as silly: “You critique feudalism yet you live under feudalism,” “You say your boss exploits you, but you’re the one who chooses to work there,” “You criticize the actions of the American government yet you continue to live here.” In each case, the person making the critique seems to be focusing on the wrong thing. Why should we leave the country instead of making the government’s policies better? Why should we give up our paycheck instead of demanding an end to exploitation? Because it’s perfectly possible to “have your cake and eat it too,” why should we be asking people to choose between either bad cake or no cake?
That’s kind of how I think about Amazon and the iPhone. The problem isn’t that people use iPhones, it’s that iPhones are produced under intolerable conditions. If people should be ashamed, it’s not for the act of purchasing the product, but for failing to join a political movement aimed at ending exploitation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having something like Amazon, a central system for choosing and delivering goods. (Apart from the climate consequences of mass consumption which is an entirely separate debate that will be had on a day that is not today.) The problem is that this system is operating as an extreme hierarchy, in which one man reaps nearly all the benefits and workers have very little control over their conditions. The solution, then, should not be to get people to stop using Amazon, any more than the solution to bad government policy is to leave the country. Instead, the goal should be to democratize Amazon and redistribute its earnings more equitably. In a way, Amazon is like the government: It’s been called monopolistic, and is steadily becoming more so. Plus, as with the working class families who shop at Walmart, why would we put the onus of ethical action on the consumer trying to save money? And besides, is Amazon that much worse than other giant corporations? On the left, there’s a slogan: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” meaning that if the economic system is based on exploitation, it’s fruitless to try not to participate in an exploitative system. You’re going to be, no matter what, unless you go off and live in the forest and eat berries. So you might as well keep your Prime account, keep getting Always Lower prices at Walmart, and join the international proletarian movement!
I tell myself all of these things, and I believe them, but then I quickly swing back in the other direction: Okay, fine, there may not be any PERFECTLY ethical form of consumption, but surely there is more and less ethical consumption. If you have a choice between non-union sweatshop-made goods and goods made with well-paid unionized laborers, shouldn’t you choose the latter? Do consumers really bear no responsibility for the consequences of their choices? If consumers stopped using Amazon, Amazon wouldn’t be able to keep exploiting people. Boycotts can work, consumers have power. This seems persuasive to me, too. If I wear coats made by slaves, and I could choose to wear coats that are not made by slaves, surely that’s bad. And if that’s bad, then aren’t other choices just less extreme versions of a quite real ethical dilemma?
All of this gets complicated by another ethical problem: that of needless consumption itself. Is the problem that I am buying gummies and lamp harps from Amazon in particular, or is it that I am buying gummies and lamp harps when there are poor children whose families can’t afford to keep them alive? Perhaps the thing that makes me a hypocrite is not that I am going to the wrong retailer, but that I’m buying retail goods that I don’t absolutely need. I’ve wrestled with this before in the context of Mardi Gras: I love Mardi Gras, but it’s wasteful, extravagant, and in some sense pointless, and I have difficulty trying to justify it. And yet I feel strongly that a world without Mardi Gras would be a much worse world and that there’s no need to choose between Mardi Gras and healthy children. The kind of life I live, with its occasional carnivals and candies, seems like one everyone could have if we distributed the earth’s resources well.
I have no good answers to the Amazon problem, because I hold two beliefs that contradict each other and I haven’t found a way to reconcile them: (1) what’s wrong is not the act of purchasing from Amazon, but what Amazon does to its employees, and since there would be nothing wrong with purchasing from Amazon if it was, say, a worker cooperative, the demand should be “democratize it” rather than “stop using it.” (2) You shouldn’t buy from companies with highly unethical business practices, such as staying in a hotel that fired striking workers, or buying slave-made goods. I wrestle with this constantly, because Amazon is very difficult to avoid: We sell Current Affairs books and magazine subscriptions using Amazon and we use certain Amazon “web services” (Amazon absolutely dominates cloud computing and is bigger than its four next biggest competitors—Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Alibaba—combined, so lots of entities that you might not think are supporting Amazon are supporting Amazon). The company is going to continue to grow and grow, and we will all be touched by it in one way or another. Is it right or even helpful to boycott it? Should we decline to watch Amazon TV shows, on principle, and if so what is the principle?
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
All of which raises the question of whether I am a hypocrite who daily violates the principles he most holds dear. Actually, I know I am a hypocrite who violates my dearest principles—I suppose the question is rather: Just how bad of a hypocrite am I? Can one denounce Amazon’s business practices while using its services? Should people feel bad about using Amazon? Should they actively try to avoid it?
