Genetics

Honors Programs and RIETS Host a Discussion on Genetic Testing and Jewish Law Yeshiva University News – Yu News

Esti Rose

On Tuesday, February 2, 2021, the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program at Yeshiva College, the S. Daniel Abraham Honors Program at Stern College for Women, the Business Honors and Entrepreneurial Leadership Program at the Sy Syms School of Business, and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary(RIETS) hosted Genetic Testing: A Scientific and Halachic Perspective.

The featured speaker was Esther Rose07S, a genetics counselor from JScreen, a program for Jewish genetic diseases headquartered at Emory Universitys Department of Human Genetics. Sara Gdanski21S, a current honors student who has worked as a JScreen intern, developed the idea for the very successful event that drew approximately 200 participants.

Joining Rose was Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz, director of the Semikhah [rabbinic ordination] Program at RIETS, and the panelists discussed scenarios involving reproductive genetic testing and how screenings might influence family planning.

The session was incredibly informative and well presented, said Yonatan Kurz23YC.Learning about the importance of genetic testing and the accompanying halachic [Jewish law] and practical implications made it a tremendously helpful and enlightening presentation.

Dr. Eliezer Schnall, director of Yeshiva Colleges Honors program, was excited by the turnout and looks forward to co-hosting more events that bring together the Universitys honors programs.

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Honors Programs and RIETS Host a Discussion on Genetic Testing and Jewish Law Yeshiva University News - Yu News

Embryology

Assisted reproductive technology in Australia and the United Kingdom – BioNews

15 February 2021

Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of New South Wales. Director of Reproductive Medicine, Royal Hospital for Women, Sydney

Uptake of IVF and related technologies has increased exponentially throughout the developed world over the last two decades and births after assisted reproductive technology (ART) make a significant contribution to the total birth rateof many countries.

However, two major problems continue to impede progress in many settings, namely safety (mainly the impact of multiple births after multiple embryo transfer on the health of the children resulting from ART), and accessibility, with high costs of treatment preventing many couples from being able to pay to use this technology.

In this article, I will contrast possible solutions to these obstacles taken by two 'First World' countries.

The Office of National Statistics reports that, in 2018, there were 657,076 live births in England and Wales, a decrease of 3.2 percent since 2017 and a 9.9 percent decrease since the most recent peak live birth rate in 2012. This resulted in a fall in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) to 1.7 children per woman, lower than all previous years on record except 1977 and 1999-2002.

More recent data showed that this trend is continuing, with fewer births in 2020 compared with 2019. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)database shows that the number of live births resulting from IVF in the UK in 2018 was 19,728, suggesting that approximately three percent of live births resulted from IVFthat year.

The comparison with practice in Australia is stark. There were 14,355 live births resulting from IVF in Australia in 2018, representing almost five percent of all live births. The population of Australia continues to grow, with an annual growth of 1.3 percent between 2019 and 2020, with a healthier total fertility rate of 1.83 in 2020.

My opportunity to explore the clinical, social and political forces that drive these variances in uptake of IVF in the two countries results from my having worked in reproductive medicine for the NHS for over 20 years before moving to work in a similar clinical academic practice in Sydney in 2011. This has given me insights into the provision and uptake of IVF services in the two countries.

The most obvious difference one perceives when moving from healthcare practice in the UK to Australia is the fundamental difference between the NHS and the Australian Medicare-funded public health system. Provision of Medicare services is universal in Australia to citizens and those with a permanent residency visa. The system is generous, reflecting the overall wealth of the nation, but requires all patients to pay a proportion of their healthcare costs in many situations. There is a liberal safety net which provides those of low income with access to quality healthcare across the country. From an IVF perspective, Medicare funds approximately 50 percent of the cost of an IVF cycle. At the present time, there are no limits on funding based on the number of cycles a woman or couple have had previously, nor on the woman's or man's age. Using some metrics, the Australian system is the second most generous to couples requiring IVF after Israel.

The position in the UK is not only vastly different from Australia but it is also different across the devolved nations.In England the NHS has never embraced IVF and has always placed it low on its list for funding priority. Although clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) are instructed by the NHS to provide three full cycles of IVF to eligible patients, this goal has never been achieved by more than a fraction of the 135 CCGs in England. Currently only 17percent of CCGs offer three full cycles recommended by the UK Department of Health and Social Care. IVF is therefore usually funded from a couple's taxable earned income and although costs vary from centre to centre, many couples will spend more than 5000 per cycle of IVF treatment. The situation appears worst in London where less than 25 percent of IVF treatments are supported by the NHS .

The method of delivery of IVF also differs between the two nations. Australian IVF is almost entirely delivered in the private sector, mostly by large corporations that own networks of clinics within the main Eastern states. Corporatisation of IVF has not been without its problems quality of research into human reproduction and its failings in Australia has dropped dramatically over the last two decades, and couples from less well-off sections of society find it difficult to cover the costs of their treatment even with Medicare reimbursement.

However, Australia continues to excel in one key area of IVF practice, namely single embryo transfer, which is almost universally practised across the country resulting in a multiple IVF birth rate of only four percent. Despite recent improvement, the equivalent figure for the UK is double, probably driven by a couple's desire to mitigate further financial burden by pushing for double embryo transfer. This problem may be exacerbated by the attitude of some prominent clinicians who continue to advocate for multiple embryo transfer despite overwhelming evidence of increased risk of harm to the children as a result of this outdated practice.

Conversely, one area in which the UK has considerably outstripped Australia is in the provision of clinical information to consumers, clinics and politicians. TheHFEAhas been in existence since 1991 and, despite many problems and setbacks, continues to provide high-quality clinic-specific data, which informs CCGs and patients.

Perhaps inevitably, due to the more corporate nature of ART provision in Australia, there has been a huge delay in providing clinic-specific data. As an outsider, I find this surprising, particularly since Medicare, ie, the Australian Government, covers approximately half the cost of IVF. However, after significant political pressure and negotiation of many roadblocks placed in its path by influential opponents, the 'yourivfsuccess.com.au' website developed by the National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit with funding from the Australian Government has just gone live. This will no doubt attract significant press interest and its impact on the IVF sector will be fascinating to watch. Personally, I doubt much will change in the short term, but if the UK processes are replicated, performance of the lower quartile clinics will improve over time.

On a more basic level, Australians are used to paying for healthcare. The principle of co-payment for health such that the patient pays for some proportion of their treatment is universal, whilst the expectation in the UK continues to bethat healthcare should be at no cost to the patient at the point of delivery. This laudable principle has underpinned the NHS since its foundation after the Second World War, but it may be time to reconsider itsuniversality.

A partial subsidisation by the NHS of the majority of IVF cyclesfor those qualifying under well-established rules based on probability of IVF success would reduce costs to patients, improve access, improve quality of clinical care and increase the number of IVF births. This in turn may help reverse the fall in total fertility rate that the country is currently experiencing. The UK Government has now announced a reform of the governance of the NHS, reversing the internal market introduced as part of the Lansley review a decade ago, and abolishing GP led commissioning. A more 'top-down'approach may allow a measured introduction of a co-payment system for IVF patients, which would be to the benefit of many and the detriment of none.

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Assisted reproductive technology in Australia and the United Kingdom - BioNews

Embryology

Egg Freezing Is On The Up: But Do Clinics Advertise It Correctly? – SheThePeople

Egg freezing on the rise: More women in the UK than ever before are considering freezing their eggs, with the sharp rise in inquiries at some of Londons largest clinics attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. No wonder perhaps, since social restrictions have impacted single people wishing to couple-up, making it significantly more difficult to go on dates or meet potential partners.

The current prolonged uncertainty about the future has exacerbated the concerns that many single childless women especially those in their mid-30s were already reporting, including anxieties about the ticking of their biological clocks and fears over age-related fertility decline.

Sarah, a 36-year-old HR manager who recently came out of a four-year relationship, feels the pandemic could not have come at a more costly time in her personal life. She told me, I have this constant underlying worry that by the time this all blows over and I can finally meet someone, I might have missed the boat to become a mother.

It is easy to see why women like Sarah might opt for egg freezing. Yet while this technology can certainly be useful for some women, new research reveals that it may not always be as straightforward as it appears.

Many aspects of egg freezing have been discussed in the media, yet to date, there has been almost no attention paid to the ways in which fertility clinics advertise, market and promote their egg freezing services on their websites, and the quality of information that is available to potential patients considering their options.

