Fascist Twinkie hoarder Donald Trump, who boasts with the desperation of a man in possession of the world’s smallest micropenis, often says that he’s going to “have to look at a lot of things” when asked for specifics about his policies should he become President. That’s his way of trying to make it sound like he’s not an impetuous, adult baby who has no idea what he’s talking about and is too lazy to conduct basic research.
When it comes to doing “regretfully” unpleasant things to people who are not very white, he is definitely going to have to look at a lot of things. Nipple clamps? Cattle prods? Internment camps? Well, they are the linchpins of democracy.
In Hunter Walker’s Yahoo! Politics piece, Trump not only serves up Torquemada-esque talking points, but the skank even has the lack of self-awareness to mention Monica Lewinsky. An excerpt:
Yahoo News asked Trump whether his push for increased surveillance of American Muslims could include warrantless searches. He suggested he would consider a series of drastic measures.
“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” Trump said. “And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
Yahoo News asked Trump whether this level of tracking might require registering Muslims in a database or giving them a form of special identification that noted their religion. He wouldn’t rule it out.
“We’re going to have to — we’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely,” Trump said when presented with the idea. “We’re going to have to look at the mosques. We’re going to have to look very, very carefully.”•
Nikola Tesla was dreaming his seemingly impossible dreams of drones–bolts of Thor!–a century ago, but some military analysts in the U.S. began to seriously consider pilotless planes dropping bombs and aiding in surveillance in the relatively pacific period between the two World Wars. In an article from the September 8, 1934 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which also looked at experimentation in germ warfare, robotic fliers were proposed, though the U.S. military wanted to no part in such outlandish speculation.
Maybe we should tell the GOP Presidential candidates that climate change is Muslim?
Like most people, I don’t give a crap what the Islamic State wants, except insofar as comprehending that mindset will aid in the destruction of the terrorist organization. Empathy is a useful tool, even in war. In addition to understanding the ideology of the monstrous group, I’m also curious how much drug use is employed to “program” the modern suicidal soldiers. We know that a mélange of medieval brutality, Hollywood technique and social media are the heart of its methods, but what is driving the execution?
When it comes to the murderous principles, Graeme Wood raises many intelligent points about the terrorists’ apocalyptic nature in his new Atlantic essay. The opening:
What is the Islamic State?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.•
The sidewalks in Paris weren’t yet dry when America’s leading ghoul Bill Kristol was being wheeled in front of cameras to call for 50,000 U.S. ground troops to be deployed to the Middle East, for a war that would no doubt last decades and get many thousands of people killed. All that money and death for something so impractical as a ground effort against a moving target, when a flexible, selective offensive is much safer and more intelligent. But what can you expect from this embalmed-looking buffoon, who seems at this point to only be able to get hard from inhaling the scent of soldier blood.
Of course, this routinely discredited dunderhead won’t be alone in calling for a large-scale war effort. With GOP rivals trying to out-extreme one another, the war drums are now to be pounded with many fists.
Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.
So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.
The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong. …
Finally, terrorism is just one of many dangers in the world, and shouldn’t be allowed to divert our attention from other issues. Sorry, conservatives: when President Obama describes climate change as the greatest threat we face, he’s exactly right. Terrorism can’t and won’t destroy our civilization, but global warming could and might.•
One of the better understandings I’ve read of the current American mindset is Ben Casselman’s Five Thirty Eight piece “The Economy Is Better — Why Don’t Voters Believe It?” The reporter travels to Davenport, Iowa, to get a sense of why voters in a city with a mercifully low unemployment rate still have a profound fear of falling.
The passage below is poignant and a little heartbreaking. Local citizens (and others, no doubt, across America) yearn for a return to the time when you were educated when you were young and then coasted to success for the rest of your life on that foundation. Not only is that not coming back, but it’s going further and further away. We’re just at the beginning of a very bumpy technological and cultural transition.
An excerpt:
I was in Davenport just days before a closely contested local election in which the city’s mayor wasunseated after eight years in office. The campaign was focused on local issues — a riverfront development project, a new on-shore casino, the controversial firing of the city manager — but Jason Gordon, a city alderman running for re-election, said he had heard voters talk about how the economy had changed.
Gordon, who wasre-elected, got his start in politics working for U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, a moderate Republican, and is drawn to mainstream presidential candidates, not the insurgents. (Local government races in Davenport are nonpartisan.) But he said he understood voters’ concern about the long-term direction of the economy.
“This is a county that 40 years ago, you could go to college and you’d be set for life, or you could come out of high school and get a job at Deere orCaseor wherever and also be set for life with a solid, middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “That doesn’t exist here anymore, and I don’t think it exists anywhere anymore.”
The recession may not have hit Davenport hard, Gordon added, but it nonetheless revealed how fragile the economy can be, shattering what was left of the illusion of stability.
“If you look at a lot of the numbers, unemployment and other data, they look good, but I still sense some angst that you’re one development away from a dire set of circumstances,” Gordon said. “It’s not your house that burned down, but your neighbor’s did.”•
Henry Miller wrote this in the early pages of Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch: “The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls.”
While the rise of the Islamic State, a nightmarish quasi-nation of no precise borders, was certainly made possible by the senseless invasion of Iraq by the United States, I don’t think the destructive impulse that drives it was. Unfortunate geopolitical decisions liberated the madness but did not create it. Terror is usually thought to be a response, but it can also be a call, driven by deeply embedded ideologies and psychologies, whether we’re speaking of a large-scale operation like Nazism or a relatively small-scale one like ISIS. Sometimes evil is just evil.
Disappear every last Westerner from the Middle East and attacks such as the horror in Paris will continue, because the very fact of liberalism and secularism is incompatible with this small but destructive band of zealots. The world just means something different to them, and they can’t abide by such differences.
The overwhelming majority of the globe’s nearly 1.6 billion Muslims are clearly living peaceful, productive lives, but the members of ISIS and Al Qaeda aren’t among them. There’s no easy strategy to defeat them for good, with trillions of dollars of boots on the ground unlikely to bring about a lasting peace and likely to be attended by many casualties. A broader coalition of free nations acting in an opportunistic military fashion is really the best guess right now.
