1. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).
2. For instance, they may execute a “short squeeze” by bidding up a stock that investors have sold short, forcing them to close out their positions at ever-higher prices to contain their losses.
3. Marshall Brain, Manna (BYG, 2012).
4. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014).
1. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, and C. E. Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 1955, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Rochester_(computer_scientist), last modified March 15, 2014.
3. Committee on Innovations in Computing and Communications: Lessons from History, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, Funding a Revolution (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999), 201.
4. Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (New York: Basic Books 1993), 58, 221n.
5. The technical term for settling down is convergence. Whether and how such systems converge is a focus of much research.
6. Frank Rosenblatt, “The Perceptron: A Perceiving and Recognizing Automaton,” Project Para Report no. 85-460-1, Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL), January 1957.
7. Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972).
8. At this point, readers actually working in the field of AI are likely to be rolling their eyes as well, since I have lumped neural networks, machine learning, and big data together as though they are different names for exactly the same thing. In reality, many of the techniques used in the latter two fields aren’t based on anything resembling neurons. The common element, for the purpose of this discussion, is that they all take the same functional approach: create a program that extracts signal from noise in large bodies of data so those signals can serve as abstractions for understanding the domain or for classifying additional data.
9. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (1965).
10. Ronda Hauben, “From the ARPANET to the Internet,” last modified June 23, 1998, http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/tcpdigest_paper.txt.
11. For the proverbially impaired, here’s the original: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
12. Joab Jackson, “IBM Watson Vanquishes Human Jeopardy Foes,” PC World, February 16, 2011, http://www.pcworld.com/article/219893/ibm_watson_vanquishes_human_jeopardy_foes.html.
1. For a firsthand narrative of some of these events by the inventor himself, see Vic Scheinman’s interview at Robotics History: Narratives and Networks, accessed November 25, 2014, http://roboticshistory.indiana.edu/content/vic-scheinman.
2. I’m indebted to my friend Carl Hewitt, known for his early logic programming language Planner, for his eyewitness report on this incident. Carl is now board chair of the International Society for Inconsistency Robustness. Seriously, it’s a real topic.
3. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University, “Jedibot—Robot Sword Fighting,” May 2011, http://youtu.be/Qo79MeRDHGs.
4. John Markoff, “Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software,” New York Times, November 17, 2014, science section.
5. “Strawberry Harvesting Robot,” posted by meminsider, YouTube, November 30, 2010, http://youtu.be/uef6ayK8ilY.
6. For an amazingly insightful analysis of the effects of increased communication and decreased energy cost across everything from living cells to civilizations, see Robert Wright, Nonzero (New York: Pantheon 2000).
7. Amazon Web Services (AWS), accessed November 25, 2014, http://aws.amazon.com.
8. W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem).
1. At least, that’s the way I remember it. Dave may have a different recollection, especially in light of the fact that Raiders wasn’t released until 1981.
2. David Elliot Shaw, “Evolution of the NON-VON Supercomputer,” Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports, 1983, http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:11591.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce, last modified December 31, 2014.
4. James Aley, “Wall Street’s King Quant David Shaw’s Secret Formulas Pile Up Money: Now He Wants a Piece of the Net,” Fortune, February 5, 1996 http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/02/05/207353/index.htm.
5. Ibid.
6. To be clear, I have no inside information about the particular strategies that D. E. Shaw may or may not have employed. This is a generic discussion of HFT.
7. This particular solution was brought to my attention by Kapil Jain from the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University.
8. Similar proposals have been made to eliminate spam: charge a tiny fraction of a cent for each email sent, making it unprofitable while permitting substantive communication to flow.
9. There’s a related concept in quantum physics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you can’t know both the position and momentum of a particle precisely; the analogy here is that you can’t know both the exact price of a security and the time of that price precisely. Divergent prices of the same security on different exchanges are like Schrödinger’s mythical cat—the values exist simultaneously in superposition. The problem with HFT is that unlike quantum physics, the exchanges don’t cause an observation of price at a specific time to collapse the inconsistent prices (wave function) into a single value; that happens only as a result of a trade, which delivers value (energy). If you were able to make such costless observations in physics, you could harvest energy for free by picking and choosing which superposition value to make “real”—a form of Maxwell’s demon. In other words, the exchanges give away information for free, while the real quantum world charges a price for information.
