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Artificial intelligence is not limited to entertaining chatbots: increasingly effective programs trained with machine learning have become integral to uses ranging from smartphone GPS navigators to the algorithms that govern social media. But as AI’s popularity keeps rising, more researchers and experts are noting the environmental cost. Training and running an AI system requires a great deal of computing power and electricity, and the resulting carbon dioxide emissions are one way AI affects the climate. But its environmental impact goes well beyond its carbon footprint.

“It is important for us to recognize the CO2 emissions of some of these large AI systems especially,” says Jesse Dodge, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle. He adds, however, that “the impact of AI systems in general is going to be from the applications they’re built for, not necessarily the cost of training.”

Tech giants are building power-hungry data centers to run their artificial intelligence tools. The costs of that demand surge are becoming clearer.

A.I.’s carbon problem

Generative AI is the hot new technology behind chatbots and image generators. But how hot is it making the planet?

As an AI researcher, I often worry about the energy costs of building artificial intelligence models. The more powerful the AI, the more energy it takes. What does the emergence of increasingly more powerful generative AI models mean for society’s future carbon footprint?

The environmental cost of training AI systems varies and is, in the case of some models, hefty, according to the 2024 AI Index report. For example, Meta’s Llama 2 70B model released approximately 291.2 tonnes (321 US tons) of carbon. That’s 291 times more than the emissions produced by a single traveler on a round-trip flight from New York to San Francisco and 16 times higher than the average American’s yearly carbon emissions.

However, that’s nothing compared to the whopping 502 tonnes (553 US tons) reportedly released during GPT-3 training.

Strubell et al. recently benchmarked model training and development costs in terms of dollars and estimated 2 emissions [129]. While the average human is responsible for an estimated 5t 2 per year,2 the authors trained a Transformer (big) model [136] with neural architecture search and estimated that the training procedure emitted 284t of 2 . Training a single BERT base model (without hyperparameter tuning) on GPUs was estimated to require as much energy as a trans-American flight. While some of this energy comes from renewable sources, or cloud compute companies’ use of carbon credit-offset sources, the authors note that the majority of cloud compute providers’ energy is Not sourced from renewable sources and many energy sources in the world are not carbon neutral. In addition, renewable energy sources are still costly to the environment, 3 and data centers with increasing computation requirements take away from other potential uses of green energy,4 underscoring the need for energy efficient model architectures and training paradigms.

Electricity consumption from data centers, AI, and cryptocurrency could reach double 2022 levels by 2026, according to projections from the International Energy Agency. Those technologies together made up roughly 2% of global electricity demand in 2022. Note that these numbers aren’t just for AI—it’s tricky to nail down AI’s specific contribution, so keep that in mind when you see predictions about electricity demand from data centers. There’s a wide range of uncertainty in the IEA’s projections, depending on factors like how quickly deployment increases and how efficient computing processes get. On the low end, the sector could require about 160 terawatt-hours of additional electricity by 2026. On the higher end, that number might be 590 TWh. As the report puts it, AI, data centers, and cryptocurrency together are likely adding “at least one Sweden or at most one Germany” to global electricity demand. In total, the IEA projects, the world will add about 3,500 TWh of electricity demand over that same period—so while computing is certainly part of the demand crunch, it’s far from the whole story. Electric vehicles and the industrial sector will both be bigger sources of growth in electricity demand than data centers in the European Union, for example. Still, some big tech companies are suggesting that AI could get in the way of their climate goals. Microsoft pledged four years ago to bring its greenhouse-gas emissions to zero (or even lower) by the end of the decade. But the company’s recent sustainability report shows that instead, emissions are still ticking up, and some executive point to AI as a reason.