In his latest FT column, Edward Luce looks at the impact of the Paris attacks on the U.S. 2016 election season. An excerpt:
Even before the carnage in Paris, the sands of American public opinion were shifting. Last week a majority said they were prepared to put more US troops into Iraq and Syria to defeat Isis. After November 13, that number is likely to rise. The pressure on Mr Obama to take more drastic action, such as agreeing to “no-fly zones” within Syria, is rising. At nearly every point, Mr Obama has been caught behind the curve on Syria. In early 2014, he described Isis as “junior varsity”, which meant they were unlikely to trouble the grown-ups. Within weeks the group had taken control of up to a third of Iraq and was spreading rapidly in Syria. Whatever the reality on the ground today, Americans are prone to distrust Mr Obama’s reassuring words on Isis.
He is losing his grip on the language. When he came into office, Mr Obama quietly dropped George W Bush’s “war on terror”. That downgrade looks unlikely to outlast his period of office. It was motivated by the view that the US had brought much of the terror on itself by the mistaken 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Mr Obama vowed to undo. By 2011, all US troops were out of Iraq.
But the success of Isis, which filled much of the vacuum left by a departing US, has challenged Mr Obama’s worldview. Instead of seeing Isis as a product of the botched aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq — notably the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated army and leave Baghdad in the grip of the Shia — many Americans see it as a result of Mr Obama’s decision to pull out of Iraq in 2011. He has already put 3,500 troops back into Iraq. US public opinion would like to see more. The Paris attacks will increase that drumbeat.
Mr Obama’s fellow Democrats have yet to catch up with that reality.•
One thing I know for sure about the future is that it won’t be a utopia–we’ll see to that. Tomorrow will be only as good as humans are, and we tend to stink up the joint.
However, major changes will come to life, especially city life, in the short run, because we’re on the precipice of game-changing technological innovations. If driverless, for instance, is really perfected in the next 25 years or so, the nature of urban life is remade, and car ownership will become ever-more optional. Our world will be a greener and more convenient thing, but I’m willing to bet it won’t all be electric bicycles and vertical gardens.
So what could a successfully networked city of the transportation near-future look like? Picture this.
You wake up and open an app that tells you how to leverage the city’s various transit options to get to your appointment. Maybe it’s a walk to a bicycle, which you pedal to a bus. Or an autonomous taxi to the downtown perimeter to hail a ride-hailing service, driven by a human. Or borrowing a car that belongs to your apartment building’s small fleet.
Once outside, you’ll notice community gardens and playgrounds where parking lots once stood. The air will be cleaner and you might hear birds chirp, both due to the preponderance of electric vehicles. Emergency vehicle sirens are less common as automotive accidents decline thanks to on-board car sensors that track moving objects and humans. Trucks don’t crowd the streets because deliveries are made at night by self-driving vehicles.
“In many ways, we’ll be moving back toward the city of the past, and much like in the 18th century we’ll be designing around people who are walking, biking and even growing their own food,” says Gabe Klein, author of Start-Up City: Inspiring Public and Private Entrepreneurship, Getting Projects Done, and Having Fun.
In less than two decades, researchers say cities could become safer for pedestrians and cyclists and what cars do exist will be small, electric and largely driverless. Under this optimistic forecast, public transit will be efficient, and smart traffic signals will keep the system moving along.
Not that this vision is either guaranteed or without potentially damaging potholes.•
In an excellent Five Books interview, writer Calum Chace suggests a quintet of titles on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, four of which I’ve read. In recommending The Singularity Is Near, he defends the author Ray Kurzweil against charges of techno-quackery, though the futurist’s predictions have grown more desperate and fantastic as he’s aged. It’s not that what he predicts can’t ever be be done, but his timelines seem to me way too aggressive.
Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, another choice, is a very academic work, though an important one. Interesting that Bostrom thinks advanced AI is a greater existential threat to humans than even climate change. (I hope I’ve understood the philosopher correctly in that interpretation.) The next book is Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, which I enjoyed, but I prefer Chace’s fourth choice, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age, which covers the same terrain of technological unemployment with, I think, greater rigor and insight. The final suggestion is one I haven’t read, Greg Egan’s sci-fi novel Permutation City, which concerns intelligence uploading and wealth inequality.
An excerpt about Kurzweil:
Question:
Let’s talk more about some of these themes as we go through the books you’ve chosen. The first one on your list is The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil. He thinks things are moving along pretty quickly, and that a superintelligence might be here soon.
Calum Chace:
He does. He’s fantastically optimistic. He thinks that in 2029 we will have AGI. And he’s thought that for a long time, he’s been saying it for years. He then thinks we’ll have an intelligence explosion and achieve uploading by 2045. I’ve never been entirely clear what he thinks will happen in the 16 years in between. He probably does have quite detailed ideas, but I don’t think he’s put them to paper. Kurzweil is important because he, more than anybody else, has made people think about these things. He has amazing ideas in his books—like many of the ideas in everybody’s books they’re not completely original to him—but he has been clearly and loudly propounding the idea that we will have AGI soon and that it will create something like utopia. I came across him in 1999 when I read his book, Are We Spiritual Machines? The book I’m suggesting here is The Singularity is Near, published in 2005. The reason why I point people to it is that it’s very rigorous. A lot of people think Kurzweil is a snake-oil salesman or somebody selling a religious dream. I don’t agree. I don’t agree with everything he says and he is very controversial. But his book is very rigorous in setting out a lot of the objections to his ideas and then tackling them. He’s brave, in a way, in tackling everything head-on, he has answers for everything.
Question:
Can you tell me a bit more about what ‘the singularity’ is and why it’s near?