10. Paul Krugman, “Three Expensive Milliseconds,” New York Times, April 13, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/krugman-three-expensive-milliseconds.html.
11. “Hedge Funder Spends $75M on Eastchester Manse,” Real Deal, August 1, 2012, http://therealdeal.com/blog/2012/08/01/hedge-funder-spend-75m-on-westchester-manse/.
12. http://www.deshawresearch.com, accessed November 26, 2014.
1. “Automated Trading: What Percent of Trades Are Automated?” Too Big Has Failed: Let’s Reform Wall Street for Good, April 3, 2013, http://www.toobighasfailed.org/2013/03/04/automated-trading/.
2. Marcy Gordon and Daniel Wagner, “‘Flash Crash’ Report: Waddell & Reed’s $4.1 Billion Trade Blamed for Market Plunge,” Huffington Post, December 1, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/01/flash-crash-report-one-41_n_747215.html.
4. Steve Omohundro, “Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human Good,” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 26, no. 3 (2014): 303–15.
5. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Mark Twain famously said, “It is my … hope … that all of us … may eventually be gathered together in heaven … except the inventor of the telephone.” Were he alive today, I’m confident he would include the inventor of the CAPTCHA. Regarding the use of low-skilled low-cost labor to solve these, see Brian Krebs, “Virtual Sweatshops Defeat Bot-or-Not Tests,” Krebs on Security (blog), January 9, 2012, http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/01/virtual-sweatshops-defeat-bot-or-not-tests/.
1. E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906; repr., Clark, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange, 2009).
2. Craig S. Neumann and Robert D. Hare, “Psychopathic Traits in a Large Community Sample: Links to Violence, Alcohol Use, and Intelligence,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 76 no. 5 (2008): 893–99.
3. For an excellent review, see Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, Moral Machines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
4. “PR2 Coffee Run,” Salisbury Robotics Laboratory, Stanford University, 2013, http://web.stanford.edu/group/salisbury_robotx/cgi-bin/salisbury_lab/?page_id=793.
5. For a remarkable pre–Civil War exposition of the contradictions of the legal treatment of slaves both as property and as responsible for their crimes, see William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative Facts (New York: American and Foreign Anti-slavery Society of New York, 1853).
6. For instance, see Josiah Clark Nott, M.D., Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races (Mobile: Dade and Thompson, 1844), https://archive.org/stream/NottJosiahClarkTwoLecturesOnTheNaturalHistoryOfTheCaucasianAndNegroRaces/Nott%20Josiah%20Clark%20%20Two%20Lectures%20on%20the%20natural%20history%20of%20the%20Caucasian%20and%20Negro%20Races_djvu.txt.
7. This concept was explored with wit and subtlety in the 2012 movie Robot and Frank starring Frank Langella as an aging cat burglar with advancing dementia who befriends a robotic caregiver.
8. While Thurlow is famous for this quote, it’s not clear if he ever actually said it quite this poetically. The quote itself appears to have come to prominence in John C. Coffee, “‘No Soul to Damn, No Body to Kick’: An Unscandalized Inquiry into the Problem of Corporate Punishment,” Michigan Law Review 79, no. 3 (1981): 386.
9. The path of U.S. corporations to legal personhood started with an 1819 Supreme Court decision affirming that Dartmouth College itself was entitled to the protection of the Contract Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1). The rights and responsibilities of corporations were expanded and refined from there.
1. My Onsale.com cofounders were the talented engineers Alan Fisher and Razi Mohiuddin. The company was ultimately sold to Egghead Software, a respected computer retailer at the time, now out of business. Onsale’s auction patents are now owned by eBay.
2. Amazon even reserves the right to cancel your order if the transaction turns out to be unprofitable. From their help system: “If an item’s correct price is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation.” http://www.am azon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201133210, accessed December 31, 2014.
3. For instance, http://camelcamelcamel.com.
4. Janet Adamy, “E-tailer Price Tailoring May Be Wave of Future,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2000, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-09-25/business/0009250017_1_prices-amazon-spokesman-bill-curry-don-harter.
5. J. Turow, L. Feldman, and K. Meltzer, “Open to Exploitation: American Shoppers Online and Offline,” Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, 2005, http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/35.
6. The French phrase laissez-faire literally translates as “Let it be” or “Let them do it,” meaning to permit the market to operate freely, without government interference.