In order to address this gap, my colleague Emily Tiemann and I analysed the websites of the UKs 15 largest fertility clinics offering egg freezing. Our recently published findings make uncomfortable reading.

Our research suggests that fertility clinic websites in the UK, taken in general, provide a poor standard of information and, we argue, need to be urgently improved, for reasons of both medical ethics and consumer rights. Of course, as websites are dynamic entities some of them may have already improved or changed since we took our snapshot (in June 2019), but our findings nevertheless raise concerns for potential patients.

We found that most of the clinics we looked at presented what we believe is an unbalanced view of egg freezing on their websites, highlighting its potential benefits and failing to adequately discuss its potential risks. Clinics websites were also not sufficiently clear and transparent about the cost of an egg freezing cycle, with the average true cost exceeding the advertised costs by approximately a third (on average an additional 923).

Finally, we came to the view that clinics did not always provide accurate data or success rates. In fact, of the 15 analysed, we only rated one clinic website as good in terms of its quality of information.

We found that most of the clinics we looked at presented what we believe is an unbalanced view of egg freezing on their websites, highlighting its potential benefits and failing to adequately discuss its potential risks.

We reached out to all 15 clinics for comment. Harley Street Fertility Clinic responded, We welcome the Gurtin and Tiemann paper because it aims to improve the quality of information provided to patients. However, we do not necessarily agree with all the metrics and indicators used by the authors as part of their review [] As a clinic, we strive to be clear and transparent in our communications. Hence, we will use the suggestions made in the paper to improve our communications with patients.

IVI Midland responded by pointing out that since 2019, the clinic had been acquired by CARE Fertility and therefore the website we analysed is no longer active. CARE Fertility, meanwhile, replied, The number of egg freezing cycles we carry out is very small, and as success rate data is only available once a woman returns for fertility treatment (often many years later), we have even less success rate data [] At the time of the study in June 2019, the egg freezing page of our website could have more clearly explained the costs involved with egg freezing, but we have since updated the page to further help patients access the information they need.

The other clinics we approached for comment did not respond. But it is welcome news that some have been working to improve their website content.

We have issued an urgent recommendation for clinic websites to be improved, but it is difficult for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to enforce such changes when much of the economic or commercial aspects of fertility treatments fall outside its remit.

But the issue is pressing, since we contend that the lack of good quality information compromises the ability of women like Sarah to make truly informed decisions, and leaves them inadequately informed or misinformed about crucial aspects, such as costs to plan for or potential risks to weigh up.

Justine*, a journalist who lives in London, froze her eggs two years ago, aged 38. She told me that although she went to some lengths to research the technology, she still felt unprepared for the reality of how it would feel to freeze her eggs.

Justine found herself in considerably more physical discomfort than she had expected, feeling bloated, uncomfortable and in pain despite having been told she would be able to go about her normal life before the procedure. Her physical discomforts continued and even worsened after egg collection, As the hours passed, I still felt incredibly weak, bloated and short of breath. I called the clinic who just said if you continue to feel bad, then go to A&E. It was at that point I felt very alone.

She felt that the clinic had relinquished all responsibility. I went to A&E and was admitted overnight, with a series of tests and observations confirming that I had OHSS, she said.

While Justine was unlucky to suffer from ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), a rare complication of the IVF and egg freezing processes caused by the production of too many eggs, she felt she lacked information about this potential risk and that the clinic didnt offer adequate follow-up care.

The fertility industry is becoming increasingly commercialised, a consideration that is particularly pertinent in the case of egg freezing, which takes place primarily in the private sector. This is an aspect that Lucy van de Wiel, a researcher at Cambridge Universitys Reproductive Sociology Research Group, focuses on.

Her new book, Freezing Fertility, draws attention to the potential conflicts between clinical decision-making or patients best interests on the one hand and business and profit motives on the other. Market forces in the fertility industry, political interests underlying regulations, and age-old cultural narratives of gender and motherhood play a role in our reproductive decision-making.

The fertility industry is becoming increasingly commercialised, a consideration that is particularly pertinent in the case of egg freezing, which takes place primarily in the private sector.

Given this, I would urge women considering egg freezing to look beyond the information on clinic websites. In particular, women may wish to ask clinics for specific and verified data regarding the number of cycles they have performed each year or their success rates.

They may want to ask questions about exactly what is and is not included in advertised pricing, and to consult the HFEA website for an unbiased discussion of the benefits and risks of the technology. It can also be extremely helpful to discuss egg freezing with others who have been through the process, to gain a realistic impression of what it involves.

Despite her difficulties, overall Justine feels a sense of comfort knowing that she has frozen eggs in storage, but she does offer a note of caution:

While the process is presented as being fairly straightforward, it does have powerful physical, emotional and psychological impacts so it is important not to gloss over it as a procedure and make sure you have support available.

*Name and identifying details have been changed.

Zeynep Gurtin, Lecturer in Womens Health, UCL published this article first on The Conversation. The views expressed are the authors own.

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Egg Freezing Is On The Up: But Do Clinics Advertise It Correctly? - SheThePeople

Human Behavior

Five keys to combatting violence: Advice for the Biden administration | TheHill – The Hill

America is back means that President Biden faces a slew of foreign policy challenges as he modifies the course of U.S. national security. From confronting Russian President Vladimir PutinVladimir Vladimirovich PutinBiden can push back on Russia by supporting its neighbors in the Caucasus Five keys to combatting violence: Advice for the Biden administration Putin takes aim at a news company funded by Congress: How will US respond? MORE on cyber-based attacks against the American public to competing with Chinas ambitions under Xi Jinping to searching for a path toward honest diplomacy with Irans Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Rohani, moments like these can lead to big and important changes.

With years of experience working in national security (from war zones to the U.S. Senate to federal law enforcement), I have learned that the simplest and most effective way to make sense of the complexity of these moving moments is to treat these issues as firms and entrepreneurs acting in competitive markets.

To change the behavior of a criminal, terrorist or tyrant, offer something in exchange. Offer a good money, political support, market access, etc. or a bad kinetic force from military or law enforcement, trade sanctions, denial of access to currency or banking, etc. The key idea is to think of Putin, Xi, and Rohani and their critical supporters as humans, and not just countries.

To help make this shift to thinking in markets, considering heads of state as entrepreneurs leading firms in competitive markets I suggest a framework of five vectors of national security policymaking:

People want the best for themselves and their people, defined decreasingly as family, communities and nation. People tend to base their involvement in an activity on the expectation that the involvement will somehow bring about what they want. Entrepreneurs can lead commercial or political organizations and make resource allocation decisions for that organization. The organization can be called a firm: a state, an insurgent organization, a mafia. Whether a president, a criminal, a terrorist, or a tyrant or a president engaging in crime the first rule to keep in focus is this:Each human seeks to optimize these personal goals.

Resources like wealth can constrain a persons chosen behaviors for a given set of goals. A tyrants power may be limited by the wealth he can pay to his internal police forces, for example. Increasing or decreasing the wealth available to a leader/entrepreneur often effects human behavior. Sanctions from the Treasury Department, trade promotion from the Commerce Department and the United States Trade Representative (USTR), and development assistance from USAID have proven powerful tools in the past and must be considered in the context of incentives to change the behaviors of entrepreneurs such as Xi and Putin.

Institutions are the human-devised set of rules and associated enforcement of those rules which further constrain or enable human behavior. Laws and norms of behavior promoted by institutions such as the Financial Action Task Force, World Customs Organization or World Bank can define standards of behavior and exercise or moral suasion like name-and-shame policies of the Treasury that identify individuals providing financial support to terrorists.

Information feeds a persons expectations, and leaders, like all other people, make decisions based on expected outcomes. But leaders make decisions with imperfect information, so their decisions can be wrong.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Osama bin Laden orchestrated attacks on people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon and Pablo Escobar bombed a commercial airliner, but each of the three likely did not expect to be killed shortly after these actions.

In the coming year, the Biden administration should communicate clearly with both our friends and adversaries around the world to avoid information asymmetries. What consequences could the Iranian leadership expect to suffer if they violate weapons agreements? If President Biden cannot provide information convincing his Iranian counterparts of real negative consequences, then the agreement will have no good impact.

Time horizons act as an enabler or constraint on a leaders decision making. This time horizon may be different based on age, health or expected political term. An elected official may expect a four-year term, but a dictator may expect a lifetime term and the ability to pass on power to her heirs.