AI model training can lead to the evaporation of an astonishing amount of fresh water into the atmosphere for data center heat rejection, potentially exacerbating stress on our already limited freshwater resources. All these environmental impacts are expected to escalate considerably, with the global AI energy demand projected to exponentially increase to at least 10 times the current level and exceed the annual electricity consumption of a small country like Belgium by 2026. In the United States, the rapidly growing AI demand is poised to drive data center energy consumption to about 6% of the nation’s total electricity usage in 2026, adding further pressure on grid infrastructures and highlighting the urgent need for sustainable solutions to support continued AI advancement. The generation of electricity, particularly through fossil fuel combustion, results in local air pollution, thermal pollution in water bodies, and the production of solid wastes, including even hazardous materials. Elevated carbon emissions in a region come with localized social costs, potentially leading to higher levels of ozone, particulate matter, and premature mortality. Furthermore, the strain on local freshwater resources imposed by the substantial water consumption associated with AI, both directly for onsite server cooling and indirectly for offsite electricity generation, can worsen prolonged droughts in water-stressed regions like Arizona and Chile.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hailed as a game-changer but beneath its transformative potential lies a pressing concern: its environmental impact. The development, maintenance, and disposal of AI technology all come with a large carbon footprint.

In this article, we dive deep into the hidden environmental dilemma surrounding AI and explore the urgent need for proactive measures. A sustainable future may be secured, and the risks AI brings to our world can be reduced by being aware of the effects and acting responsibly.

“The biggest issue with AI is actually going to be … its use in biological conflict,” according to former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.[1] And he’s not the only AI expert worried. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, warned that in just two to three years, AI has the potential to “greatly widen the range of actors with the technical capability to conduct a large-scale biological attack.”[2] OpenAI’s Sam Altman has called for regulation on AI models “that could help create novel biological agents.”[3]President Biden’s recent Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence explicitly tasks relevant agencies with assessing the ways in which AI can increase, and potentially help mitigate, biosecurity risks.[4]But what exactly has experts and officials so worried?

Biological weapons are not a new concern

Public opinion has shifted: Half of us are nervous about AI's impact

According to surveys conducted by Ipsos, while 52% of the global public expressed nervousness about products and services that used AI, up from 39% in 2022, Australians were the most nervous, followed by Brits, Canadians, and Americans.

AI and machine learning technologies have become integral to many applications and services within the security industry. The adoption of these technologies in security continues to rise rapidly as the performance of these technologies improves and new applications emerge. The ability to extract insights from massive amounts of data provides security teams with augmented awareness of risks and events.

Video analytics relies on AI for tasks like pattern recognition, facial recognition, object classification, and anomaly detection within video data. Smart cameras equipped with machine learning can identify threats and suspicious behavior in real time. AI also unlocks valuable insights from security data through techniques like predictive analytics. AI technologies are finding use cases across access control, video security, alarm systems, and much more.

In order to extend this analysis, it is useful to compare the draft EU AI regulation to the GDPR [22]. The GDPR is not supported by standards, however it does allow for third-party GDPR certifications to be awarded. These certification schemes do not provide presumption of conformity with GDPR [1]. Such certification schemes have also been slow to manifest, and there is only one that is endorsed by the European Data Privacy Board [20].

The complaint-based and enforcement-led approach of GDPR means that levels of compliance are determined by each organisation’s judgement of the risk and impact of fines and reputational damage, and limited by the number of resources available to data protection authorities. Additionally, there is growing evidence that GDPR has resulted in less competition in some areas, and favoured large online platforms [23]. One of the reasons for this is that companies are less willing to trust smaller companies with data, as it may impact their own compliance [24]. Consequently, the decision to use regulations without standards has had a substantial impact on innovation in the uncertain data sector. It should be acknowledged, however, that this impact has not only been negative. The emergence of privacy-enhancing technologies is linked to the GDPR, and represents a positive impact of the regulation on innovation.