Calum Chace:
The singularity is borrowed from the world of physics and math where it means an event at which the normal rules break down. The classic example is a black hole. There’s a bit of radiation leakage but basically, if you cross it, you can’t get back out and the laws of physics break down. Applied to human affairs, the singularity is the idea that we will achieve some technological breakthrough. The usual one is AGI. The machine becomes as smart as humans and continues to improve and quickly becomes hundreds, thousands, millions of times smarter than the smartest human. That’s the intelligence explosion. When you have an entity of that level of genius around, things that were previously impossible become possible. We get to an event horizon beyond which the normal rules no longer apply.
I’ve also started using it to refer to a prior event, which is the ‘economic singularity.’ There’s been a lot of talk, in the last few months, about the possibility of technological unemployment. Again, it’s something we don’t know for sure will happen, and we certainly don’t know when. But it may be that AIs—and to some extent their peripherals, robots—will become better at doing any job than a human. Better, and cheaper. When that happens, many or perhaps most of us can no longer work, through no fault of our own. We will need a new type of economy. It’s really very early days in terms of working out what that means and how to get there. That’s another event that’s like a singularity — in that it’s really hard to see how things will operate at the other side.•
I’m all for incentivizing the exploration of space as long as its done with sane regulations, though it is strange that the United States has unilaterally privatized asteroids and the like, making it finders keepers for American corporations that lay claim to pieces of the final frontier.Granted, trying to get the whole world on the same page for global guidelines would be difficult, but certainly some wider agreement would be helpful since we’re not likely to be the only nation pioneering out there. Hopefully this solitary move will force a worldwide discussion that results in a broader consensus.
The United States Senate has passed theSpace Act of 2015, which includes a range of legislative changes intended to boost the US space industry.
Perhaps the most significant part are measures allowing US citizens to engage in the commercial exploration and exploitation of “space resources,” with examples including includes water and minerals. The right to exploit resources covers anything in space that isn’t alive – so if a commercial exploration team discovers microbial life, they can’t exploit it for profit.
For the purposes of this bill a “citizen of the United States” is defined as “(A) an individual who is a citizen of the United States”, “(B) an entity organized or existing under the laws of the United States or a State” or “an entity organized or existing under the laws of a foreign country if the controlling interest (as defined by the Secretary of Transportation) is held by an individual or entity described in subclause (A) or (B) of this clause”.
That means not only individuals but also corporations, including those that are not wholly US owned, qualify as US citizens for the purpose of mineral exploitation in space. For example, Richard Branson is a British citizen, but he’s an investor in Planetary Resources, a self-described “asteroid mining company” that has been heavily involved in lobbying in favor of the Space Act. As a result, he’s likely to be one of the first British people to profit from US commercial asteroid mining.•
Technology won’t make us poorer, at least not in the aggregate. Distribution could be a thorny problem, but there are worse things than having to come up with political solutions to close a yawning wealth inequality in a time of plenty.
In his latest Financial Times column, Andrew McAfee focuses on a different issue concerning to him in regards to technological unemployment: the devil and idle (non-robotic) hands. He cites the alarming Case-Deaton findings of a scary spike in the mortality rate of white, middle-aged Americans, believing the collapse of industrial jobs and of communities is a matter of causation, with the former prompting the latter.
It’s difficult to know for sure if that’s so, but it’s possible McAfee is on to something. Already it seems we’ve become too much a nation anesthetized by prescription painkillers, fantasy football and smartphones, not willing to take a good look in the mirror, unless it’s the black mirror. Sure, there’s nothing new in feeling lost, but you only get to find yourself through a life lived with purpose. My best guess is that people in a less-workcentric world will eventually find new kinds of purpose, but the transition may be a bumpy one.
An excerpt:
So what happens when the industrial-era jobs that underpinned the middle class start to go away? Voltaire offered a prescient caution when he observed that: “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
Of the three of these, I’m the least worried about need. Trade and technological progress, after all, make a society wealthier in aggregate. The problem that they bring is not one of scarcity — of not enough to go around. Instead, they bring up thorny questions of allocation.
But rather than spending time on that issue here (if you’re interested, Erik Brynjolfsson and I dedicate a lot of our bookThe Second Machine Age to it), I want to focus on Voltaire’s other two evils, boredom and vice. How bad are they? How worried should we be about them?
I sometimes hear the argument that we shouldn’t be that worried at all. If we don’t need people’s labour, this logic goes, why should we care what they do with their time? Why should traditional notions of boredom and vice matter? If people want to drink, take drugs, engage in casual sex or play video games all day, where’s the harm? These are not the most conventionally respectable or productive activities, but why should we let convention continue to hold sway?•
Positions traditionally seen as starter jobs or bridge positions have become permanent ones for many people in the post-collapse economy, which is part of the reason you see the campaign for $15 minimum wage. Unfortunately, this type of low-skill employment is most easily replaced by Weak AI, which is developing quickly. If Toyota’s just-announced $1 billion investment in AI is any indication, that process will only speed up. What then becomes of the bellhop, shelf-picker and fast-food worker?
From Heather Kelly’s CNN report about Tally, the inventory robot:
Retail stores typically have human employees who roam the floors, manually taking inventory with handled devices.
In a mid-sized store like a Walgreens, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 products for sale. Bogolea says it takes an employee 20 to 30 hours a week to audit all those items.
One Tally robot can scan 15,000 items in an hour.
Completely autonomous, Tally moves four feet at a time before pausing to take high-resolution photographs of everything on store shelves. It tags the images with metadata, like an exact location, and uploads them to the cloud. The system then matches those images against a store’s files of what exactly that shelf should look like and instantly creates reports.
If Tally sees the cereal aisle is low on Cheerios, an employee can quickly restock that shelf.•
The problem with treating fledgling fascists like jokes is that’s what they all seem like, at least initially.
I’m sure Benito Mussolini originally appeared to be a vulgar cartoon too outlandish to be feared, until it was too late, his entire country perverted into something awful before his murderous gaze. One of the least-insane things he did: In 1933, Il Duce ordered all Italian newspapers to push aside current events and dedicate their front pages to articles about Julius Caesar. The message was clear, that Mussolini was a latter-day Caesar and would rule with absolute authority. Tragically, that’s how things went, until he found himself hanging from the business end of a meat hook from the roof of an Esso gas station in 1945. The odd decree was covered in an article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September of that year.