All those who would threaten the public safety and security of the American people are people, so this framework from economics can inform our national security protections and countermeasures. Seeing global threats as firms led by entrepreneurs acting in competitive markets makes clear that national security isnt just a job for the military and law enforcement. All levers of U.S. power (kinetic, financial, trade-based, cultural, diplomatic, etc.) comprise the tools of national and homeland security. Crafting U.S. foreign policy in market terms provides the framework to regain balance following a shift in priorities.

Gary M. Shiffman, Ph.D., a former chief of staff of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is the founder of Giant Oak and Consilient and the author of The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism.

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Five keys to combatting violence: Advice for the Biden administration | TheHill - The Hill

Human Behavior

Emergence, Rise and Fall of Surveillance Capitalism, Part 2: Rise and Fall – CircleID

"We are still in the early days of an information civilization. The third decade is our opportunity to match the ingenuity and determination of our 20th-century forebears by building the foundations for a democratic digital century."1 (Shoshana Zuboff)

One of the consequences of the Jan 6th events is a renewed attention towards Surveillance Capitalism as a key doctrine undermining democracy.2 This part 2 of the 2 part series of discusses the rise and fall of Surveillance Capitalism under the premise that the better we understand the danger at the door, the better we are able to confront it.

"Capitalism is supposed to be a system of checks and balances. It's a marketplace where everyone haggles until they are basically satisfied, and it works because you can always threaten to walk away if you don't get a fair deal. But when there's only one Marketplace, and it's impossible to walk away, everything is out of balance. Amazon owns the marketplace. They can do whatever they want, That's not capitalism. That's piracy. (David Kahan, Chief Executive Birkenstock Americas)3

Surveillance has a built-in drive for more and more surveillance. The goal is certainty, but to reach more certainty, you need more surveillance data. It can never reach the ultimate goal. It can only increase the observations and sharpen the analytic tools, but it can never reach 100% certainty, but it can suggest other surveillance uses. It will forever be on the hunt for the holy grail of certainty, with the user investing time and sacrificing more and more data. Shareholders want ever better margins from the monetization of data. Advertising partners want even more precise predictions. Governments spur themselves on with the thought of missing another 9/11. The stakes have become higher. A hunt for higher profits has become, in the context of security agencies, a question of corporate life and death. Ever more certainty has become an imperative! To achieve this, it is no longer enough to observe, it has to go further and read everybody's minds and ultimately control and direct what we do.

Surveillance capitalist corporations are in a perpetual "startup' mode of disrupting existing businesses and replacing them with their own. The moment they lose this drive, they become themselves the prey of other companies. That is why surveillance capitalist companies are always monopolistic and by design fighting any and all anti-trust regulations and regulatory moves. It only knows one direction, to become ever more disruptive, bigger, dehumanized, antisocial to the degree of criminality. It amasses power because it knows without it will die. Will they die? Are there are limits to their exploitation? Left on their own will, they leave nothing but devastation and despair behind them.

The genius of surveillance capitalism is revealed when it comes to introducing the new tools needed to increase its powers of observation and manipulation. Following the tried and tested digital business model of the search engine and social media platform, it offers a new product, the "next big thing." On the surface, it offers innovations that make the user's life easier, but the real purpose of the (IoT) devices or apps is to harvest even more and better personal data. Why should a digital corporation or government install the instruments of observation and risk a "big brother" image when it can manipulate its citizens and customers to provide the data, and even pay to do it. ( In surveillance capitalism, you can build the wall and get Mexico to pay for it!)

The most valuable tool and resource surveillance capitalism has exploited is the smartphone. Smartphones equipped with gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetic field detectors, and a barometric pressure sensor allow apps to monitor a person's activities in great detail. It does not just roughly know where you are and what you do; it knows that you are on the fourth-floor dance studio, having salsa lessons with the nice co-worker you met at the watercooler 4 month ago. The same co-worker that searched the net for engagement rings and was recently seen lurking outside the displays of jewelry shops. There are endless business opportunities opening there. All hell will break loose if she says "yes" and the wedding industry takes over the situation. Data-driven marketing pitches will pressure the couple away from that intimate 40 person family event that they wanted, and into a 3-day stadium event that will bankrupt them for life, possibly at the cost of their children's higher education, as college funding underwrites a flashy wedding.

Sometimes it is argued that the iPhone is less intrusive than Android phones. Apple makes a point to portrait itself as the good guy with slogans like "what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone" or even point out their role as guardians of privacy with slogans like "we're in the business of staying out yours." In fact, iPhones have the same array of sensors and send as much personal data to third parties as any Android phone. There is also a persistent worry that Apple's use of Chinese subcontractors makes it vulnerable to backdoors and hacking.

The methods to create consumer demand and consent are simple. Either you appeal to laziness or comfort. When that is not possible, a threat is created and promoted together with the offering of the tool to alleviate it. Consumers become the collaborators in their own exploitation. By "google" people, they internalize the values of surveillance capitalism, and their ethics have become one with it.

To see what they do, doorbells with networked cameras are brought to market. They can stop a thieve to steal a parcel, but they also register who is going in and out of the house and what is happening in front of it. Combining the images of all doorbells in the street enables the observation of the whole street and, ultimately, the whole town. Combining the images with the sounds from "smart interfaces" that have been marketed as "household helpers" provides more refined data and context.4 As these devises leave few physical tasks for the humans, they need to keep fit, which requires knowledge about what is going on in their bodies. The knowledge about your health that is important for you and your doctor is equally important for a health insurance company to decide if you are worth the risk.

To aid driving, cars are equipped with navigation systems. To make the car "smart" its connected directly with its manufacturer and other entities such as banks and insurance companies. If the installments are late, it gets switched off remotely. If the service intervals are not observed, the top speed reduces to 15 miles an hour and forces the car to come to the garage of the manufacturer's choice for "service." Your car insurance premium is flexible now and is deducted monthly depending on which driving behavior is reported. There is much too much uncertainty in just allowing people to drive. A self-driving car, or even better, a self-driving car that checks if your journey is justified and gives you permission for it is a much more sensible proposition. What is more, it is all done in the interest of, and out of "care" for, the consumer.

Uncertainty, rooting in the free will of the individual, is bad for business and ultimately inefficient, and chaotic. One can argue that it contributes to unnecessary emissions and impacts climate change. Here we have reasons why humans must be taught to control their behavior, otherwise, they will continue the madness of turning up all at once, with their motors running, to buy their coffees and bagels at the drive-through. Teaching them to come in regular intervals will save the world by saving humankind from its irrational self.

Surveillance capitalism feeds a new "cult of reason"5 like during the French revolution, and this time it has the means to direct people to what is best. How to do that was demonstrated successfully by Pokmon GO.6 The game whose basic object it is to collect creatures. Instead of hunting them down, it uses mapping tools to take the hunt from the screen into the real world. By making a creature to appear outside a particular coffee shop at 8.30 pm and letting the player know in advance, you ensure that he or she will be there. Make the next person come at 8.32 and so on. Use and refine these basic principles to all areas of human behavior, and voila, a state of perfect reason has been created, but at the expense of what human rights.

Surveillance capitalist corporations claim that they have a specific corporate culture, as an Amazon executive expressed it "our way," not grasping that the significance of his words mean that the values and needs of the company are more important than the rights of individuals, individual or the common good. This begs the question about our fears about computers taking, a takeover that has long been fulfilled. Humanity becomes no more or less than a function that has mobilized the support of capitalist surveillance companies. Even Jeff Bezos has to realize that he too is among the poorest with us, when he sold himself and us to ultimate surveillance capitalist exploitation through a machine called Amazon.

There is a reason why they teach robotics using Lego bricks:

"The most consequential global policy concerns of the present era are arising in debates over the architecture and governance of cyber-physical systems. Technology policy has to be conceptualized to account for the expansion of digital technologies from Communication and information exchange to material sensing and control. How technical, legal, and institutional structures evolve will have sweeping implications for civil liberties and Innovation for a generation."7

The goal of surveillance capitalism is to change the Internet from a communication network of, for, and by the people, to a system of control. Think about human communication as children's building blocks. Before surveillance capitalism, think of the Internet. There are blocks of different shapes, sizes, and colors. You can stack them on top of each other or side by side to construct whatever you want. Construction is limited by the fact that the blocks might touch one another, but they are not connected by anything more than gravity, making any construction both possible and unstable. (But that is also part of the fun, which child could resist the sight and sound of tumbling building blocks.)

