This Time is Different: How Big Data Has Left the Middle Class Behind

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Tuesday March 24, 2015 · 10:39 AM PDT

2015/03/24 · 10:39

What if innovation is driving economic stagnation and inequality? That's the question Charles Leadbetter analyzes in "The Whirlpool Economy" over at the UK Innovation Foundation's Long+Short site. He makes key points about the current relationships between innovation and the economy but misses partly what may make the new technology of big data a particularly toxic driver of current economic inequality. That stagnation haunts the U.S. and especially Europe is a common observation, but as Leadbetter notes, it's a "a very strange one, for it comes at time when our lives are in the midst of incessant change, much of it brought on by what claim to be radical innovations."

NathanNewman

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Thursday March 06, 2014 · 6:20 AM PST

2014/03/06 · 06:20

Despite growth in new sectors like technology, where jobs grew 60 percent from 2003 to 2012, the poverty rate in New York City is 22 percent higher than twelve years ago. And in the years following the collapse of the financial bubble (2008 to 2011), the median income declined 6%. Unemployment remains stubbornly high - 8.6% in September 2013 - and those unemployment numbers reach half of the working-age black and latino population in the City.

NathanNewman

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Tuesday March 04, 2014 · 8:32 AM PST

2014/03/04 · 08:32

This is part of a series of posts on MORE NYC outlining the economic, jobs and environmental gains for NYC from a large-scale expansion of housing construction in the City

There is a crisis of affordability for renters, both in New York City and across the nation. The professional class in the City continues to grow without the City keeping up with housing needs, forcing up housing prices in the central business district and also forcing the displacement of existing low-income renters as professionals gentrify what were once affordable neighborhoods.

NathanNewman

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Monday February 24, 2014 · 7:45 AM PST

2014/02/24 · 07:45

The Crisis: The overwhelming election of Bill de Blasio reflects the frustration of New Yorkers with the rising inequality and unmet needs in the City. As a City, we need to take advantage of that opportunity to permanently create the base for long-term gains for working families and for addressing the climate change crisis. However, beyond many of the admirable policies promoted in his campaign, New York City needs even more ambitious and far-ranging changes in direction to reverse the yawning gap between the elite and struggling working families in the rest of the City.

NathanNewman

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Monday September 09, 2013 · 5:24 AM PDT

2013/09/09 · 05:24

This Tuesday is the Democratic primary for mayor in New York City. And the frontrunner to win the primary is Bill De Blasio, who has made an unapologetic appeal to voters that addressing inequality in the City will be his priority if mayor.

That arguably the most progressive major candidate is leading the race shouldn’t be news in New York City, yet Republicans have held the mayorship for the last twenty years. And the Democrats who ran the city from the early 70s through David Dinkins in the early 90s were so beset by economic crises that their urban policy had little positive national impact. Where a Fiorello LaGuardia was a national political figure in the New Deal, no New York City mayor has had a major role in the national progressive imagination for nearly fifty years.

NathanNewman

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Tuesday March 05, 2013 · 5:57 AM PST

2013/03/05 · 05:57

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has made job creation a top priority. Here’s a test: will he require conditions to protect jobs in the T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger?

When merging companies talk about “transaction-specific efficiencies” and cost savings through “synergy,” the workers involved know that pink slips are usually on the way. That’s what we can expect if Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski allows a proposed merger of T-Mobile and MetroPCS to go through without conditions to protect employment.

NathanNewman

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Tuesday February 05, 2013 · 7:04 AM PST

2013/02/05 · 07:04

How do we address surging bandwidth usage and bridge the digital divide in a country where tens of millions of families don't have any high-speed access to the Internet at home - and everyone sees high prices often without the speeds for the most cutting edge uses of the Internet? Just this week, The Wall Street Journal highlighted how many low-income teens, a third of whom have no broadband at home, turn to places like McDonalds with free Wi-Fi to get their homework done. New money to bridge that gap is an obvious need cited by many political leaders, but the money needs to come from somewhere.

One question is whether content providers on the Internet like Netflix, Google and Facebook, who profit tremendously from the existence of a fast Internet, should be taxed to support the physical infrastructure supporting broadband?