Everybody could be wrong. It’s wouldn’t be the first time. Maybe the new technologies will birth plentiful jobs and industries we just can’t yet imagine. Or perhaps we will have to radically think our economy in a climate that favors machine labor over the human kind.
It’s striking that the worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. seem almost alternative universes, with a growing number in the former acknowledging that Guaranteed Basic Income may need become a reality, and the latter, represented last night by the GOP debate, in which it’s not even part of the conversation. I believe Marco Rubio spoke up against the minimum-wage hike because it would make “people more expensive than machines,” which glancingly acknowledges the actual world we’re living in, but doesn’t offer any sort of solution. Be poor or automation will make you poorer isn’t the best we can do.
In the face of rising U.S. income inequality and concerns about job loss to automation, some of Silicon Valley’s best-known names including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman havespoken up in favor of a universal basic incomethat would give people a baseline standard of living in an economy that may not be able to produce enough decently compensated work for everyone.
“Everyone in the country having jobs is not going to make sense anymore because we’re going to have computers and robots doing what we’re doing most of what we’re doing today,” saidJim Pugh, who got a Ph.D in distributed robotics before he worked on the original 2008 Obama campaign. “If you accept that as a premise, what we need to do as a society is not made up of small changes. It’s actually a fairly radical change and basic income seems to be an elegant solution for doing that.”
A basic income is a kind of Social Security system where all citizens or residents get an unconditional amount of money on top of whatever their wages are from elsewhere. It assumes that, above this minimum level of income, people will still be motivated to work for more money or on more meaningful projects. …
Pugh said the point ofthe Createathonis to build energy for a broader political movement that will advocate for universal basic income and push for small pilots to test the idea out in the United States.
To be fair, not everyone prominent in the tech industry agrees with the premise that there won’t be enough jobs for everyone.•
The real problem isn’t that your Vizio Smart TV is watching you though, sure, that’s not good. The main issue is that when the Internet of Things becomes the thing, when everything is a computer, objects of all sorts will be quietly collecting information about us just the way the Internet does. There will be no opt-out switch, no notification, no hum to clue you in. The new arrangement will be silent and seem perfectly normal.
TV makers are constantly crowing about the tricks their smart TVs can do. But one of the most popular brands has a feature that it’s not advertising: Vizio’s Smart TVs track your viewing habits and share it with advertisers, who can then find you on your phone and other devices.
The tracking — which Vizio calls “Smart Interactivity” — is turned on by default for the more than 10 million Smart TVs that the company has sold. Customers who want to escape it have to opt-out. In a statement, Vizio said customers’ “non-personal identifiable information may be shared with select partners … to permit these companies to make, for example, better-informed decisions regarding content production, programming and advertising.”
Vizio’s actions appear to go beyond what others are doing in the emerging interactive television industry. Vizio rivals Samsung and LG Electronics only track users’ viewing habits if customers choose to turn the feature on. And unlike Vizio, they don’t appear to provide the information in a form that allows advertisers to reach users on other devices.•
Years before he was to become a Hollywood heavyweight, Ivan Reitman helped launch the career of affable, parody-ready illusionist Doug Henning, who came to attention in Canada with the stage performance Spellbound. Relocated to Broadway in the mid-1970s and rechristened The Magic Show, it was a long-running sensation. After a break from the NYC boards and some permutations in his personal life, Henning tried, with disastrous results, to recapture the old magic with his 1983 creation, Merlin. Before itwas delivered a death blow to the stomach, à la Houdini, by indifferent audiences, Henning was profiled by Mary Vespa of People. The opening:
Doug Henning learned one of his most valuable tricks not from another magician but from the manager of the famous mime Marcel Marceau: “Keep yourself scarce.” He has. Though he’s been doing his annual NBC-TV specials for eight years now, and frequently takes his act on the road, he hasn’t set foot on Broadway since The Magic Show, the popular revue that established him as big box office when he starred in it from 1974 to 1977. Now he’s back, this time with Merlin, a musical with a $4 million budget, lavish sets, stunning effects and stunts on a scale that, he says, “staggers the imagination.”
Indeed, the Mark Hellinger Theater has never seen quite such goings-on. There is exotic music. Beautiful women emerge from fire, burst into a constellation of stars, disappear into thin air. Chita Rivera, as the evil queen intent on doing in the young Merlin (Henning) before he meets the future King Arthur, changes a black panther into a temptress who tries to distract him from his magic. But Henning survives this and other hazards—at one point he disappears from a flaming cage being lifted above the stage—to triumph in the end.
Whether all this will dazzle the critics won’t be clear until the show, now playing to preview audiences, opens on Jan. 9. But for Henning, at least, Merlin is already a milestone that is not only professional but personal: The show’s water spirit, a lithe brunette dream woman he levitates above a fountain, is in fact a new wife who’s given him a badly needed lift.
Cut to 1981. Henning was trying to bounce back from a busted marriage. Exhausted after doing one of his TV shows, he retreated to a favorite haunt, the Transcendental Meditation Center at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. “Doug was just so sad and lonely,” recalls friend Jim Bagnola. “It seemed as though he was achieving all his goals and still remaining unfulfilled.” Call it luck. Timing. Or was it life playing a trick on a superillusionist? There, at a banquet, he met a beauty who would sweep away his woes like, well, magic.
“My friends said there was practically a flash of light,” says Henning, 35. “I had never felt anything like it in my whole life.” The dazzler was Debby Douillard, 27, an abstract painter with bottomless blue eyes who was taking classes at the university and also had just separated from her spouse. She, too, felt Cupid’s bolt: “It was like I blossomed right on the spot.”
They got engaged within the week and wed last December. He still marvels at the sorcery she’s worked on him. “When I perform, I could love a million people,” Henning admits, “but I had trouble loving one person. I would separate love and sex. Debby’s helped me overcome my fear of intimacy.” Her problem was shyness, and Henning’s Rx has been to use her not only in Merlin but also on tour, where she performs as a singer, dancer and his assistant. “I have a tendency to be inward,” says Debby. “Doug’s turning me inside out. Sometimes it’s painful, but it’s a great growing experience.”•
Not content with merely being a magus, Henning also founded a political organization, The Natural Law Party, which helped him lose elections very badly in both the UK and Canada. Sometimes democracy works.