It is like Grandpa is talking to us today, reminding us of a time when friendship and reciprocity guided the relationship between the Cree and the newcomers in the eagle hills, at a time when a traveller was made welcome day or night. This book is about unpacking relationships between Plains Cree people and newcomers. Specifically, this book offers an Indigenous perspective on the economic realm. What is the relationship between Canada's "progress" and the exploitation of Indigenous peoples? What gifts are embedded in Indigenous world views to speak to miyo-pimâtisiwin, the good life, and, specifically, good relations related to the economy? In this book I present two main arguments. The first is that economic exploitation was the first and most enduring relationship between newcomers and Indigenous peoples. This set the stage for settler colonialism to take hold. This important characterization has not been analyzed extensively enough. The second argument is that our economic relationships are constitutive; by this I mean that the relationships we have to the land, people, and other beings create and co-create who we are as individuals and as peoples. Indigenous peoples' options for achieving economic self-determination need to be attuned to the constitutive nature of these relationships. I draw from nehiyawak narratives to hold up Indigenous principles related to Cree livelihood that are embedded in our world view. I argue that these enduring principles are still of relevance today. Simply stated, the answer is not trading state colonialism for capitalist colonialism. A changing economy has fundamentally altered relationships with ask\y g'p+, the land, broadly conceived. This change has different contours. One has to do with a shift from a subsistence and trade economy to capitalism and wage labour. This change has altered our relationships, prioritized waged labour, and changed our relationship from living with the land to making a living off the land (Ghostkeeper 2007). Tied to this are the particularly destructive aspects of resource extraction. Resource extraction has diminished everyone's ability to live at a subsistence level by decreasing wildlife populations and increasing harmful toxins found in the food system and natural environment. This has left many Indigenous communities without adequate subsistence options. A subsistence livelihood is basic to the econ-omy, but it is also intimately connected with social connections and cultural practices (Kuokkanen 2011). To state it another way, to lose the ability to live with the land has a major impact not only on the economy of a people (historically and currently), but also on its social system. Being able to maintain miyo-wicêhtowin TV A 14>4-> (good relationships) with the land has intrinsic value, even if the land, because of human impact, is no longer able to provide for all the people's subsistence needs. A common public critique of Indigenous self-determination is that it is not feasible without economic independence from the settler state. This critique and the logics settlers use to try to govern Indigenous peoples serve to push Indigenous communities to look beyond themselves for economic development initiatives that might promise a stronger capital portfolio. This has led to radical transformations for Indigenous peoples, who find themselves increasingly governed from the outside and by the logic of the global market. This story is being told. What has not been fully explored is the Indigenous-nation-specific dissonance that is deeply rooted in settler economic exploitation, and corresponding acts of discord, refusal, and re-sistance. The duality entailed in revitalizing Indigenous economic relation-ships, in the context of Indigenous resistance to economic exploitation, has a logic of its own. That logic is the subject of this study. Most non-Indigenous Canadians do not understand this logic underpinning Indigenous resist-ance. Therefore, this study might be of interest for Canadians to understand an Indigenous world view that underpins Indigenous dissonance and resistance. The intervention provided by this study is grounded in dual concepts. It is at once a critique of unexamined economic development in a Plains Cree context, and also a narrative that foregrounds accounts of Cree-centred acts of wähkohtöwin <. j')A, the normative principles guiding relationships, that serve as resistance to these logics. Although this study focuses on one Indigenous people, it is my hope that other Indigenous peoples will see value in the method of drawing from wisdom within their own oral traditions or other resurgent methods (land-based, ceremonial cycle, language, etc.) to revitalize their economic relationships. Stated in another way: the nehiyawak o"As ‹' (Cree people), whose knowledge systems I draw upon, have distinctive governing relationships of colonial logic: colonialism has also centred on disrupting and destroying Indigenous economies - for example, exploitation during the fur trade (when the Hudson's Bay Company unjustly sold 2.9 million square miles of Indigenous lands) or through resource extraction (with oil and gas companies operating on Indigenous lands), and then creating and forcing upon us economic development programs linked to modernization (arguing that Indigenous cultures hinder economic development, and that once we assimilate into white society we will be able to develop economically) (Canada 1996, vol. 2, ch. 5). There is an ironic aspect to this settler-colonial logic. It trades one master for another. For example, Canada negotiates a Comprehensive Land Claims agreement with a First Nation. This Indigenous nation in a northern part of the prairie region lived a mostly subsistence lifestyle of hunting, fishing, and harvesting for hundreds and hundreds of years, although resource extraction has increasingly infringed on this. The bipartite (with the federal government) or tripartite (with the province included) agreements are made with the uneven power relations of a Canadian government that determines the scope and boundaries of negotiations and seeks to provide certainty (legal and economic) to non-Indigenous interests. This allows, for example. a multinational corporation to start a new oil and gas project in an Indigenous community in Canada, and in exchange the corporation will hire a few community members to operate some of the equipment. Say this community's food security came mainly from living with the land - hunting, fishing, and harvesting. Then the corporation has to build a road, which increases external traffic. The oil and gas project and the new road disrupt and displace the moose, elk, muskrat, and so on that the commun-ty hunts for food. With leakages from tailings ponds and unfettered de-velopment, the fish in that First Nation's bodies of water now have tumours and are not fit for human consumption, and water from the river is poisoned and no longer potable. The First Nation can no longer be self-sufficient and feed itself. What are the options left for the community? Perhaps an Impact Benefit Agreement is negotiated, and a few members will have training in this new industry. Often, economic exploitation becomes a filter that limits economic choices and viable options for Indigenous communities - it constricts. In this example, self-government, which can often start from an outstanding land claims process, pushes Indigenous societies aggressively into the second colonial logic: economic exploitation through the exposure of Indigenous lands to faster resource development (see Jobin 2020). Gaining more independence from the Canadian government by negotiating self-government or by allowing economic development initiatives that open lands to multinational corporations places Indigenous people more aggressively under the governance of the global capitalist market (Castro-Rea and Altamirano-Jiménez 2008). This is a difficult option for Indigenous communities, because before the negotiations, economic development surrounding the Indigenous territory already had affected their ability to live a subsistence lifestyle.

