Harvard professor of history, Alexander Keyssar, writes in the Washington Post, “The real grand bargain, coming undone,” that the agenda of today’s conservatives “looks like a bizarre effort to return to the Gilded Age, an era with little regulation of business, no social insurance and no legal protections for workers.”

He says the conservative agenda are calls for the “destruction or weakening of institutions without acknowledging (or perhaps understanding) why they came into being.”

Keyssar says that this agenda forgets that over 100 years ago, in response to the excess of the Gilded Age, America made a grand bargain  — “a balance between private interests and public welfare, workers and employers, the wealthy and the poor” — and that conservatives efforts to destroy this grand bargain is a big mistake.

A century ago, Keyssar explains,“most, Americans were convinced that capitalism had to be replaced with some form of cooperative commonwealth … In the presidential election of 1912, 75 percent of the vote went to candidates who called themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist.’ … The political pressure from anti-capitalists, anti-monopolists, populists, progressives, working-class activists and socialists led, over time, to a truly grand bargain.”

1. First came the regulation of business and banking to protect consumers, limit the power of individual corporations and prevent anti-competitive practices. The principle underlying measures such as the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) — which insured bank deposits and separated investment from commercial banking — was that government was responsible for protecting society against the shortcomings of a market economy. The profit motive could not always be counted on to serve the public’s welfare.
2. The second prong of reform was guaranteeing workers’ right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. The core premise of the 1914 Clayton Act and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — born of decades of experience — was that individual workers lacked the power to protect their interests when dealing with large employers. For the most poorly paid, the federal government mandated a minimum wage and maximum hours.
3. The third ingredient was social insurance. Unemployment insurance (1935), Social Security (1935), and, later, Medicaid and Medicare (1965) were grounded in the recognition that citizens could not always be self-sufficient and that it was the role of government to aid those unable to fend for themselves.

Keyssar says that this “grand bargain” is coming undone

• Regulatory laws (including antitrust laws) are weakly enforced or vitiated
• Private-sector employers’ fierce attacks on unions since the 1970s
• The social safety net has frayed … The real value of the minimum wage is lower than it was in the 1970s.

Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that “The Singularity Is Near” was given a new jolt of credibility this week, when IBM revealed it has developed a new “cognitive computing chip” designed to mimic the functions of the human brain.

Kurzeil is a futurist who notes that the amount of computing power that can be bought for $1000 double every 11 months. Kurzweil predicts this  exponential explosion of computing power will continue and that eventually machines will become billions of times more intelligent than humans.  Kurzweil predicts this “singularity” will occur in 2045.

IBM’s new chip is a radical change in the current 40 year old computer technology that relies on stored programs. IBM reports that this new generation of chip are, “designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition.”

From the news release:

In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.

Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be programmed the same way traditional computers are today. Rather, cognitive computers are expected to learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember – and learn from – the outcomes, mimicking the brains structural and synaptic plasticity.

To do this, IBM is combining principles from nanoscience, neuroscience and supercomputing as part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative. The company and its university collaborators also announced they have been awarded approximately $21 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 2 of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.

The goal of SyNAPSE  is to create a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment – all while rivaling the brain’s compact size and low power usage. The IBM team has already successfully completed Phases 0 and 1.

“This is a major initiative to move beyond the von Neumann paradigm that has been ruling computer architecture for more than half a century,” said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research. “Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture. These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signaling the beginning of a new generation of computers and their applications in business, science and government.”

The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.”

Previous posts:

• As The Singularity Approaches — The Aim Of Education Must Be — Awake, Find Oil For Your Lamp, Get Ready
• When Computers Are Billions Of Times More Intelligent Than Humans — What Should Be The Aims Of Education?

Interesting article in today’s NYT, “Crashing the Tea Party,” says, according to polls, disapproval of the Tea Party is increasing and, “even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic.”

The authors of the article — David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard — studied extensive data going back to 2006. They report:  “In data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like atheists and Muslims. Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.”

According to these scholars, what Americans most dislike about the Tea Party is the Tea Party’s emphasis on religion.

“Americans have become slightly more conservative economically,” these authors report, “They have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.”

The article says:

Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.

On everything but the size of government, Tea Party supporters are increasingly out of step with most Americans, even many Republicans. Indeed, at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, today’s Tea Party parallels the anti-Vietnam War movement which rallied behind George S. McGovern in 1972. The McGovernite activists brought energy, but also stridency, to the Democratic Party — repelling moderate voters and damaging the Democratic brand for a generation. By embracing the Tea Party, Republicans risk repeating history.