7. This effect is meticulously detailed in Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).
8. Kaiser Permanente, my health maintenance organization, has taken this to its logical extreme: it won’t even tell you what your medications cost until after it has shipped them to you. As a result of plan changes required by the Affordable Care Act, Kaiser Permanente actually charged me $2,431.85 for a refill that a month earlier had cost only $40.95. Far from contrite, the company refused to accept a return or refund my money until I filed an appeal!
9. John Pries (May 20, 2011), in response to a question by David Burnia (April 8, 2009), Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/Why-does-price-change-come/forum/Fx1UM3LW4UCKBO2/TxG5MA6XN349AN/2?asin=B001FA1NZU.
10. Redlaser.com, for instance.
11. For a current example of such incentives, consider the “Clean Air Cash” program of Stanford University’s Parking and Transportation Services: http://transportation.stanford.edu/alt_transportation/CleanAirCash.shtml.
1. The top 1 percent earned $394,000 or more in 2012. “Richest 1% Earn Biggest Share Since Roaring ‘20s,” CNBC, September 11, 2013, http://www.cnbc.com/id/101025377. We’re a bit better off in the asset department. It appears we rank around the top 1/2 percent, largely because of the house.
2. Brian Burnsed, “How Higher Education Affects Lifetime Salary,” U.S. News & World Report, August 5, 2011, http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2011/08/05/how-higher-education-affects-lifetime-salary. See also Anthony P. Carnevale, Stephen J. Rose, and Ban Cheah, “The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings,” Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, 2011, https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/ctg48m85ftqm7q1vex8y.
3. Matthew Yi, “State’s Budget Gap Deepens $2 billion Overnight,” SFGate, July 2, 2009, http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/State-s-budget-gap-deepens-2-billion-overnight-3293645.php.
4. For example, see “Family Health, May 2011: Local Assistance Estimate for Fiscal Years 2010–11 and 2011–12; Management Summary,” Fiscal Forecasting and Data Management Branch State Department of Health Care Services, last modified May 10, 2011, http://www.dhcs.ca.gov/dataandstats/reports/Documents/Fam_Health_Est/M11_Mgmt_Summ_Tab.pdf.
5. Kristina Strain, “Is Jeff Bezos Turning a Corner with His Giving?” Inside Philanthropy, April 9, 2014, http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/tech-philanthropy/2014/4/9/is-jeff-bezos-turning-a-corner-with-his-giving.html.
6. William J. Broad, “Billionaires with Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science,” New York Times, March 15, 2014, science section, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html.
7. Walt Crowley, “Experience Music Project (EMP) Opens at Seattle Center on June 23, 2000,” Historylink.org, March 15, 2003, http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=5424.
8. Jimmy Dunn, “The Labors of Pyramid Building,” Tour Egypt, November 14, 2011, http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/pyramidworkforce.htm. See also Joyce Tyldesley, “The Private Lives of the Pyramid-builders,” BBC: History, February 17, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/pyramid_builders_01.shtml#two.
9. Jane Van Nimmen, Leonard C. Bruno, and Robert L. Rosholt, NASA Historical Data Book, 1958–1968, vol. 1, NASA Resources, NASA Historical Series, NASA SP-4012, accessed November 27, 2014, http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012v1.pdf.
10. Bryce Covert, “Forty Percent of Workers Made Less Than $20,000 Last Year,” Think Progress, November 5, 2013, http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/11/05/2890091/wage-income-data/#.
11. Andrew Robert, “Gucci Using Python as Rich Drive Profit Margin Above 30%: Retail,” Bloomberg News, February 20, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-20/gucci-using-python-as-rich-drive-profit-margin.html. The suppliers, of course, are also making a profit, but it’s probably not as high as Gucci’s, so some additional portion is going to other stockholders rather than to workers.
12. “Recession Fails to Dent Consumer Lust for Luxury Brands,” PR Newswire, March 19, 2012, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/recession-fails-to-dent-consumer-lust-for-luxury-brands-143264806.html; see also Sanjana Chauhan, “Why Some Luxury Brands Thrived in the U.S. Despite the Recession,” Luxury Society, February 7, 2013, http://luxurysociety.com/articles/2013/02/why-some-luxury-brands-thrived-in-the-us-despite-the-recession.