Then came innovation by the creators of Lego. By sticking little round knobs on the bricks that clicked into holes in the bottom of other bricks, they created a stable connection that made the creative possibilities endless. The Internet is the little round knobs on the bricks of human communication. It enabled people to connect with each other globally. The digital knobs, the technical infrastructure of the Internet, like the Lego knobs, are both physical and virtual; they are cyber-physical. We can see the knobs clearly, but they are hidden and invisible within the platforms and applications where they make their magic, form connections with other bricks, and produce a gold mine of archived and tagged data.

The possibility to connect is endless, and everything seems to be possible as long as the knobs and holes are compatible with one another. To gain an economic advantage, surveillance capitalism wants to control all the bricks in play, and to do, so it tampers with the bricks and little knobs that connect the network of networks. They started to collect data about every brick, every effort to move a brick, and all the traffic in and around the brick, and any traffic facilitated by the brick. To do so, they created bricks with a multitude of sensors. Connected to the Internet, they form the Internet of Things (IoT). They look like ordinary bricks and function as part of the whole construction. Their real purpose is to send data to a special cluster of bricks that collects and analyzes the data and to send commands to actuator bricks that are able to manipulate all the bricks around it through numerous ways like turning switches, moving bricks into the desired position, and determine where and when bricks would connect with others. These magic sensor/actuator bricks bridge the gap between virtual and real. Something real, like the position of a person, is translated into digital virtual information. Based on the analysis and a pre-determined goal, commands are sent to actuators that cause where the person might go next. There is a subtle (and hidden) interplay between services provided and data collected.

The character and function of the Internet is changed from a communication network to a network of sensing and control. The Internet has undergone a transition from being primarily content-centric to increasingly surveillance and activation-centric. The Internet was always used by companies and governments to remote control utilities such as the electric grid, the step that Surveillance capitalism did is that it began to integrate humans and human behavior into the Internet of Things (IoT). A large part of the Internet is used to control legions of sensors and actuators. Outfitted with sensors and actuators like smart phones, social media sides and health watches, humans are surveyed and activated. The point of interaction between humans and the Internet has moved from the screen to the sensors, resulting in the invisibility of the network, a lack of agency about control, and a loss of ability to determine what happens with personal data.

The win here for surveillance capitalism is that by monitoring and controlling the sensors and actuators, it determines the shape of the whole and does not need to control everybody and everything. It only must establish itself as the architect that guides the overall construction and use (orchestration) to achieve the desired results. You cannot build a round house if you have only square bricks. Cyber-physical architecture determines what the Internet is and, more importantly, what it will become in the future. In a form-follows-function design model, the functions are data mining and behavioral modification, designed in the clothing of friendly apps.

To control all aspects of construction and to eliminate the last havens of freedom and creativity, surveillance capitalism needed to replace the round knobs with knobs of another design under its control.

To do so, it had to first cause a disruption by disassembling existing socio-economic constructs. The next step of the "innovation" was to reassemble the bricks in such a way that the connection between the bricks is controlled by the virtual bricks. Becoming the intermediary between two systems, one real and one virtual, with the virtual in surveillance mode, lets the virtual control the real.

To convince players to abandon the round design they made the new bricks free and gave them attractive functions designed to appeal to and please the users. First, these bricks seemed to be compatible but having convinced a large amount of players to use their bricks, surveillance capitalism began to change the design of the knobs. Then it created knobs specific to economic sectors like buying a book, ordering a taxi and renting a room. These knobs were different in shape and size and could only be connected with bricks of the same specification, a design primarily to restrict access to valuable data. Free creative play and economic competition are replaced by an increasing need to create and follow a pre-ordained design. Soon their knobs began to replace the original knobs everybody used. The new knobs where hailed as vital innovations and treated as commercial property that surveillance capitalists used to create powerful monopolies that forced everybody else to adapt and buy bricks with, or compatible with, the new knobs.

All firms are now technology companies, but not all are surveillance capitalists. Surveillance capitalism has achieved the seemingly impossible takeover of most global commercial activities. It did this by making itself the connector between providers and consumers, offering free access in exchange for data mining.

In the end, there is only one pre-ordained design. We have stopped being players with agency and have become bricks in an overall construction by an architect who has no concerns about us, other than as the producers of data and as the subjects of behavior modification as consumers (and citizens?).

Governments try to regulate the visible but are unable to address the real problems that a pre-determining cyberinfrastructure represents. Existing governance structures fail as they are basically addressing the wrong net. As observed:

"Interventions based on law and international agreements are not alone sufficient. Public policy is inscribed and concealed inside architecture." "The technological diffusion of the Internet into the material world requires new approaches to technical architecture and governance that not only consider the content-centric protection of the digital economy and the free flow of information but also view infrastructure stability and cybersecurity as a critical human rights issue."8

"What has made us great for so long is suddenly being seen as something we ought to be ashamed of!" (Amazon executive)

"people are worried-we're suddenly on the firing line." (recently retired Amazon executive)9

The situation looks hopeless. Escape from Alcatraz High-Security Prison seems to be more likely than escaping from surveillance capitalism. 99.9% of the digital information is rendered in a digital format that the surveillance capitalists have created for us. How can we escape or at least resist? We went the wrong way with the Internet, and we got led down the wrong path by surveillance capitalism. Now that we are becoming increasingly aware of its dangers, how can we start our way back to the crossroads and try again?

One reaction is to opt-out of digital technologies, which in developed societies seems impossible. The next option is to go digital hiding by deploying practices like Virtual Private Networks (VPN) that disguise our identity and deceive the deceivers. This might afford a person some limited level of protection, and even with that VPN in play, the devise is transmitting coordinates and other identifiable data. Individual defenses take a lot of effort and resources and do not bode well as the best path for our human dignity and integrity. The question is whether these forms of passive resistance can effect change, or do they just change the information to surveillance capitalism that has won over our self-determination.

We should not despair. There are good reasons that will ultimately cause the downfall of surveillance capitalism. It is unsustainability, and its business practices run against human nature and our notions of human rights and human dignity.

The European Commission stated in its recent White Paper on Artificial Intelligence: "As digital technology becomes an ever more central part of every aspect of people's lives, people should be able to trust it. Trustworthiness is also a prerequisite for its uptake."10

"For most of us, computers are effectively magic. When they work, we don't know how. When they break, we don't know why. For all but the most rarefied experts, sitting at a keyboard is an act of trust" (Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker)11

(Silicon Valley is in) "the trust business if you loose the trust of the people who use the product, you are done, You never get it back" (McNammee in the New Yorker)12

The tide is turning against surveillance capitalism as users are increasingly losing trust with regard to some uses of the Internet. There is a wealth of studies about how mistrust against digital industries in general and social media and online news platforms is growing.13 The current developments and discussions around privacy and the proposed Covid-19 tracking apps shows how deep this mistrust goes. Singapore was one of the first countries to introduce a Covid19 tracking app. It turned out to be a failure not only for technical reasons but mainly because people did not trust and download it.14 60-80% adoption would be needed to make it effective, but only around 30% used the app.15 One of the reasons was that the digital use plan, like in any surveillance capitalism app, tried to take advantage of the situation, and collected data that did not fit its stated purpose. Populations responded or failed to respond, where it seems that many would rather risk illness than submit themselves to digital monitoring by states in combination with data mining by surveillance capitalism. This is a case where the lack of digital integrity in the past results in death today.

No citizen will deny a legitimate and authorized health or law enforcement agency access to relevant data if the appropriate checks and balances are in place. Surveillance capitalism's insistence on scraping data, tagged to individuals from all sources, is at the core of concerns and opposition here.16

If a government treats its citizens by default as potential, but "not yet", offenders and manifests its non-existing trust relationship with widespread digital surveillance, possibly backed up with social-economical retributions, citizens will wisely strive to hide their information.17 They will not trust a government that does not trust them. When the government bases its approach to surveillance on digital integrity, and practices it, a policy dialogue to determine the rights and responsibilities of both governments and citizens is possible. The "Brands in Motion 2018" study, based on 25,000 consumers globally, found that 93% of the consumers in Germany demanded more ethical responsibility in the use of digital technologies.18

Governments and the digital industry need to restore the public trust in themselves through transparency, accountability, and truth and unity between their words and deeds, complimented by checks and balances provided through Internet Governance. Trustworthiness requires a new way of thinking, resulting in structural changes embedded in digital processes and Internet governance.

