MAIN IDEA:

This book was written by the leader of Project Veritas.  – the investigative media group that uses hidden video recordings to uncover all kinds of wrongdoing by politically connected, protected by media and Democrats leftist activists, corporate and government bureaucrats. The book reviews all aspects of this process and demonstrates how difficult and sometimes even dangerous the attempts to bring into public knowledge the machinations of these people are. It not only shows the mechanics of the process but also delves into the psychology and motivation of people who do this necessary job.  

CONTENT:

MY TAKE ON IT:

For me, the most interesting part of this book is motivation. The job of exposing communists, semi-communists, and their sympathizers was always dangerous and thankless. It is because the dominant intelligentsias’ beliefs are generally collectivistic and support Marxist ideology. Moreover, this part of the elite controls media, journalism, entertainment, and practically all command heights of the culture. Consequently, people who stand up against leftists’ wrongdoing are subject to litigation, cancellations, shameless libel, and everything else conceivable.

Nevertheless, there are such people. Luckily for the Western semi-democratic world, they seldom end up in Gulag or with a bullet in their head – a common practice in communist countries from the former USSR to present-day China or Cuba. Maybe this is one of the main factors why the miseries of socialism and communism inflicted by the Western elite on the population come in a relatively mild form. Something like the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Great Recession of the 2000s, or not yet the Great, but considerable inflation of today, all are comparatively small disasters. These calamities are mild compared to the communist government-organized famine in Ukraine in the 1930s – 3 to 5 million dead or, on a larger scale, famine in China in the 1960s – 30-60 million dead. As long as such groups as Veritas exist and cannot be entirely suppressed, the damage from collectivistic ideologies, whether Commies or Nazis or Wokes, will remain relatively mild, but only in comparison.  

MAIN IDEA:

This book came out from the results of the work of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Working Group on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity (Hoover IP2). It is concerned with the distribution of economic surplus generated by innovations via the mechanism of government-granted monopoly on the use of innovations via the legal enforcement of the patents. The book reviews many facets of the patent system, its impact on economic development, and its many faults. But however bad these faults are, they are not the main issue. That’s how the authors define it:” The meaningful question, therefore, is not how patent systems are imperfect, but why historically they have come to dominate all other methods of encouraging inventive activity. The chapters in this book pursue that question at length. Because this is a work of social science, not a mystery novel, permit us to outline a brief version of the answer that we came to as a group. Patents dominate because they create a property right that facilitates a productive division of labor, because they allow firms to transfer technological knowledge to one another, even across countries, and because they allow for incremental improvements to existing technologies. In short, patent systems foster the kind of decentralized, cumulative improvement that extends the frontiers of what is economically possible.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

As it exists now, I think the patent system has already outlived its usefulness and increasingly became the break on innovation rather than its accelerator. The reason is the treatment of innovations as material property to be distributed between mainly corporate entities. The typical consequence is when the transfer of all intellectual property developed by an individual to the corporation is the condition of employment. The complex innovations such as software development create high-value products, either Windows or Facebook, consisting of the multitude of inventions created by thousands of individuals but concentrated via a legal system under the control of a few individuals at the top of the corporation. Moreover, when formalized as a patent, it could be transferred from one entity to another, correspondingly moving economic rewards away from the actual innovators to others better versed in the legal system rather than technology. These issues increasingly demonstrate to potential innovators that they have very little chance of getting economically rewarded for the dedication required to produce something new and valuable.

I think that the new and different system should substitute the current system. In this new system, intellectual property is an inalienable property of an innovator. It should be automatically licensed to anybody based on standard or arbitraged conditions that provide adequate economic returns to the innovator. With the current proliferation of automated data collection functionality and coming AI-based functionality, it should be pretty feasible to trace who came up with a sufficiently new, non-trivial, valuable idea and implemented it to the demonstratable level. As a result, the merit would be allocated between human individuals who created the innovation. The task of redesigning and implementing the system of rewards for value created by innovations would not be easy. Still, it will become necessary unless we want to go back to some neo-feudal system when value produced by peasants is transferred to the lord to use as the lord wishes.         