13. Jason M. Thomas, “Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams,” Economic Outlook, March 29, 2013, http://www.carlyle.com/sites/default/files/Economic%20Outlook_Geography%20of%20Final%20Sales_March%202013_FINAL.pdf; “Americas Surpasses China as Luxury Goods Growth Leader Propelled by Chinese Tourism and New Store Openings, Finds Bain & Company’s 2013 Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study,” Bain & Company, October 28, 2013, http://www.bain.com/about/press/press-releases/americas-surpasses-china-as-luxury-goods-growth-leader.aspx.
14. Stephanie Clifford, “Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly off Shelves,” Business Day, New York Times, August 3, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/business/sales-of-luxury-goods-are-recovering-strongly.html?_r=0.
15. This friend is Randy Komisar of Kleiner, Perkins Caufield and Byers. A practicing Buddhist, he has the inexplicable ability to lift the spirits of everyone he comes in contact with. People leave meetings with him feeling refreshed and inspired. Randy has the remarkable knack of making you feel smart, even if he’s just pointed out that you’re a complete idiot. His secret? Listening carefully and responding respectfully.
16. Jesse Bricker, Arthur B. Kennickell, Kevin B. Moore, and John Sabelhaus, “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2007 to 2010: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Federal Reserve Bulletin 98, no. 2 (2012), http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bulletin/2012/pdf/scf12.pdf.
17. Dean Takahashi, “Steve Perlman’s White Paper Explains ‘Impossible’ Wireless Tech,” VB News, July 28, 2011, http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/28/steve-perlman-unveils-dido-white-paper-explaining-impossible-wireless-data-rates/.
18. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/line-installers-and-repairers.htm, January 8, 2014.
1. Dorothy S. Brady, ed., Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1966, http://www.nber.org/chapters/c1567.pdf.
2. “Employment Projections,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, table 2.1: Employment by Major Industry Sector, last modified December 19, 2013, http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm.
3. Torsten Reichardt, “Amazon—Leading the Way Through Chaos,” Schafer Blog, May 18, 2011, http://www.ssi-schaefer.de/blog/en/order-picking/chaotic-storage-amazon/.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_Systems, last modified December 1, 2014.
5. I’m oversimplifying a bit. Cyclical unemployment, also known as turnover, has numerous causes—people quitting, getting laid off, changing jobs, taking leaves of absence, etc. Being automated out of the job is only one of these.
6. “Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Economic News Release, November 13, 2014, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm. Again, slightly oversimplified. Some people are dropping out of the labor market, others entering, but most of these are people leaving one company and joining another. Also, it varies wildly by industry.
7. Total number of homes (2011): 132 million; total number of sales: 4.6 million. “American Housing Survey for the United States: 2011,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research (jointly with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau), September 2011, http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/ahs/data/2011/h150-11.pdf. See also “New and Existing Home Sales, U.S.,” National Association of Home Builders, 2014, http://www.nahb.org/fileUpload_details.aspx?contentID=55761.
8. More oversimplification. In addition to obsolete skills, some applicants may look like damaged goods to potential employers because of their extended unemployment, or they may be older than desired (though in principle this is illegal).
9. I draw these figures from http://data.bls.gov/projections/occupationProj, accessed December 31, 2014.
10. As summarized in “Reinventing Low Wage Work: Ideas That Can Work for Employees, Employers and the Economy,” Workforce Strategies Initiative at the Aspen Institute, accessed November 27, 2014, http://www.aspenwsi.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/RetailOverview.pdf.
11. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+per+employee+amazon+walmart+safeway, accessed November 29, 2014.
12. “E-commerce Sales,” Retail Insight Center of the National Retail Federation, 2014, http://research.nrffoundation.com/Default.aspx?pg=46#.Ux55G9ycRUs; and “Quarterly Retail E-commerce Sales, 3rd Quarter 2014,” press release from the U.S. Census Bureau News, November 18, 2014, https://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.pdf.
13. From 1993 to 2013, total U.S. retail sales increased 134 percent (http://www.census.gov/retail/marts/www/download/text/adv44000.txt, accessed November 29, 2014). The new 50 percent of (online) retail sales require only 20 percent as many people, so half of that 20 percent is 10 percent of the total.
14. Mitra Toosi, “Projections of the Labor Force to 2050: A Visual Essay,” Monthly Labor Review, Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 2012, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2012/10/art1full.pdf.