"Rivalries in 'Silicon Valley One' revolved around technological Prowess, consumer allegiance, and profitability. Now competition is for moral superiority..." Brian Barth, The New Yorker19

Surveillance capitalism has a build-in inability to do the right thing because doing so would mean self-destruction. The "right thing" is contrary to its digital business plan. Piecemeal private data protection regulations are nothing more than a short-term fix, inadequate and costly. In the long run, Surveillance capitalism will damage and impoverish the lives of all that are touched by it.

To see how a trust-based business model might work, we must return to digital integrity. Digital integrity is an Internet user's most valuable protection from digital exploitation. Current digital business models are based on the exploitation of personal data. Internet users live in a constant tension between using the full potential of the Internet and being exploited to the point of digital slavery. As more Internet users suffer and feel the tension, the more they will value digital integrity, and the more they will demand and possibly be willing to pay for assured digital integrity.

We have seen the same demand for integrity at work in creating marketplaces where consumers go "green" and started to pay for their physical health, and the health of the planet, by buying biological products at a higher price than non-biological ones. Private sector companies that offer products that demonstrably do not violate their customers' digital integrity are able to charge a price and make a profit without having to resort to practices that are harmful to their customers. Like the "green industry, a "digital integrity industry" is forming, from registries to domain name sellers, platform providers and online stores. We see just the beginning of a movement, but it is gaining momentum.20 Digital citizens start to express their will through behavioral changes and so create new digital realities. With each new "digital integrity business," the will of the people manifests itself in pressures to reform the digital marketplace.

The more we know here, the more we will be able to resist. Education in all matters concerning digital integrity and the workings of the digital ecosystem is one of the main pre-requisites for effective digital citizenship. Education informs digital citizens to become empowered digital citizens. The right to education should go beyond, for example, basic literacy or the higher goals STEM or STEAM-focused curriculum. It must include awareness around one's role in the governance ecosystem and building and maintaining a suitable social fabric and the social contract for social processes and behavior that promote access to individual human dignity.

Are anti-trust laws and privacy regulations by governments the solution?

"It's as if Bezos charted the company's growth by first drawing a map of antitrust law, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them" (Lina Khan)21

The ultimate goal and premise would be to restrict commercial activity based on private data seriously. Only data that was strictly necessary for providing a particular service, from medical files to gym membership, could be collected, never shared, and deleted when no longer needed.

Surveillance capitalism has so far managed to deceive the general public and lobby politicians into legislation that minimally regulates how the collected data is used, and avoid the worst-case scenarios around the integrity, and human rights concerns, related to company digital business practices to collect data. This is like regulating how a slave is to be treated but not questioning the general premise of slavery.

Attempts are made to get around even the existing very limited regulations as the recent attempts of Facebook to declare a "legitimate interest" to all personal data, even that which is protected by existing legislation such the European Union's GDPR.22

The main argument against not allowing general access to private data is that to do so limits innovation and, for example, the effectiveness of AI and applications like Covid-19 prevention apps. First of all, the difference between personal data and general data (e.g., facial recognition) is blurred. Surveillance capitalism is not after just the insights that can be gotten from aggregate, anonymous data, but its digital business model is also interested in insights about you. Secondly, it focuses AI on Artificial Narrow Intelligence or "ANI," which is basically smart algorithms that make quick decisions, for example, based on real-time data they receive. They are superior to human intervention only in that they have the ability to process data quicker. The algorithms still remain "human intelligence" based, in contrast to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where machines refine the algorithms based on specified (human?) objectives.

How Surveillance Capitalists explore the possibilities of AI was demonstrated by Alpha Go developed by Googles Deep Mind Lap, which pitted a computer against a world-class Go player resulting in a 4-1 win for the computer23. Not only did the games show that computers can win but also that AGI has the potential to teach people how to think in better ways. The currently applied emphasis is on ANI, with slower growth for AGI innovation. AI-based technology and digital business plans will developed as ways to refine the control and manipulation of people, for whatever ends the users of AI seek. The real danger is that surveillance capitalists will develop a monopoly on AI, or at least a protection against transparency and accountability, that threatens the use of knowledge and technology in the common good service.

Surveillance Capitalism underestimates human nature as it sees us as soulless machines that can be controlled through the appropriate command codes.

"...the ultimate goal of surveillance capitalism is to eliminate the uncertainty of decision-making. "That has a superficial appeal, until you realize that agency and identity depend on uncertainty; because it is the choices we make in uncertainty that define who we are."24 (McNamee, The New Yorker)

The predictions about human behavior ignore one fact that can be predicted about human nature with certainty: Whatever the incentives digital technologies provide if they are violating fundamental human rights such as freedom, dignity, and integrity, people will sooner or later react, oppose, and burst the chains of their subservience. There are numerous examples in human history that support this premise. For surveillance capitalism to function, it needs ever-increasing certainty based on ever-increasing data. This is causing an ever-increasing separation of persons from knowledge, rights from responsibilities, common good from profit. In the surveillance capitalism business model, balance, dialogue and a middle ground do not exist. All that exists is the extreme need for ever more data for it to continue. Much of today's digital technology is as though our data is in the hands of data junkies in search of the next data fix.

However sophisticated surveillance capitalism becomes, it will always have to predict the thoughts and actions of people in the end. That is the monetized product sold to its corporate and government customers. The next "big thing" is to take humans totally out of the decision-making algorithm and let computers make the decisions. Delegating the analysis and the decision-making to autonomous or semi-autonomous AI algorithms is highly risky, but for surveillance capitalists, that is the way they will try to go. It is the logical outcome of their digital business strategy and the only way to reach behavioral predictability at the scale of activities and behaviors faced (enjoyed) by surveillance capitalists. They are not concerned if they lead humanity to its: "I am sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that moment, like in Stanley Kubrick's film "A Space Odyssey."

We need to find ways to make better investments in societies for their benefit and stop investments made for the sake of profits in ways that challenge the integrity and human rights and make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

"I also call upon Member States to place human rights at the centre of regulatory frameworks and legislation on the development and use of digital technologies. In a similar vein, I call upon technology leaders urgently and publicly to acknowledge the importance of protecting the right to privacy and other human rights in the digital space and take clear, company-specific actions to do so". (UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres)25

As the gap between rich and poor widens, the social contract between different parts of a society becomes unsustainable, surveillance capitalism will be confronted as a cancerous business process that is both violating human rights and feeding that inequitable growth.

We need to return to an Internet that enables us to do more for the sake of humanity and not for the sake of monopolistic surveillance capitalism and their oligarchy of investors. As the focus of the Internet increasingly became the monetization of all data and processes, the Internet started to lose its soul. Its chief evangelist spread the gospel of Google for private gain, and not in the service or for the salvation of humankind.

In the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), we need to retool digital technologies to provide direct social security for the wellbeing of all. To achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will depend on the massive and targeted use of appropriate digital technologies. Currently, digital technologies are often detrimental to the achievement of the SDGs, many with aspects in violation of the UDHR. We need new kinds of digital innovation. We need innovations that are born out of the need to address real human goals and needs and not innovations that are servants of surveillance capitalism. Instead of putting their energies into lining the pockets of shareholders, we need smart incubators that work on solving problems like climate change. Many of the surveillance capitalist business models and apps are contributing to problems like climate change, social inequity, and socio-economic marginalization.

The next "Big Thing!" to be sought and hoped for is an Internet ecosystem populated by applications and (IoT) devices that do not exploit their users. Even a smartphone where the user fully understands the terms of services offered and transparency around the nature and uses of data collected would be truly revolutionary without exploiting private user data. The associated commercial potential would not have to rival surveillance capitalism since there is every expectation that surveillance capitalism's digital business practices will be reined in.

The question is whether governments and companies have the will, or feel the pressure from citizens and consumers, to bring integrity to their digital data practices and respect human rights in both the literal and virtual aspects of life. One fear is that manufacturers and governments so value access to data to predict and manipulate the deeds and thoughts of customers and citizens that the integrity and privacy of persons are so compromised that they are never released from their digital servitude.

We face an uncomfortable truth. We will likely never be free of digital servitude unless we take on the task of change and do the job ourselves. The safe and predictable world surveillance capitalism is luring us into is nothing more than an illusion and a distraction. It will not banish unpredictability and may well heighten insecurity. The current Covid-19 pandemic has revealed how fragile we are and that we need to work together and respect each other to survive. We will stop giving in to our laziness and comfort that took us away from engagement in the affairs and wellbeing of the world and community that surround us. We must build a balance between the uses and the effects of the digital applications and (IoT) devices that are trapping us in digital servitude and contributing to wellbeing and life for all, including flora and fauna) on our fragile planet earth.