Let’s be clear: Amazon is terrible. Just a truly awful company in so many ways. Most recently, of course, they pitted struggling cities around the country against each other in a brutal “race to the bottom” to see how many taxpayer handouts they could get. New York City’s bribes succeeded and now Amazon has granted New York the privilege of having one of its working-class neighborhoods rapidly gentrified, and becoming even more unequal. But Amazon also overworks both its white-collar and blue-collar employees, and threatens to use its economic power to hurt local economies if the people so much as think of trying to make the company pay its fair share in taxes. An Amazon-dominated future is a bleak one: total unaccountable control of the economy in the hands of one fabulously wealthy individual, millions upon millions of people toiling away in his factories and warehouses. Given all of that, the only ethical path would seem to be to have nothing to do with Amazon. Don’t go near it! Nobody’s making you. Why give money to Jeff Bezos? Amazon is like Walmart, and as with Walmart you should give your money to small businesses instead. Help your local shops, the places that treat their employees well and actually pay their taxes. If you succumb to Amazon’s temptations, you’re complicit in their evil.
And yet: As much as this makes sense to me intuitively, it also seems troublingly close to the conservative line that I reject: If you hate capitalism so much, why do you use an iPhone? (For the record, personally I don’t have an iPhone. I have one of these.) Versions of that kind of thinking strike me as silly: “You critique feudalism yet you live under feudalism,” “You say your boss exploits you, but you’re the one who chooses to work there,” “You criticize the actions of the American government yet you continue to live here.” In each case, the person making the critique seems to be focusing on the wrong thing. Why should we leave the country instead of making the government’s policies better? Why should we give up our paycheck instead of demanding an end to exploitation? Because it’s perfectly possible to “have your cake and eat it too,” why should we be asking people to choose between either bad cake or no cake?
That’s kind of how I think about Amazon and the iPhone. The problem isn’t that people use iPhones, it’s that iPhones are produced under intolerable conditions. If people should be ashamed, it’s not for the act of purchasing the product, but for failing to join a political movement aimed at ending exploitation. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having something like Amazon, a central system for choosing and delivering goods. (Apart from the climate consequences of mass consumption which is an entirely separate debate that will be had on a day that is not today.) The problem is that this system is operating as an extreme hierarchy, in which one man reaps nearly all the benefits and workers have very little control over their conditions. The solution, then, should not be to get people to stop using Amazon, any more than the solution to bad government policy is to leave the country. Instead, the goal should be to democratize Amazon and redistribute its earnings more equitably. In a way, Amazon is like the government: It’s been called monopolistic, and is steadily becoming more so. Plus, as with the working class families who shop at Walmart, why would we put the onus of ethical action on the consumer trying to save money? And besides, is Amazon that much worse than other giant corporations? On the left, there’s a slogan: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” meaning that if the economic system is based on exploitation, it’s fruitless to try not to participate in an exploitative system. You’re going to be, no matter what, unless you go off and live in the forest and eat berries. So you might as well keep your Prime account, keep getting Always Lower prices at Walmart, and join the international proletarian movement!
I tell myself all of these things, and I believe them, but then I quickly swing back in the other direction: Okay, fine, there may not be any PERFECTLY ethical form of consumption, but surely there is more and less ethical consumption. If you have a choice between non-union sweatshop-made goods and goods made with well-paid unionized laborers, shouldn’t you choose the latter? Do consumers really bear no responsibility for the consequences of their choices? If consumers stopped using Amazon, Amazon wouldn’t be able to keep exploiting people. Boycotts can work, consumers have power. This seems persuasive to me, too. If I wear coats made by slaves, and I could choose to wear coats that are not made by slaves, surely that’s bad. And if that’s bad, then aren’t other choices just less extreme versions of a quite real ethical dilemma?
All of this gets complicated by another ethical problem: that of needless consumption itself. Is the problem that I am buying gummies and lamp harps from Amazon in particular, or is it that I am buying gummies and lamp harps when there are poor children whose families can’t afford to keep them alive? Perhaps the thing that makes me a hypocrite is not that I am going to the wrong retailer, but that I’m buying retail goods that I don’t absolutely need. I’ve wrestled with this before in the context of Mardi Gras: I love Mardi Gras, but it’s wasteful, extravagant, and in some sense pointless, and I have difficulty trying to justify it. And yet I feel strongly that a world without Mardi Gras would be a much worse world and that there’s no need to choose between Mardi Gras and healthy children. The kind of life I live, with its occasional carnivals and candies, seems like one everyone could have if we distributed the earth’s resources well.
I have no good answers to the Amazon problem, because I hold two beliefs that contradict each other and I haven’t found a way to reconcile them: (1) what’s wrong is not the act of purchasing from Amazon, but what Amazon does to its employees, and since there would be nothing wrong with purchasing from Amazon if it was, say, a worker cooperative, the demand should be “democratize it” rather than “stop using it.” (2) You shouldn’t buy from companies with highly unethical business practices, such as staying in a hotel that fired striking workers, or buying slave-made goods. I wrestle with this constantly, because Amazon is very difficult to avoid: We sell Current Affairs books and magazine subscriptions using Amazon and we use certain Amazon “web services” (Amazon absolutely dominates cloud computing and is bigger than its four next biggest competitors—Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Alibaba—combined, so lots of entities that you might not think are supporting Amazon are supporting Amazon). The company is going to continue to grow and grow, and we will all be touched by it in one way or another. Is it right or even helpful to boycott it? Should we decline to watch Amazon TV shows, on principle, and if so what is the principle?
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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