15. Steven Ashley, “Truck Platoon Demo Reveals 15% Bump in Fuel Economy,” Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE International), May 10, 2013, http://articles.sae.org/11937/.
16. “Commercial Motor Vehicle Facts,” Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, March 2013, http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/sites/fmcsa.dot.gov/files/docs/Commercial_Motor_Vechicle_Facts_March_2013.pdf.
17. “Automated Trucks Improve Health, Safety, and Productivity,” Rio Tinto (Home/About us/features), accessed November 29, 2014, http://www.riotinto.com.au/ENG/aboutus/179_features_1365.asp; Carl Franzen, “Self-driving Trucks Tested in Japan, Form a Close-Knit Convoy for Fuel Savings,” The Verge, February 27, 2013, http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/27/4037568/self-driving-trucks-tested-in-japan.
18. “Commercial Motor Vehicle Facts.”
19. “United States Farmworker Fact Sheet,” Community Alliance for Global Justice, accessed November 29, 2014, http://www.seattleglobaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/fwfactsheet.pdf.
20. Nancy S. Giges, “Smart Robots for Picking Fruit,” American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), May 2013, https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/robotics/smart-robots-for-picking-fruit.
21. http://www.agrobot.com, accessed December 31, 2014.
22. Hector Becerra, “A Day in the Strawberry Fields Seems Like Forever,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/great-reads/la-me-strawberry-pick-20130503-dto,0,3045773.htmlstory#axzz2w5JRTBig.
23. Tim Hornyak, “Strawberry-Picking Robot Knows When They’re Ripe,” CNET, December 13, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20025402-1.html.
24. http://www.bluerivert.com, accessed December 31, 2014.
25. Erin Rapacki, “Startup Spotlight: Industrial Perception Building 3D Vision Guided Robots,” IEEE Spectrum, January 21, 2013, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/startup-spotlight-industrial-perception.
26. http://www.truecompanion.com, accessed December 31, 2014. As of this writing, there’s little evidence that the company is actually producing a viable product.
27. Robi Ludwig, “Sex Robot Initially Designed as a Health Aid,” February 9, 2010, http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/sex-robot-initially-health-aid.htm.
28. http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/personal_robotics.html, accessed November 29, 2014; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3891631/Kitchen-robot-loads-the-dishwasher.html, December 22, 2008; http://www.dvice.com/archives/2011/05/pr2-robot-gets.php, May 12, 2011; http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/pr2-robot-fetches-cup-of-coffee, May 9, 2013.
29. “Lawyer Demographics,” American Bar Association, 2011, http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/marketresearch/PublicDocuments/lawyer_demographics_2011.authcheckdam.pdf.
30. http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/three-year-volume, accessed December 31, 2014; and Jennifer Smith, “First-Year Law School Enrollment at 1977 Levels,” Law Blog, Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/12/17/first-year-law-school-enrollment-at-1977-levels/.
31. E. M. Rawes, “Yearly Salary for a Beginner Lawyer,” Global Post, accessed November 29, 2014, http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/yearly-salary-beginner-lawyer-33919.html.
32. Adam Cohen, “Just How Bad off Are Law School Graduates?” Time, March 11, 2013, http://ideas.time.com/2013/03/11/just-how-bad-off-are-law-school-graduates/.
33. http://www.fairdocument.com, accessed November 29, 2014.
34. https://www.judicata.com, accessed November 29, 2014.
35. For instance, http://logikcull.com, accessed November 29, 2014.
36. https://lexmachina.com/customer/law-firms/, accessed November 29, 2014.
37. http://www.robotandhwang.com, accessed November 29, 2014.
38. Michael Loughran, IBM Media Relations, “WellPoint and IBM Announce Agreement to Put Watson to Work in Health Care,” September 12, 2011, https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35402.wss.
39. http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm.
40. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland, last modified December 25, 2014.
41. Terrence McCoy, “Just How Common Are Pilot Suicides?” Washington Post, March 11, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/11/just-how-common-are-pilot-suicides/?tid=pm_national_pop.
42. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, September 17, 2013, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf.
43. “Fact Sheet on the President’s Plan to Make College More Affordable: A Better Bargain for the Middle Class,” press release, the White House, August 22, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/22/fact-sheet-president-s-plan -make-college-more-affordable-better-bargain-.