______________________________
Immanuel Velikovsky was an outsider scientist whose work was impressively elaborate nonsense. “Astronomers at Harvard consider the sensational theory of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky that the earth stood still a couple of times in Biblical days sheer nonsense,” noted Popular Sciencein 1950.A charismatic guy, he nonetheless managed to befriend some of the greatest minds of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Freeman Dyson. In a New York Review of Books piece, Dyson recalled their friendship. An excerpt:
After I came to America, I became a friend of Immanuel Velikovsky, who was my neighbor in Princeton. Velikovsky was a Russian Jew, with an intense interest in Jewish legends and ancient history. He was born into a scholarly family in 1895 and obtained a medical degree at Moscow University in 1921. During the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution he wrote a long Russian poem with the title “Thirty Days and Nights of Diego Pirez on the Sant Angelo Bridge.” It was published in Paris in 1935. Diego Pirez was a sixteenth-century Portuguese Jewish mystic who came to Rome and sat on the bridge near the Vatican, surrounded by beggars and thieves to whom he told his apocalyptic visions. He was condemned to death by the Inquisition, pardoned by the pope, and later burned as a heretic by the emperor Charles V.
Velikovsky escaped from Russia and settled in Palestine with his wife and daughters. He described to me the joys of practicing medicine on the slopes of Mount Carmel above Haifa, where he rode on a donkey to visit his patients in their homes. He founded and edited a journal, Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum, which was the official journal of the Hebrew University before the university was established. His work for the Scripta was important for the founding of the Hebrew University. But he had no wish to join the university himself. To fulfill his dreams he needed complete independence. In 1939, after sixteen years in Palestine, he moved to America, where he had no license to practice medicine. To survive in America, he needed to translate his dreams into books.
Eleven years later, Macmillan published Worlds in Collision, and it became a best seller. Like Diego Pirez, Velikovsky told his dreams to the public in language they could understand. His dreams were mythological stories of catastrophic events, gleaned from many cultures, especially from ancient Egypt and Israel. These catastrophes were interwoven with a weird history of planetary collisions. The planets Venus and Mars were supposed to have moved out of their regular orbits and collided with the Earth a few thousand years ago. Electromagnetic forces were invoked to counteract the normal effects of gravity. The human and cosmic events were tied together in a flowing narrative. Velikovsky wrote like an Old Testament prophet, calling down fire and brimstone from heaven, in a style familiar to Americans raised on the King James Bible. More best sellers followed:Ages in Chaos in 1952, Earth in Upheaval in 1955, Oedipus and Akhnaton in 1960. Velikovsky became famous as a writer and as a public speaker.
In 1977 Velikovsky asked me to write a blurb advertising his new book, Peoples of the Sea. I wrote a statement addressed to him personally:
First, as a scientist, I disagree profoundly with many of the statements in your books. Second, as your friend, I disagree even more profoundly with those scientists who have tried to silence your voice. To me, you are no reincarnation of Copernicus or Galileo. You are a prophet in the tradition of William Blake, a man reviled and ridiculed by his contemporaries but now recognized as one of the greatest of English poets. A hundred and seventy years ago, Blake wrote: “The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius, but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass and obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art and Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If not, he must be starved.” So you stand in good company. Blake, a buffoon to his enemies and an embarrassment to his friends, saw Earth and Heaven more clearly than any of them. Your poetic visions are as large as his and as deeply rooted in human experience. I am proud to be numbered among your friends.
I added the emphatic instruction, “This statement to be printed in its entirety or not at all.” A quick response came from Velikovsky. He said, “How would you like it if I said you were the reincarnation of Jules Verne?” He wanted to be honored as a scientist, not as a poet. My statement was not printed, and Peoples of the Sea became a best seller without my help. We remained friends, and in that same year he gave me a copy of his Diego Pirez poem, which I treasure as the truest expression of his spirit. I hope it will one day be adequately translated into English.•
A 1972 CBC doc about the Velikovsky and his catastrophist claptrap.
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Here’s an oddity: In 1991, Doris Tate, mother of actressSharon Tatewho was among those murdered by theManson Family, appeared on To Tell the Truth hosted by Alex Trebek. The elder Tate became a campaigner for the rights of crime victims. This short-lived iteration of the venerable game show, which had a harder, more provocative edge than such fare usually has, provided a platform for Tate’s work. She passed away the following year as a result of a brain tumor.
If we don’t extinct ourselves in the short run, it will seem almost beyond imagination one day, and hopefully one day soon, that we ever stubbornly continued to get the majority of our energy from sources other than the sun. Children born into a solar world won’t understand why we didn’t sooner heavily invest in R&D try to exploit this clean, natural abundance.
In Ed Crooks and Lucy Hornby’s FT Magazine piece, “Sunshine Revolution,” the writers look at, among other things, Las Vegas as an “unlikely hotbed of radicalism” for U.S. solar conversion, a shift driven more by lower costs than the bigger picture. The opening:
The suburbs of Las Vegas do not look like the cradle of a revolution. Golden stucco-clad houses stretch for street after identical street, interspersed with gated communities with names such as Spanish Oaks and Rancho Bel Air. The sky is the deepest blue, the desert air is clear and the distant mountains are beautiful. The only sounds are the buzz of a gardener’s hedge trimmer and a squeaking baby buggy pushed by a power-walking mother. The bright lights of Sin City seem a very long way away.
Yet these quiet streets are being changed by a movement that is gathering momentum across America and around the world, challenging one of the most fundamental of economic relationships: the way we use and pay for energy. There are now more than 7,000 homes in Nevada fitted with solar panels to generate their own electricity, and the number is rising fast. Just five years ago, residential solar power was still a niche product for the homeowner with a fat wallet and a bleeding heart. Not any more. Technology, politics and finance have aligned to move it into the mainstream. Solar power has become the fastest-growing energy source in the US.
