abrownbear

Dope piece.

"As we began our recent book about Elon Musk, we quickly realized that parallels between Musk and Ford are not primarily about personal biography. They are about what kind of societies their versions of political economy produce—and require."

As AI makes it increasingly easier to build in-house systems, it seems like this kind of issue -- funneling billions of dollars to private contractors for eligibility verification software -- should be easily resolved. It would be cool if more tech people brought their skills to government in a constructive (non-DOGE) way.

As always, the most important aspect of this story is scale: "Given the scale of the deportation agencies, there is simply no way for legal responses to keep pace with the lawless mass lockup. Unlike ICE, the habeas bar did not receive a multi-billion dollar investment to underwrite limitless expansion."

"In our recent research, we document that mirroring the general rise in income inequality (documented by Piketty and his collaborators, among many others), there has been a similar concentration in individual campaign contributions. Figure 2 shows that the share of campaign contributions coming from the richest ten percent of Census tracts went from about 40% of the total in 1980 to almost 55% in 2020. Meanwhile, the share of the bottom fifty percent of tracts halved, from almost 30% to less than 15%."