44. Daniel Kaplan, “Securitization Era Opens for Athletes,” Sports Business Daily, March 12, 2001, http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2001/03/20010312/This-Weeks-Issue/Securitization-Era-Opens-For-Athletes.aspx.
45. http://www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/The-Role-of-Government-in-Education-%281995%29.aspx, 1955.
46. For a recent policy analysis, see Miguel Palacios, Tonio DeSorrento, and Andrew P. Kelly, “Investing in Value, Sharing Risk: Financing Higher Education Through Income Share Agreements,” AEI Series on Reinventing Financial Aid, Center on Higher Education Reform, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), February 2014, http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/-investing-in-value-sharing-in-risk-financing-higher-education-through-inome-share-agreements_083548906610.pdf.
47. George Anders, “Chicago’s Nifty Pilot Program to Fix Our Student-Loan Mess,” Forbes, April 14, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/04/14/chicagos-nifty-pilot-program-to-fix-our-student-loan-mess/.
48. Allen Grove, “San Francisco State University Admissions,” About Education, accessed November 29, 2014, http://collegeapps.about.com/od/collegeprofiles/p/san-francisco-state.htm; and http://colleges.niche.com/san-francisco-state-university/jobs—and—internships/, accessed November 29, 2014, which gives the school a C+ grade in its niche.
1. Actually, the rules make this a “touchback,” not a field goal, but permit me some latitude here for dramatic purposes.
2. Alberto Alesina, Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch, “Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?” Journal of Public Economics 88 (2004): 2009–42.
3. Specifically, the average U.S. income was $1,000 per year in 1800 (in today’s dollars), and about 80 percent of the population worked in agriculture. These figures are almost identical to present-day Mozambique (http://feedthefuture.gov/sites/default/files/country/strategies/files/ftf_factsheet_mozambique_oct2012.pdf, accessed November 29, 2014) and Uganda (http://www.farmafrica.org/us/uganda/uganda, accessed November 29, 2014). Income data is from the World DataBank, “GNI per Capita, PPP (Current International $)” table, accessed November 29, 2014, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/views/reports/tableview.aspx#.
4. For example, Robert Reich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich, last modified December 31, 2014); Paul Krugman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman, last modified December 12, 2014); and the recent influential book by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2014).
5. This analogy relies primarily on income data from the U.S. Census (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/families/index.html, last modified September 16, 2014).
6. I recall as a child buying packs of “chocolate cigarettes” (cylindrical sticks of candy wrapped in rolling papers).
7. However, high homeownership rates have a strong negative effect on employment because people can’t easily migrate to follow the jobs. For instance, see David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, “The Danger of High Home Ownership: Greater Unemployment,” briefing paper from Chatham House: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, October 1, 2013, http://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/papers/view/195033.
8. Marc A. Weiss, “Marketing and Financing Home Ownership: Mortgage Lending and Public Policy in the United States, 1918–1989,” Business and Economic History, 2nd ser., 18 (1989): 109–18, http://www.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v018/p0109-p0118.pdf. For an excellent survey, see Michael S. Carliner, “Development of Federal Homeownership ‘‘Policy,’’’ Housing Policy Debate (National Association of Home Builders) 9, no. 2 (1998): 229–321.
9. Lyndon B. Johnson: “Special Message to the Congress on Urban Problems: ‘The Crisis of the Cities,’” February 22, 1968; Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29386.
10. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance program, created in 1934, included a mandate that the neighborhood be “homogeneous.” The FHA conveniently supplied the necessary forms to add racially restrictive covenants. Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
11. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html, last modified October 31, 2011.
12. http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/images/comparison70.jpg, accessed November 29, 2014.
13. “History of Long Term Care,” Elderweb, accessed November 27, 2014, http://www.elderweb.com/book/history-long-term-care.
14. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html, accessed November 27, 2014.
15. As an experienced entrepreneur, I can assure you this argument is completely ridiculous. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, would have worked just as hard for a tiny fraction of the rewards he reaped. The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor widely regarded as the seminal Silicon Valley startup—were thrilled to strike it rich when the parent company bought them out for the princely sum of $250,000 each. In the words of Bob Noyce, “The money doesn’t seem real. It’s just a way of keeping score” (http://www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html, originally published by Tom Wolfe in Esquire, December 1983).
16. Matt Taibbi, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” Rolling Stone, April 5, 2010, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405.