NathanNewman

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Tuesday December 11, 2012 · 10:13 AM PST

2012/12/11 · 10:13

Americans often engage in the conceit that we have the oldest written constitution in the world. But that’s a false story, and a dangerous lie to boot.

Yes, a Constitution was written in 1789. And it fell apart in 1861 under the weight of its uncertainty on whether the United States was a collection of sovereign states or one nation—and even more so based on its moral bankruptcy on the issue of slavery.

And so, beginning in 1865, a new Constitution was forged, both in the halls of Congress and, as importantly, on the battlefields of Antietam, Bull Run and Gettysburg. The new movie Lincoln does the inestimable service of telling that tale of the Civil War, not as a tragedy, but as the founding of our country as one truly “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

NathanNewman

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Tuesday November 13, 2012 · 7:32 AM PST

2012/11/13 · 07:32

The America of nostalgic visions of clean-cut suburban lawns, self-sufficient breadwinners, and homogenous communities heard its death rattle last Tuesday. To be fair, we've been hearing the hoofbeats of the Grim Reaper coming for the Silent Majority since Al Gore received the majority of the votes in the 2000 election. An extraordinary Supreme Court suppression of the vote and the hysteria of post-911 politics delayed its reckoning and the filibuster on immigration reform has slowed its demographic political asphyxiation.

But with Bill Kristol now calling for the GOP to abandon its protection of tax cuts for the wealthy, the Right is beginning to reach the stage of desperate bargaining with Thanatos for a few more years of life. The bargain won't be made and the conservative political majority that Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater helped build, that George Wallace and Ronald Reagan brought into reality, and that Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush built two additional decades of government around -- that majority is dead and buried.

NathanNewman

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Thursday April 05, 2012 · 12:41 PM PDT

2012/04/05 · 12:41

With the threat of the Supreme Court striking down the most important progressive domestic initiative in a generation, we should be talking about impeaching Supreme Court Justices who engage in such right-wing judicial activism.

Impeachment? Many progressives shrink back in horror at such a supposed affront to judicial independence. For an example, see Ruth Marcus's tizzy over President Obama's rather mild (and accurate) statement that unelected judges striking down such a core economic regulation would be unprecedented in the post-1930s legal environment.

But we need to be talking about impeachment if we are not to see every progressive economic regulation struck down by the courts as outside the supposed intent of the Constitution's Founders -- the regular rhetoric of those promoting rightwing legal theory.

NathanNewman

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Wednesday September 07, 2011 · 9:06 AM PDT

2011/09/07 · 09:06

On my cell phone, I don't pay for a texting plan from AT&T, since I use the Textfree smartphone app. I regularly bypass my dataplan by accessing the Internet through my TimeWarner Internet service at home and at coffee shops around the city. And while I'm not a big Skype user, I have friends who call all over the world without racking up a dime of cell carrier phone charges using the Skype or Google Voice app on their phone.

We are in a period where the cell phone carriers have essentially lost control of their customers to smartphone apps that use their own cell phones to compete for business in each of the wireless services they try to sell to those customers.

The Department of Justice calling Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile the main competitors to AT&T-- and worrying about a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile -- completely misses what's happening in the wireless telecom industry.

NathanNewman

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Friday July 15, 2011 · 6:47 AM PDT

2011/07/15 · 06:47

This is the third part in a three-part series that is running this week at HuffPost on how lost privacy online drives economic inequality in our economy. The first part looked at the ways lost privacy leads to greater economic inequality in our economy and how Google users are encouraged to give up that personal data without recognizing its real value. Part two looked at why this personal information is so valuable to advertisers and how it empowers what economists call "price discrimination" and just plain old racial discrimination.

All of these issues of price discrimination, behavioral tracking and datamining discussed in the last two parts of this series come together in Google's role in the subprime mortgage meltdown and its aftermath. Most people don't think of Google as a key player in the financial debacle that crashed the economy, but like almost every company making billions of dollars in the last decade, a chunk of Google's profits were coming straight from the subprime mortgage lenders in the form of targeted online advertising using Google to find customers.

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This Time is Different: How Big Data Has Left the Middle Class Behind

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