For decades the electricity industry has been a cautious and conservative business, but the plunging prices of solar panels, down by about two-thirds in the past six years, have woken it up with a bang. Dynamic rooftop solar power companies have entered the market, in the most radical change to electricity supplies since the industry was born in the 19th century. It has been described as the equivalent of the mobile revolution in telephony, or the PC in computing.•
When things take a turn for the worse, people often follow course, the need to blame seemingly wired into the less-blessed areas of our brains. As globalization and technology have conspired to assail the privileges of the American white middle class, fingers have increasingly been pointed, especially in this political season. Somehow, Mexicans are supposedly culpable, even though they were long welcomed here, legal or not, to work our farmland.
Except that Mexican people are trying to beat the border patrol in Arizona in greatly diminished numbers, an inconvenient truth for panderers. Many of the immigrants attempting to stealthily enter the U.S. are Central Americans arriving in Texas. Why the shift? In an excellent London Review of Books report, Tom Stevenson answers that question and visits the checkpoints to see the harsh reality awaiting those seeking refuge. An excerpt:
If you take Route 281 south from San Antonio, past the billboards (‘We buy ugly houses – call this number’; ‘AAA finance loans from $50-$1280’), you eventually reach Falfurrias, the largest place in Brooks County but still a one-horse town. The Dairy Queen burned down in May and the Walmart closed in July. Falfurrias once had a reputation as a hub for illegal gambling but this summer the gaming houses were raided and shut down. The town seems abandoned, apart from a border patrol station and a detention centre. The United States Border Patrol operates checkpoints on main roads many miles from the actual frontier. Falfurrias is 70 miles from the border and one of the inspection points is just outside town. If you’re an undocumented migrant this is where you leave the highway and walk for miles through the wilderness. More migrants die from thirst and injury in Brooks County than anywhere else in the United States.
In Falfurrias I met Lavoyger J. Durham, a large man with a deep voice who drives a big 4×4. He was born on the King Ranch – Texas’s best-known agribusiness, roughly the size of Cornwall – and he has been a cowboy all his life. In his home he has framed copies of magazines in which he’s featured: on the front of the Cattleman he appears on horseback lassoing a calf. He has managed the El Tule ranch, just outside Falfurrias, for 25 years. His grandfather, he told me proudly, signed up with Captain Leander McNelly, a Confederate officer and Texas Ranger, to ‘clean South Texas’ of ‘bandits’, most of them Mexican: McNelly’s militia hanged hundreds of people in the 1870s. But Lavoyger is now worried about the number of would-be migrants dying on south Texas’s ranches. He’s half Mexican himself – what would his grandfather have made of that? – and speaks fluent Spanish. On the way to El Tule, he gossips about the Bush family – ‘Barbara was at my second wedding but not, well … involved’ – and plays around with names for the borderlands that don’t quite hit the mark: the ‘catch me if you can’ zone comes after the ‘free nilly willy’ zone, and so on.
I asked him how many people had been found dead in Brooks County so far this year. He wasn’t sure of the exact number and phoned the sheriff. ‘How many dead people we got this year?’ The answer was 28. ‘Tell your daughter I love her.’ That the remains of 28 migrants had been discovered in just one of Texas’s 254 counties in a six-month period ought to be remarkable, especially given that the sheriffs estimate only 10 to 15 per cent of those who die are ever found. There are no figures on the total number of undocumented migrant deaths in Texas. Lavoyger himself has come across more than two dozen bodies over the years. On the ranch he showed me a clearing littered with half-rotten clothes, although these filthy coats and jeans in this macabre collection didn’t necessarily come from dead bodies; as Lavoyger explained, most of the dead are found without clothes, and usually it’s the local wildlife – vultures circling or coyotes playing with the bones – that point to their whereabouts.
So how does an undocumented migrant end up dead on Lavoyger’s ranch?•
Retired chess champion Garry Kasparov, a real-life John Henry, is still fighting machines, chiefly Vladimir Putin’s. The Russian autocrat has led his nation to re-embrace the failed aggressions of the twentieth century rather than create a modern state based on the German model, doing so in the manner of an underworld mob boss, a capo with nuclear capabilities. His most outspoken Russian-born critic sat for an interview with Erich Follath of Spiegel, expressly accusing President Obama and the West of appeasement, which seems more than a little hyperbolic. The opening:
Spiegel:
Mr. Kasparov, you call Vladimir Putin the greatest threat to world peace. Don’t we need the Russian president’s help now more than ever to end wars and contain terrorism?
Garry Kasparov:
Russia is a mafia state today, and Putin is its top godfather. The regime is in trouble economically and can no longer offer anything to its citizens. That’s why Putin has to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, so he can serve his people the fairy tale of Russian pride and regaining its strength as a major power. But he uses fascist propaganda to do so. From Ukraine to Syria, he is behaving like the world’s new general and celebrating victories, while the American president sits on the sidelines and Europe sleeps. The West’s behavior toward Putin is political and moral capitulation.
Spiegel:
Now you’re really exaggerating.
Garry Kasparov:
No, I’m not. People would have been shaking their heads in disbelief if someone had predicted, 15 months ago, that Putin would annex Crimea and grossly violate European postwar borders. Then came the expansion into eastern Ukraine, and now the direct military intervention in the Syrian war, on the side of mass murderer Bashar Assad. Putin needs wars to legitimize his position. It’s the only move he has left. And his appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in late September is typical for action and counter reaction.
Spiegel:
What do you mean?
Garry Kasparov:
Putin spoke unabashedly about the importance of national sovereignty in Syria, a concept apparently near and dear to his heart, unless it comes to the sovereignty of Georgia, Ukraine or any other country in which he intervenes. Then he offered his cooperation, but without making any concrete concessions at all. And he didn’t have to, either. He knows what he can rely on. He has assets that are more valuable than words: He has tanks in Ukraine, fighter jets in Syria — and Barack Obama in the White House. His speech before the UN only an hour earlier was completely toothless. The West can’t come up with anything to deal with Moscow, except appeasement.•
Considering the poll numbers of Donald Trump and Ben Carson, we all owe Sarah Palin an apology, don’t you think?