Let us build new digital structures and processes that are constructive and not destructive. Let us set up structures of Internet Governance the promote engagement and democratic accountability. Let us return decency and integrity to what we do and how we do it. We are not where we want to be, but through conscious and deliberate engagement. With good Internet governance and by retooling social media and other digital apps to serve engaged dialogue, we can get on the way to a better tomorrow.

The author would like to give a big THANKS to Prof. Sam Lanfranco. Without his support and input these articles would not be possible.

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Emergence, Rise and Fall of Surveillance Capitalism, Part 2: Rise and Fall - CircleID

Human Behavior

Opinion Why the GOP is now anti-democratic – The CT Mirror

There is some movement afoot in the Connecticut legislature to make voting easier permanently, not just during the pandemic. The matter is complicated by our state constitution, but one pattern holds depressingly clear. Here, as elsewhere, Republicans mainly oppose easier ballot access.

The idea that one of our two viable political parties has evolved into an anti-democratic institution- one that does not want free and fair elections with high voter turnout whose results are respected is almost too upsetting to contemplate. But as Republican machinations graduate from voter purges and computer-assisted gerrymandering to their congressional attempt to overthrow a national election, it is incumbent on those of us who would think clearly about America to cope with this reality. Global warming is no fun to think about either, but not thinking about it wont help.

A good first step in understanding our situation is to acknowledge that throughout human history, representative democracy with a wide voter base has hardly been the norm. We in this country have had the exquisite good fortune to be able to take it for granted until lately, but in the big picture its the exception not the rule.

After the USSR dissolved and the Berlin Wall came down, there was a triumphalist moment in political science when some academics argued that liberal democracy had clearly won the battle of ideas and would vanquish all competitors forthwith, but the end of history didnt quite happen. Ours is certainly not the only polity in which liberal democracy is endangered or has never arrived. There is nothing inevitable about a system like ours, and nothing indestructible about it once established.

The average human being has not, while evolving from other primates, developed an instinctual and deep-seated love of democracy. Realistically, we want what we want and need what we need, and tend to like a political dispensation that we think will satisfy our needs and wants. If we dont think fair elections with lots of people voting are going to deliver the results we want, we are not genetically programmed to say Oh well, I guess its for the best. Whether from the perspective of world history or of human behavior, there has never been any reason to be complacent about the continued existence of a system like ours.

In the case of the contemporary GOP, the turn against democracy is not especially mysterious. This is a minority party. A Pew Research Center study from October 2020 found that 29% of registered voters identified as Republican. Its an unsurprising result in terms of banner Republican policies: most Americans favor a womans right to choose, and the GOP isnt having it; most Americans understand about climate change, and the GOP basically denies it; most Americans are having a more or less hard time making ends meet, and the GOP likes the federal minimum wage where it is, at $7.25/hr. How does a party like that win?

Certainly there are many independent voters who vote Republican, but its worth remembering that of three GOP presidential victories this century, two were popular-vote losses. Gore got more votes than Bush in 2000, and Clinton got way more than Trump in 2016. She beat him by about as many votes as Bush beat Kerry by in 2004, and we did not consider that to be a close election. The GOP happens to benefit, in a huge and anti-democratic way, from the electoral college.

It benefits similarly from the structure and behavior of the Senate. A vote for a senator in bright-red Wyoming is 67.6 times as powerful as a vote for a senator in deep-blue California, because thats the population differential, and they each get two senators. Once theyre in, these minority-party senators thrive in a body in which plain-old majority rule is now a rare exception; it generally takes 60 votes to do anything.

The Republican party also benefits from some apparently natural voting (or non-voting) patterns. Young people tend not to vote Republican, but then again they tend not to vote at all. The same is true of poor people. White people are more likely to vote, and to vote Republican, than non-whites, but here the result is not especially natural. Selective voter suppression has been the norm throughout U.S. history, with a relatively brief pause while the Voting Rights Act had teeth.

With all of these advantages natural, unnatural, and happenstance they lost in 2020; Trump was just too repellent. So now the Republican party is against our elections. It wanted the right to put them aside. When the courts wouldnt do it, they tried it in Congress.

I dont think it makes sense to think of this as an aberration. The Republican party in America is not well-situated to win free and fair elections in which lots of people vote. They know it, and will probably continue to act accordingly. They dont seem to care what gets broken along the way.

This is what we face.

Eric W. Kuhn lives in Middletown.

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Opinion Why the GOP is now anti-democratic - The CT Mirror

Human Behavior

Economists and Psychologists Are Weaponizing Psychology and the Thought of "Rationality" – The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

This year has been interesting for Wall Street, to say the least. After hearing that hedge funds had shorted the stock of the dying retail chain GameStop by over 100 percentof shares, Redditors banded together to buy up the stock, knowing that short sales do not expire, so the hedge funds willeventually be forced to buy it all back at a drastically raised price.

Estimates of short interest on the stock from sources such as the NASDAQ, MarketBeat, Yahoo Finance, and Bloomberg range from 53 percentto 177 percentof float. Hedge funds have been shutting down retail brokers, trading among themselves after hours, and publicly claiming to cover shares they had not yet bought, all in an attempt to lower the price on the stock, minimizing losses for the hedges when they finally cover the shorts. Historical examples such as the Volkswagen short squeeze of 2008 suggest that even a short interest as low as 50 percentcould still yield high dividends for GME stockholders.

With this in mind, Redditors hold GameStop under the perfectly rational desire to avoid getting tricked out of their money, and many more profess a willingness to hold despite losses if it means that hedge funds will be punished through bankruptcy for manipulating the market.

So why does the corporate press describe this phenomenon as a bubble that is irrational, insane, and dangerous,the product of the hysteria and cognitive bias of investors whodont know what theyre doing? Short squeezes are not new. The Redditors strategies are nothing that Wall Street has not tried before. In addition, the Redditors who initially popularized the stock have a reputation for treating the stock market like a casino, as evidenced by the name of their community, r/wallstreetbets. Gambling is a form of consumption spending, an end in itself. It is not inherently irrational for someone to buy a consumer good, no matter how strange.

Moreover, the Redditors live in a world where the committee investigating the blatant fraud surrounding GameStop is led by a woman who accepted six-figure fees from the defendant. Holding the stock as an attempt at getting justice makes sense, especially from the perspective of an online community full of Millennials, who have had their economic future crippled by Wall Street financiers through three consecutive once in a generation market crashes. For the amateur investor, there is no rule of law on Wall Streetand revenge is a rational strategy outside the law. All of this is obvious to anyone who reads what the Redditors have to say. Their plan might be ill advised, but it is definitely not irrational. Why doesnt the corporate media acknowledge this?

The answer is that economic rationality, like so many other terms, has been defined to suit the convenience of the neoliberal establishment. The concept of bias in economic decision-making is pseudoscientific, since its meaning can be warped to include any deviation from neoclassical economic models, even ones which are rational when put incontext. In the instance of the GameStop investors, this confusion of terms is serving its purpose, pathologizing as irrational a well-reasoned populist response to a broken financial system. This crucial context is necessary to recognize that the medias concern for the mental soundness of retail investors is only a tool meant to delegitimize them in the eyes of the public.

First, a word about irrationality. Rationality in economics is a different concept than rationality to the average person, a distinction lost upon the media pundits that bandy about the term. There is no single accepted definition of rationality in economics, but the general concept is one of maximization of self-interest, quantifiable as utility. Neoclassical economists models of human behavior all revolve around a strict interpretation of this definition, one that Austrian economists see as incompatible with the actual human experience. This mainstream conception of rationality excludes values that cannot be quantified from economic decision-making, painting human beings as automata competing to gain control of limited tangible resources.

When neoclassical economists models are compared with reality, they fail, often spectacularly. But rather than sacrifice their models to accommodate a broader definition of rationality, where humans use the means available to them to meet subjectively valued ends that can differ based on a multitude of factors, neoclassical economists of late classify those who deviate from these models as irrational,and make it their mission to fix them.