17. Works Progress Administration, in 1939 renamed the Work Projects Administration.
18. John M. Broder, “The West: California Ups and Downs Ripple in the West,” Economic Pulse, New York Times, January 6, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/06/us/economic-pulse-the-west-california-ups-and-downs-ripple-in-the-west.html.
19. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/53/U3HH.html, accessed December 31, 2014.
20. For an example, see Heidi Shierholz and Lawrence Mishel, “A Decade of Flat Wages,” Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper #365, August 21, 2013, http://www.epi.org/publication/a-decade-of-flat-wages-the-key-barrier-to-shared-prosperity-and-a-rising-middle-class/.
21. Robert Whaples, “Hours of Work in U.S. History,” EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples, August 14, 2001, http://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/.
22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States, last modified December 20, 2014.
23. http://finduslaw.com/fair-labor-standards-act-flsa-29-us-code-chapter-8, accessed November 27, 2014.
24. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=AVHWPEUSA065NRUG, accessed November 27, 2014.
25. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm, accessed November 27, 2014.
26. Census Bureau, table P-37, “Full-Time, Year-Round All Workers by Mean Income and Sex: 1955 to 2013,” last modified September 16, 2014, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/.
27. Census Bureau, table H-12AR, “Household by Number of Earners by Median and Mean Income: 1980 to 2013,” last modified September 16, 2014, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/.
28. http://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html, accessed November 29, 2014.
29. Census Bureau, table H-12AR, “Household by Number of Earners.” To arrive at these numbers, multiply the number of households having 1, 2, 3, and 4+ earners by 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively, which results in 153,488,000 earners for 122,460,000 households, or 1.25 earners per household for 2012. Repeat the process for 1995 to get 1.36 earners per household.
30. Jonathan Vespa, Jamie M. Lewis, and Rose M. Kreider, “America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2012,” Census Publication P20-570, figure 1, August 2013, https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-570.pdf. I arrived at the 2.5 percent estimated decrease by eliminating households composed of a single adult living alone (which increased by 2.5 percent).
31. This may simply be a rational reaction to the “Easterlin Paradox,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox, last modified October 7, 2014.
32. http://www.federalreserve.gov/apps/fof/DisplayTable.aspx?t=B.100 (last modified March 6, 2014), line 42, “Net household worth, 2012”: $69,523.5 billion, combined with http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html (last modified December 3, 2014), “Number of households, 2012”: 115,226,802, and “Persons per household, 2008–2012”: 2.61.
33. “A Summary of the 2014 Annual Reports,” Social Security Administration, accessed November 29, 2014, http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/. This is the sum of the OASI, DI, HI, and SMI trust funds at the end of year 2013: $3.045 trillion.
34. “Annual Returns on Stock, T. Bonds and T. Bills: 1928–Current,” last modified January 5, 2014, http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html.
35. “World Capital Markets—Size of Global Stock and Bond Markets,” QVM Group LLC, April 2, 2012, http://qvmgroup.com/invest/2012/04/02/world-capital-markets-size-of-global-stock-and-bond-markets/.
36. http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations/2013/01/21/who-really-owns-the-us-national-debt-n1493555/page/full, last modified January 21, 2013.
37. Cory Hopkins, “Combined Value of US Homes to Top $25 Trillion in 2013,” December 19, 2013, http://www.zillow.com/blog/2013-12-19/value-us-homes-to-top-25-trillion/; and “Mortgage Debt Outstanding,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, last modified December 11, 2014, http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/releases/mortoutstand/current.htm.
38. “International Comparisons of GDP per Capita and per Hour, 1960–2011,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, table 1b, last modified November 7, 2012, http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table01.
39. https://www.energystar.gov, accessed December 31, 2014.
40. C. Gini, “Italian: Variabilità e mutabilità (Variability and Mutability),” 1912, reprinted in Memorie di metodologica statistica, ed. E. Pizetti and T. Salvemini (Rome: Libreria Eredi Virgilio Veschi, 1955).
41. Adam Bee, “Household Income Inequality Within U.S. Counties: 2006–2010,” American Community Survey Briefs, Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, ACSBR/10–18, February 2012, http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-18.pdf.