You remember Sarah Palin, right? She was a bear-meat peddler who briefly governed the petro-socialist state of Alaska. I think she once hired a hit man to kill a rival cheerleader. Okay, I’m not sure about that part. That might have been the plot of a Lifetime movie I watched once in an airport lounge. But it still brings her to mind, doesn’t it?
I can still recall those halcyon days of 2008 when a Sarah Palin took the stage at the Republican National Convention and won the hearts and minds of those white Americans who were waiting for a spiteful poseur to express their grievances in a pre-Duck Duasty version of a Maoist “Speak Bitterness” meeting. Scrutiny did not become her, however, and Palin was eventually voted off the island due to her sheer idiocy and meanness, exiled to Elba or Arizona or somewhere. Now she’s merely a hologram of hate, activated occasionally in her camera-filled basement.
Those standards of basic competency, decency and honesty are longer with us less than a decade later, so on behalf of everyone, I’ll offer a mea culpa: Sorry, you horrible person, that you aren’t the dangerously unprepared nutbag to capture the imagination of white nationalist half-wits this time around. Take solace in knowing that this year’s models and their overt bigotry have served to redeem you from the absolute worst to almost the absolute worst, the way you once managed to make Dan Quayle seem interchangeable with Thomas Jefferson. You wore your simple mind on your sleeve but at least not on your hat.
From Eric Bradner’s CNN report on the GOP campaign, a modern story of belt buckles and pharaohs:
[Trump] said he hopes Carson “comes out great” from the scrutiny.
But Trump also implied that Carson’s story about attempting to stab someone in his youth — only to have his knife broken when he hit a large belt buckle — was hard to believe.
“Belt buckles really pretty much don’t stop stabbing,” Trump said. “They turn, they twist, things slide off them — pretty lucky if that happened.”
Trump said Carson’s description of his childhood temper as “pathological” is disturbing.
“It’s a serious statement when you say you have a pathological disease, because if I understand it, you can’t really cure it,” Trump said.
Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, Trump also cited Carson’s belief that the pyramids were built to store grain as another reason to question his judgment.
“So, you’re talking about storing grain in the pyramids. Well, they have very little space. They have space for small rooms, where the pharaohs had their coffins and where the pharaohs were buried, essentially,” Trump told host John Dickerson. “So, a lot of — a lot of things are going on. And I don’t know. I just don’t know what to think. I hope it — I hope it works out fine for Ben. I just don’t know what to think.”•
Just to make clear the utter uselessness of polls at this point in the Presidential race, I’ll point out the most recent Quinnipiac survey which reports that Gov. Chris Christie, who’s been pushed from the main stage in the upcoming GOP debate because he’s failed to register 2.5% support, would theoretically defeat Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head general-election matchup. Ben Carson, who would lose horribly in the general, is currently destroying Clinton by 10%. From Politico:
Among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters, Clinton bested Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to the tune of 53 percent to 35 percent, a 10-point jump for both from the same poll in September.
In general election matchups, Carson beat Clinton 50 percent to 40 percent, outdrawing the former secretary of state in the share of both men (55 percent to 35 percent) and of women (45 percent to 44 percent). Clinton also came up on the short end of hypothetical head-to-heads against Rubio (41 percent to 46 percent), Cruz (43 percent to 46 percent) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (43 percent to 46 percent), who drew less than Bush among Republican voters. Quinnipiac did not test a Bush-Clinton matchup.
Matched up against Trump, however, Clinton held a lead of 46 percent to 43 percent.•
The best follow-up reporting I’ve read about the eye-popping Anne Case-Angus Deaton study on the shocking spike in mortality among white American adults (which I blogged about here) is Julia Belluz’s Vox piece. It’s clear that oxycodone and the like are contributing furiously to the early deaths, but the question is why the usage has become so widespread. What is the void this group of people is trying to fill? Deaton discusses his theory with Belluz, though such overarching narratives are always somewhat slippery. An excerpt:
2) Deaton thinks middle-aged white Americans have “lost the narrative of their lives”
But what’s behind the substance abuse? One possible factor here: This demographic group has faced a rise in economic insecurity over the past decade, driven by things like the financial crisis and the collapse of manufacturing.
Still, it’s difficult to put together a full story of what’s going on. After all, if the recession or decline of manufacturing was the only factor, we might expect to see a similar uptick in mortality rates among middle-aged people in places such as Europe. But America seems to be unique in this regard.
“An anthropologist friend here says that [white, middle-age Americans] have lost the narrative of their lives — meaning something like a loss of hope, a loss of expectations of progress,” he explained.
Though African Americans as a group are still worse off overall, Deaton added, their quality of life has improved over the past several decades. “And when Hispanics look back, they may look back to where they came from, or what their parents or grandparents had,” he continued.•
The Paul family had become a de facto none-of-the-above box on GOP ballots, the happy recipients of the base’s increasingly loud “no” to the status quo. In the fractiousness of the current election cycle, Sen. Rand Paul was supposed to see his hodgepodge of unorthodox views rewarded with serious consideration atop the ticket. In a 2014 article I questioned at the time, the New York Times Magazine essentially prophesied it.
Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. In 2015, Paul has found his waiting pockets picked by Trump and Carson, the new standard-bearers of no standards, whose bigotry, paucity of policy and inanity provides the party faithful with an ever-more-forceful rebuke to its leadership. Not even Rick Santorum and the sweater-vest wing of the party is out there enough to get in on the action. The voters, disappointed repeatedly by the core, want to go as far away from it as possible.
Maybe that’s all this strange contest is, not some cult of personality working its voodoo on brains softened by Reality TV. Not even a sharp shift to the hard right. Perhaps it’s just “no.”