Enter behavioral economics, the application of the theory of cognitive bias to economic decision-making. Despite the name, it is an offshoot of applied psychology, specifically the theory of behaviorism within psychiatry. Behaviorism holds that human reactions to stimuli are either products of evolutionor reflexes trained through past reinforcement. By this definition, human action is predictably irrational, and must be systematically adjusted by some enlightened outside actor in order to maximize human welfare in a world vastly different from the one we evolved to live in. In behavioral economics, the logical endpoint of this world view is the need for regulation, which behavioral economists take it upon themselves to design.

Earlier scholars of the liberty movement have performed prescient analysis of the relationship between governance and the science of human behavior. In his book, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry, prominent antipsychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz describes the role of such sciences as follows: Law and psychiatry are similar in that both disciplines are concerned with norms of conduct and methods of social control.If people believe that health values justify coercion, but that moral and political values do not, those who wish to coerce others will tend to enlarge the category of health values at the expense of the category of moral values. Today, this medicalization of moral values has grown out of the field of psychology, where it originated, and into other fields such as economics.

Decades before Daniel Kahneman and Aaron Tversky would publish the paper that created behavioral economics as we know it, Szasz argued that the medicalization of social science would create a therapeutic state,one that granted power to unelected departments of expertsto pathologize and thereby delegitimize abnormal social behavior in the name of the health of the citizenry. The Western world was put on house arrest for a year by the policy czars of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Psychiatrists have en masse violated the Goldwater rule, which disallows them to speculateabout the mental health of a public figure they have not personally examined, in order to stigmatize right-wing populism. Its not difficult to see the resemblance to current events. How neatly this parallels arguments to deny amateur investors access to the market for their own good, in a move that would, coincidentally, of course, benefit the hedge funds that these investors want to bankrupt.

The mechanism of the therapeutic state is the same, no matter which social science is used to implement it. Irrationality, to the behavioral economist, is the consumers insanity, and the behavioral economists who profess to cure it are the darlings of the Keynesian establishment. Daniel Kahneman has received the Nobel Prize. Cass Sunstein, another pioneer of the field, was appointed administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2008. Policymakers in both the private and public spheres have leapt at the chance to implement these theories. They recognize cognitive bias as a useful explanation for why the public doesnt react as expected to policies that are supposedly in our best interest. And the terminology that behavioral economists coin makes its way into popular parlance, where it can be thrown at anyone whose actions are inconvenient to the established orderincluding retail investors.

From the perspective of an economist, this makes little sense. Austrian economists have had no problem incorporating economic behavior deemed irrational from a neoclassical standpoint into their paradigm. Moreover, many of the studies instrumental to the theories that behaviorists, and behavioral economists in turn, cite to prove human irrationality are highly flawed in their reasoning. In many cases, they either extrapolate beyond what the original experiment can be said to prove, have fallen victim to the replication crisis in social science, or have been shown to be the product of deliberate fraud.

Finally, as any student of human behavior should be able to predict, the ethical concerns that behavioral economists pay lip service to are ignored by policymakers in fact. These self-titled choice architects,using a euphemism for psychological manipulation common in the field of social engineering, assume their own immunity to the biases that they accuse others of displaying. If they cared to think about many of these cases of irrationality from the perspectives of the people they try to regulate, they would realize that their view of human behavior is not born of some privileged knowledgebut is a willful blindness to other factors at play.

But from the perspective of an apparatchik of the therapeutic state, this economic fad makes perfect sense. These are the same people whose conception of the business cycle assumes that entrepreneurs are incapable of recognizing and correcting systematic errors in their economic calculations, even when doing so would provide long-term benefit. This view is incompatible with reality, only useful to justify endless government intervention. Is it any surprise that they want to smear every economic actor in the same way, if only to claim that their intrusions constitute a moral good?

In this light, it is inevitable that the GameStop uprising will be declared a product of cognitive bias,even though the only bias here is that of media companies towardthe Wall Street investors who own them. Rather than admit that the Redditors investing behavior poses a threat to the powerful, the media condescends to them, hoping that a public unaware of the fraught history of the terminology in use will discard what they have to say. As long as it is inconvenient for these lackeys of the American aristocracy to acknowledge the rational incentives at play, they will continue to use any shoddy rhetorical tactic necessary to justify their overlords manipulation of the market, regardless of the impact this slander may have on retail investors. This is not science;this is graftand unfortunately for the field of economics, it is here to stay.

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Economists and Psychologists Are Weaponizing Psychology and the Thought of "Rationality" - The Shepherd of the Hills Gazette

Human Behavior

Linsey Davis discusses journey from U.Va. to ABC World News Tonight – University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

When Linsey Davis arrived at the University in 1995, a journalism career wasnt exactly on her mind. The award-winning ABC News anchor thought she wanted to be a psychologist and focused her studies on human behavior and how people think. Two and a half decades later, she moderated two of the 2020 elections Democratic presidential debates in front of a live, national audience.

I don't think I ever had to study that hard at U.Va., Davis remarked in an interview with The Cavalier Daily about preparing for the debates.

On Feb. 1, ABC News named Davis as anchor of its Sunday broadcasts of World News Tonight the most-watched evening-news broadcast in the nation. A two-time Emmy Award winner, Davis is also an anchor for ABC News Live Prime, the networks first-ever streaming evening newscast.

Its no secret that the University has produced many notable journalists and media executives in the last half century, despite not having a journalism school. From Katie Couric to Margaret Brennan, the University has prepared many for working in the media.

Any good institution worth its salt is going to help provoke their students to be curious and to question and to wonder, Davis said. I would say that all of that my curiosity and just wanting to kind of question certain things was nurtured while I was on Grounds.

Instead of taking courses on reporting, Davis learned about psychology, astrology and African American studies while at the University even taking a course with the late Professor Julian Bond, one of the nation's preeminent civil rights leaders. It wasnt until she studied abroad in London and took a few journalism courses late in her undergraduate career that she decided to pursue journalism.

I didn't have a change in heart until it was late, Davis said. But I will say that psychology degree was not for not I mean, you can certainly use that in any, in probably most, career paths, and just understanding how people work and just like the human behavior behind it all.

Since the University lacked a communications department at the time, she had to enroll in a graduate program elsewhere landing at New York University.

After obtaining a masters degree in communications, Davis worked as a reporter and anchor at local television stations in Syracuse, N.Y., Flint, Mich. and Indianapolis, Ind. She joined ABC News in 2007 as a New York-based correspondent and made waves in 2009 with a special Nightline report examining why African American women are the least likely of any race or gender to get married.

Davis has since conducted interviews with major influential figures and politicians including Secretary Hillary Clinton, Vice President Mike Pence, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Myon Burrell, a Minneapolis inmate who said he was wrongfully convicted for murder in part because of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who was the chief prosecutor in the case.

Last summer, as protests against police brutality were growing following George Floyds death, Davis led a roundtable discussion with Black female mayors and also anchored a documentary on the issue of domestic terrorism and hate-inspired violence in the U.S. As a Black female anchor, Davis wants to use her platform to talk about the issues facing her own community even if those conversations are uncomfortable.

I'm not afraid to tackle it and confront the issues and the facts, Davis said. Sometimes we don't have these conversations because people are so worried about how we address it or how we talk about it. I do think that there's a certain relevance that I'm able to bring to the table when I know that perspective of Black and Brown people in this community I live it, and it's my own personal experience.

However, she added that all Americans not just Black and Brown people should be starting conversations about racial issues.

Davis was also at the forefront of ABC News coverage of the 2020 presidential election, co-anchoring major political events such as two presidential debates, the vice presidential debate, presidential election coverage and Inauguration Day.

It was intense, Davis said. I had two huge, three-ring binders with 200 pages or more. [I spent time] just going through and talking about policy, talking about the economy, talking about climate change, whatever it might be so that I could really get a grasp and an understanding for the questions that I was going to be asking.

ABC News President James Goldston commended her skills as a journalist in a note to staff last week, saying that viewership of her streaming primetime newscast surged by over 200 percent in the last year.

Linsey has had an impressive rise at ABC News as a result of her unflinching interview prowess, her versatility and experience, Goldston said. Her presidential debate moderating performance was nothing short of commanding.

Outside of journalism, Davis is a best-selling author of three childrens books, including one coming out this month which she described as a love letter to our children. She is also a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and vividly remembers walking down the Lawn and Rugby Road and eating at Bodos Bagels as a University student.

It continues to be the best decision I ever made in life, Davis said. I loved U.Va. and really would attribute a lot of who I am to my four years there.

Davis will continue to anchor Live Prime Monday through Thursday in addition to being the new co-anchor of World News Tonight on Sundays.