42. This would require computing some sort of transitive closure of interests. For instance, you may have shares in a retirement fund that holds a particular stock in its name, as opposed to yours—but you are the entity we are trying to measure. As a first approximation, I would suggest that the closure has to be computed until it reaches a natural person.
43. William McBride, “New Study Ponders Elimination of the Corporate Income Tax,” Tax Foundation, April 11, 2014, http://taxfoundation.org/blog/new-study-ponders-elimination-corporate-income-tax.
44. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York: Classic House Books, 2009).
1. These are called “portmanteaus,” ironically itself a mash-up of the French words porter (carry) and manteau (coat).
2. John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” Appleton’s 8 (1906), http://explorepahistory.com/odocument.php?docId=1-4-1A1.
3. Harry Pearson is quoted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording, last modified December 11, 2014; Michael Fremer is quoted by Eric Drosin, “Vinyl Rises from the Dead as Music Lovers Fuel Revival,” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1997, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB864065981213541500.
4. These were commonplace in the late nineteenth century. Wealthy people could arrange to have their personal railroad car attached to a train, or for more luxury and flexibility, they could have it hitched to their own private locomotive.
5. L. J. Blincoe, T. R. Miller, E. Zaloshnja, and B. A. Lawrence, The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes, 2010, report no. DOT HS 812 013 (Washington, D.C.: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (2014), http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pubs/812013.pdf.
6. Kevin Spieser, Kyle Treleaven, Rick Zhang, Emilio Frazzoli, Daniel Morton, and Marco Pavone, “Toward a Systematic Approach to the Design and Evaluation of Automated Mobility-on-Demand Systems: A Case Study in Singapore,” in Road Vehicle Automation, Springer Lecture Notes in Mobility 11, ed. Gereon Meyer and Sven Beiker, 2014, available from MIT Libraries, http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/82904. See also David Begg, “A 2050 Vision for London: What Are the Implications of Driverless Transport?” Transport Times, June, 2014, http://www.transporttimes.co.uk/Admin/uploads/64165-Transport-Times_A-2050-Vision-for-London_AW-WEB-READY.pdf; http://emarketing.pwc.com/reaction/images/AutofactsAnalystNoteUS(Feb2013)FINAL.pdf
7. According to Brad Templeton, autonomous car consultant to Google, “In Los Angeles, it is estimated that over half of all real estate is devoted to cars (roads and environs, driveways, parking),” personal blog, accessed November 29, 2014, http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/numbers.html.
8. Transportation Energy Data Book, table 8.5, Center for Transportation Analysis, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, accessed November 29, 2014, http://cta.ornl.gov/data/chapter8.shtml.
9. Lawrence D. Burns, William C. Jordan, and Bonnie A. Scarborough, “Transforming Personal Mobility,” the Earth Institute, Columbia University, January 27, 2013, http://sustainablemobility.ei.columbia.edu/files/2012/12/Transforming-Personal-Mobility-Jan-27-20132.pdf.
10. Food costs accounted for 12.8 percent of expenditures in 2012. “Consumer Expenditures in 2012,” table A (“Food” divided by “Average Annual Expenditures”), Bureau of Labor Statistics Reports, March 2014, http://www.bls.gov/cex/csxann12.pdf.
11. Emilio Frazzoli, “Can We Put a Price on Autonomous Driving?” MIT Technology Review, March 18, 2014, http://www.technologyreview.com/view/525591/can-we-put-a-price-on-autonomous-driving/.
12. What might such concierges do? They could bring your coffee in the morning and have your favorite drink ready for your trip home, while you relax in one of perhaps four “captain’s chairs” in the van, complete with tray table and entertainment system, similar to a first-class airplane seat.
13. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433–60, http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize#Winners, last modified December 29, 2014.
15. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 442.
16. Paul Miller, “iOS 5 includes Siri ‘Intelligent Assistant’ Voice-Control, Dictation—for iPhone 4S Only,” The Verge, October 4, 2011, http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/04/ios-5-assistant-voice-control-ai-features/.
17. Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 65–66.
18. Vitalik Buterin, “Cryptographic Code Obfuscation: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Are About to Take a Huge Leap Forward,” Bitcoin, February 8, 2014, http://bitcoinmagazine.com/10055/cryptographic-code-obfuscation-decentralized-autonomous-organizations-huge-leap-forward/.
19. For an excellent in-depth analysis of this problem, see Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
20. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system, last modified December 30, 2014.