MAIN IDEA:

This book describes very nicely what the working class is, which is really true middle class, and how it differs from other classes of American society: poor, professionals, and the wealthy elite. It also concentrates on increasing challenges for people in this group created by globalization, outsourcing of manufacturing, and the disappearance of American lore of business as a family, either small or big. The disappearance of the job as a source of belonging and change to a job as the transactional process also removed the stability from many people’s lives, causing severe psychological distress. The book also reviews many political issues that separated this group of people from their former champion – the democratic party. This change created a new political division in America: The Middle (Working) Class being fleeced by the Government vs. United forces of the wealthy elite and the poor Underclass prospering or surviving via receiving the Government’s largess either in the form of a tenured professorship or welfare checks and free services. The book also reviews economic and psychological commonalities between people of different races in this class. The author formulated the book’s central message this way:” It’s a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss “the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America, this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding “political correctness” becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. If you like what that dynamic is doing to the country, by all means continue business as usual. I don’t, for two reasons. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. Another key message is that elite truths don’t make sense in working-class lives. Working-class truths do, and my hope is that I’ve provided a window into why. If we’re not going to provide elite lives for the broad mass of people, neither can we expect them to embrace elite truths.”

CONTENT:

MY TAKE ON IT:

I do not accept the typical division of contemporary society into classes based on income. I think income has little relevance in society when nobody is starving while housing and staff are available for everybody, albeit of different quality.   The critical difference is how people get resources to maintain whatever is their way of life:

• The poor have no property and have little to offer to others, so they have to do simple work where they are easily substituted by others and have little to no bargaining power.
• Middle Class possesses some valuable material property like a farm, shop, or similar small business, or valuable intellectual property such as experience in doing some complex job, which provides some serious bargaining power. However, in both cases, these properties need the application of significant effort to produce good returns.
• The elite possesses a large amount of property, usually material like inherited or acquired wealth or prestige that allows obtaining resources with little or no effort.

In my opinion, the current problems are caused by a massive decrease in the need for human effort to produce goods and services, making a great many people of the Middle class redundant, consequently pushing them into the rank of poor. So naturally, this causes people to become upset and unhappy, quite possibly leading to massive changes in the structure of society.

MAIN IDEA:

This book provides a detailed description of developments in the science of animal and human behavior and applications of this science for attempts to control this behavior. First, the book briefly discusses pre-scientific methods of controlling people via forced religious conversion, torture, and other crude tools. Then it looks at the most famous examples such as the works of Pavlov, Cold War experimentation with drugs and environmental/ideological brainwashing, Stockholm syndrome, and the latest development in the use of social media. The conclusion is that despite or maybe with the extensive help of contemporary science, brainwashing or, more precisely, coercive persuasion continues to exist everywhere and perhaps becomes even more effective than it used to be.

CONTENT:

MY TAKE ON IT:

Coercive persuasion is the core characteristic of human existence and probably relates to non-coercive persuasion at a ratio of 10 to 1. One only needs to look a bit wider when to see the coercion applied softly via approval/disapproval of behavior and even thoughts by surrounding people. It is very seldom when an individual can go against generally accepted beliefs and behavior norms. This coercive persuasion is a historical norm and has existed in all societies until recently. The interesting process began when the new, scientific method of thinking was invented just a few centuries ago. Suddenly, some societies in which the new way of thinking obtained a foothold began rapid technological progress, which made these societies dominant due to the military advantages of high technology. The other side of the picture was that the population’s well-being was also greatly improved. The current paradox is that the advancement of science made coercive persuasion much more effective, consequently limiting or even eliminating the progress of science. Moreover, anti-freedom societies like China and Russia got access to technology, including military technology developed in pro-freedom societies. Internal anti-freedom forces such as leftist movements are currently on the offensive, trying to move the world to the new dark age of communism and fascism. The catch is that only when individuals have absolute freedom to think and experiment outside of some paradigm – the area where real solutions reside, does the scientific way of thinking work. This fundamental freedom drives technological or social progress if combined with sufficient resources. I would hope that enough people appreciate the value of freedom enough to fight for it by limiting the elite’s power to produce fakes and deceptions. Coercive persuasion becomes impossible if a sufficient share of the active population supports freedom, but it becomes inevitable if liberty is rejected.