In a Politico Magazine article, Michael Lind traces the decline and fall of the modern American conservative movement, thinking that perhaps Trump’s rise is somewhat more nuanced than just mere negation. The opening:
There is an air of desperation out there on the GOP campaign trail. It’s impossible not to sense it in the kinds of things being said by teetering establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, both of whom started off the last debate virtually pleading with base voters to come to their senses about Donald Trump, who is barely identifiable as a conservative by any standard measure of ideology. Not to mention Ben Carson, whose views sound like a grab bag of life philosophies. “I want you to know I’m fed up. I’ve about had it with these people,” a flustered Kasich told a rally in his home state of Ohio this week. “What happened to our party? What happened to the conservative movement?”
It’s an excellent question. And maybe it’s time we stopped blaming the lack of traction experienced by establishment conservatives like Bush, Kasich, and Chris Christie on things like personality and debating skill, and started talking again about that thing known as “the conservative movement.” Maybe the real problem is less Jeb’s awkwardness, or Kasich’s personality, or Christie’s New Jersey bravado, than an issue that runs much deeper. The establishment candidates in this year’s Republican primary nomination campaign are out there reciting all the formulas that worked for Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes—supply-side tax cuts and more military spending. Yet the old-time conservative religion doesn’t seem to fire up the congregation, many of whose members have become idol-worshippers of strange new gods like Trump and Carson.
Why isn’t the old-time conservative religion working to fire people up any more? Maybe the reason is that it’s really, really old. So old it’s decrepit.•
In a dark, mostly serious 2010 Globe and Mail piece, Douglas Coupland wrote: “The middle class is over. It’s not coming back.” It seemed at the time the author may have been leaning too heavily on his sci-fi instincts the way he did in thinking the Segway the best thing since the invention of the wheel, but time seems to have been his friend.
In a Guardian essay, Charles Arthur has a go at the 2013 Frey-Osborne paper about automation that alarmed so many, arguing that while scarcity won’t likely be a problem of tomorrow, distribution may be in a big way. An excerpt:
So how much impact will robotics and AI have on jobs, and on society? Carl Benedikt Frey, who with Michael Osborne in 2013 published the seminal paperThe Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?– on which the BoA report draws heavily – says that he doesn’t like to be labelled a “doomsday predictor.”
He points out that even while some jobs are replaced, new ones spring up that focus more on services and interaction with and between people. “The fastest-growing occupations in the past five years are all related to services,” he tells the Observer. “The two biggest are Zumba instructor and personal trainer.”
Frey observes that technology is leading to a rarification of leading-edge employment, where fewer and fewer people have the necessary skills to work in the frontline of its advances. “In the 1980s, 8.2% of the US workforce were employed in new technologies introduced in that decade,” he notes. “By the 1990s, it was 4.2%. For the 2000s, our estimate is that it’s just 0.5%. That tells me that, on the one hand, the potential for automation is expanding – but also that technology doesn’t create that many new jobs now compared to the past.”
This worries Chace. “There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else,” he says. “Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of ‘gods,’ and then the rest of us.
“I think our best hope going forward is figuring out how to live in an economy of radical abundance, where machines do all the work, and we basically play.”
Arguably, we might be part of the way there already; is a dance fitness programme like Zumba anything more than adult play? But, as Chace says, a workless lifestyle also means “you have to think about a universal income” – a basic, unconditional level of state support.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that there has been so little examination of the social effects of AI.•
Certainly loan officers at traditional banks are on the chopping block, but are the banks themselves? A confluence of changes in technology and legislation is set to remake lending and borrowing in America, and there are costs and risks embedded in the convenience and opportunity. Maybe the early startups go bust, but the territory is likely to be “settled” sooner or later, much the same way that ridesharing is here to stay regardless of Uber’s fate.
The most immediate change will be an explosion in peer-to-peer lending. Just as Uber returns us to a world where anyone with a car could offer a ride to anyone with a thumb, peer-to-peer lending is both new and old. Before there was a robust retail and commercial banking system, there were people with money to lend and people who wanted to borrow it. But the current wave of peer-to-peer services takes this much further, into a hypercharged virtual realm where pools of small lenders can combine online to disperse pools of small loans. And they can do it without the friction, cost or heavy regulatory hurdles of traditional banking.
There are already many players in this field, such as Lending Club and Prosper, but most are already a decade old—ancient by tech standards. With less than $7 billion in loans in 2014, they are tiny in the multi-trillion-dollar lending world. Now the sector is showing explosive growth. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that it could be a $150 billion business by 2025.
The downside is that peer-to-peer interest rates are higher than at mainstream banks, sometimes well into the teens. The upside is that people who need modest sums (one site caps them at $35,000) can easily obtain funds from small individual lenders looking for a high return. What makes it attractive for lenders is that they can spread their capital over far more loans than any one peer could make to another peer, which reduces their risk.
Historically, the best answer to high unemployment has been to create more jobs. It’s a wonder if that’s still true, including in America, which has seen diminished and less-secure positions created in this very uneven economic recovery.
Utrecht is to experiment with Universal Basic Income on the city level, and now Finland may give it a go nationally. Can this social safety net work in some countries and not others? In all? In none?
Over the past decade, unemployment has risen drastically in the small Nordic country, home to just 5.4 million people.
In response, the Finnish Social Insurance Institution, known as KELA, has proposed an experiment to allot a monthly income of 800 euros (or roughly $881) tax-free. The cash will act as a replacement for other social benefits like housing and income support, but people will get it whether they work or not.
In other words, free money for all.
If approved in 2016, the project would begin with a pilot program in which people receive 550 euros per month and retain their benefits, before the model moves on to the real thing.
In purely democratic countries, like the US, basic income has remained on the fringes for decades. The Nixon administration tested out a form of the basic income model in the 1960s, but was met with little success.
“The biggest challenge for the basic income movement is convincing the larger public that it makes sense to redistribute economic resources to provide a basic income to all,” Almaz Zelleke, a basic income expert and associate professor at NYU Shanghai, tells Tech Insider. It involves “persuading the public that a basic income should be viewed as a basic democratic right, like the vote.”
In socially democratic countries, like the Netherlands and Finland, that idea has more legs.•