Correction: A previous version of this article said that Davis anchors Live Prime Monday through Friday and that she moderated the presidential debates 14 years after arriving on Grounds. This article has been updated to reflect that she anchors Live Prime Monday through Thursday and that she moderated the debate 2.5 decades after coming to Grounds.

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Linsey Davis discusses journey from U.Va. to ABC World News Tonight - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily

Human Behavior

Jodie Foster: Yes, Mel Gibson is problematic but says shell always love him – The Mercury News

Jodie Fosters friendship with Mel Gibson has long puzzled movie fans, who see the two-time Academy Award winner as always acting with integrity, professionally and in her personal life.

Gibson, on the other hand, is problematic, as Foster herself acknowledged in a new interview this week. Gibson, 65, has won an Oscar for directing and starred in popular and critically acclaimed films, including Braveheart and the Lethal Weapon buddy cop movies. He more recently received an Oscar nomination for directing the 2016 World War II film Hacksaw Ridge.

Gibson also is just as famous for his scandals involving documented ugly behavior. He was ostracized by the industry for about 10 years after he was arrested for a DUI in Malibu in 2006 and unleashed an anti-Semitic rant. That arrest was followed by Gibson being caught on leaked tapes in 2010, screaming the n-word and other racist epithets at his then-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva. The Russian singer-songwriter and mother of one of Gibsons nine children, also alleged he was physically abusive.

In June, Gibson was forced to deny claims from Winona Ryder that she heard him make anti-Semitic and homophobic comments at a Hollywood party.

Throughout these scandals, Foster, 58, has stayed loyal, she told Marc Maron for his WTF podcast.

Yes, he is a problematic person, Foster said. And he is warm and affectionate and loving and a really good friend.

In addition, Foster said, hes a great actor, and a deep, deep person, saying, I think thats probably whats gotten him into so much trouble in the past.

Foster, who currently stars in the Guantanamo Bay legal drama The Mauritanian, has spent the past 10 years explaining her appreciation for Gibson, although she also told Maron that she absolutely doesnt condone some of his worst behavior.

Some of Fosters appreciation for the actor and director stems from her childhood, essentially growing up on movie sets, which mostly were populated by complicated men in the cast and crew. The men looked out for her.

It was just me, and then sometimes a script supervisor and occasionally a makeup artist and sometimes the woman who played my mom, Foster said. Otherwise, it was me and a whole bunch of guys and they were my brothers and dads. And then there were the directors and other actors Ive worked with. I really like these guys who are complicated guys, and who (are not people) everyone loves. Im the sister who laughs at their jokes. I just love them.

Foster told the Hollywood Reporter in 2011 that she was drawn to Gibsons dark side after getting to know him while working on the 1994 film Maverick.

Hes not saintly, and hes got a big mouth, and hell do gross things your nephew would do, Foster said. But I knew the minute I met him that I would love him the rest of my life.

In 2011, Foster was promoting her work with him in The Beaver, a film she directed about a depressed, alcoholic middle-aged executive who communicates through a glove puppet. Box office-wise, the film was considered a flop, and Time magazine said it was hard to separate its premise a somber, sad domestic drama featuring an alcoholic in acute crisis from Gibsons real life scandals.

Foster told the Hollywood Reporter that she knows Gibson has troubles, (but) when you love somebody you dont just walk away from them when they are struggling.

Foster repeated that sentiment to Maron when he jokingly asked whether she and Gibson had buried a body together to explain their continued bond. She explained how she always told her college-aged sons that she would be the first to call the police if they did anything illegal.

But Im going to visit you in jail every day, Foster said. Its not that I condone peoples behavior when they are wrong, but I cant not love my children or my family members (or friends). You dont abandon people in their worst moment of struggling. Instead, you extend your hand to try to teach them and help them be a better human.

Originally posted here:
Jodie Foster: Yes, Mel Gibson is problematic but says shell always love him - The Mercury News

Human Behavior

Making global value chains sustainable and enhancing the position of LDCs: A shared responsibility – Trade for Development News

Company activities that incorporate products and services components spread throughout the world are called value chains. The value in the chain is added by certain elements of production processes in various countries, and, as a result, country economies are increasingly more connected to and dependent on each other.

Value here does not only have a financial and economic dimension, but also, and probably even more so, a social and climatic dimension. The social and climatic are important for making value chains sustainable, and joint responsibility and action by all stakeholders is required, acknowledging the interdependencies between all.

Moreover, value chains require that developed countries and companies originating in them increase their share of responsibility instead of focusing only on their own goals, as is currently happening in the distribution of vaccines against COVID-19. It seems the developed world is not realizing that the unequal distribution of vaccines is not only unfair, but due to economic interdependencies, there will also be significant damage that puts decades of economic progress at risk for developed and least developed countries (LDCs) alike.

The worldwide intertwining caused by value chains has its positives. For example, some of the world's population has risen above the poverty line, partly due to new connections to global value chains (GVCs), becoming producers and expanded roles in the playing field of international trade, versus being only consumers.

However, there are drawbacks. LDCs are still at the bottom of the ladder with activities that add the least value to the chain, and they are not benefitting sufficiently from their roles. For example, African countries participation in GVCs is largely through supplying inputs (often raw materials) to foreign firms for further processing. Another negative side effect of global interdependency is the fact that many developed countries are outsourcing their problems to LDCs, for example sending plastic waste abroad to achieve national sustainability goals.

Previously, multinationals put too much emphasis on cost savings when setting up value chains, avoiding the responsibility of providing employees with decent, safe working environments and respecting human rights, while demanding such from their suppliers.

This is a major barrier to making sustainable value chains work.

Both at the national and company level, there are policies in the developed world aimed at mitigating the risks of vulnerable GVCs. Company responses to overcoming value chain vulnerability include robotization and re-shoring of activities that were previously located in LDCs. For example, there are various initiatives to create local food systems. Although a noble goal, the impact on economies especially of LDCs needs to be considered, as those countries may see a decrease in their agricultural exports as a result. It is argued that further domestic support to agriculture in developed countries encourages overproduction, which in turn increases supplies in world markets and depresses prices. Low prices make it harder for producers in developing countries to compete in their home markets as well as international ones, thus reducing incentives for production and retarding the development of the agricultural sector.

The natural reaction of companies in developed countries is to invest more in the preservation and development of knowledge and production lines in their own countries. Investing in critical products and services should, however, be done based on solidarity and interconnectivity with the rest of the world.

The global interconnection and interdependence of value chains is such that when we take one domino from the chain, there is a chance that the entire structure will fall and that the poorest countries will suffer most. Global interconnectivity should be taken as a starting point when thinking about sustainable value chains, as opposed to the developed world focusing only on their own sustainability issues.

Multinationals are partly dependent on LDCs for their operations, from producing garments in Bangladesh to cocoa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Given the competitive pressure these companies experience in international trade, their dominant position also puts more pressure on suppliers in LDCs, and most of these suppliers are micro-, small- and medium-sized companies. These businesses already operate in precarious conditions, and this is being exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic shows even more the interdependence between companies and countries, and the need for cooperation for equitable access to medical supplies and equipment.

Where does a company's responsibility for the products and services provided by third parties in developing countries begin and where does it end?

Companies are increasingly expected to not only refrain from causing damage to the environment, but to rather make a proactively positive contribution to society, together with partners.

The ball is not only in the court of the business community. Solutions to the associated risks require public and private cooperation in which companies and governments must take responsibility, with citizens also playing a prominent role. If we want to face major challenges, such as sufficient clean water and CO2 emissions reductions, we must look at the entire value chain and its global interconnectedness.

In the everyday reality amplified by COVID-19, the world is confronted with the fact that human behavior is the cause of a lot of misery and can at the same time be the solution. With some good will, developed countries can leverage this crisis as an accelerator to change human behavior. This requires that countries must look beyond resolving their own national and local sustainability issues while ignoring the impact of those solutions in other parts of the world.

Developed countries and multinationals should focus more on dealing responsibly with scarce resources such as labor and the environment. Macro and micro, they must ask whether they are part of the solution or the problem, not only for themselves, but also for others. Developed countries must try to take even more responsibility when designing national policies, and commit themselves to making value chains truly sustainable, because we are all vulnerable, and Mother Earth does not care about the boundaries we have defined.

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Making global value chains sustainable and enhancing the position of LDCs: A shared responsibility - Trade for Development News