Cree epistemology is embedded in relationships with the land. Treaty Six Elders interviewed by H. Cardinal and Hildebrandt describe this connection to land as including at least the spiritual, physical, and economic elements, “This connection is rooted in the Cree concept and doctrines related to pimâtisiwin (life). It is a concept that contains many theoretical subsets including among other things, a concept called “pimâcihowin” (the ability to make a good living). Land (askiy) is an important source of life for it provides those things required for the physical, material, and economic survival of the people. When treaty Elders use the word “pimâcihowin” they are describing a holistic concept that includes a spiritual as well as a physical dimension” (H. Cardinal and Hildebrandt 2000, 43). Within this perspective Cree economy is intimately tied to relations with the land, encompassing laws, principles, values, teachings and responsibilities regarding these relationships, including responsibilities to the land and other living beings. In the book Spirit Gifting: the Concept of Spiritual Exchange (2007), Elder Elmer Ghostkeeper explores the importance of living in relationship with the land to the Indigenous worldview: “The eastern sky at sunrise is usually a brilliant yellow in my region. When I arise in the morning I face the east and say a prayer asking for a strong mind and giving thanks for my source of fire, heat, light and energy” (2007, 1). Ghostkeeper positions himself within his writing by stating that his 107 S Jobin father’s teachings regarding their Indigenous worldview and their living universe were all in the Cree language, Ghostkeeper says that this “might indicate that he had more of a Cree cultural perspective on life, than my mother, whose lessons were mostly in the English language” (2007, 6). Ghostkeeper describes himself as having a Metis49 worldview. However, I see his perspective regarding the shift from Indigenous relations with land to relations with land based on market citizenship principles as also being instructive to Cree interactions with market citizenship. How does the value of being in reciprocal relationships with physical and metaphysical beings shape notions of Cree citizenship and challenge market citizenship? I address this question in the rest of this chapter, and in chapters five, six, and seven. Ghostkeeper describes an Indigenous worldview regarding sustenance: Food to sustain life is created by The Great Spirit. It comes in the form of a gift (mekiwin), or something that is freely exchanged and shared between a donor and recipient through the relations of giving and receiving … It is the gathering and harvesting of plants and animals in order to make a living with the land. In this livelihood, a ritual is considered to be a decision made through the recital of a prayer by a gathering or harvester. The person requests permission from The Great Spirit, Mother Earth, and the aspects of the spirit, mind, and emotion of a plant or animal to sacrifice its body for human sustenance. The spirits of the donor and recipient are thought to be equal. This request is in exchange for an offering in the form of a gift of a pinch of tobacco or food, and it signals spiritual equality. (Ghostkeeper 2007, 11–12) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 49 In Ghostkeepers book, he uses the spelling Metis instead of Métis. 108 S Jobin Ghostkeeper sees this type of subsistence-based philosophy as a sacred relationship: living with the land. According to Ghostkeeper, through changes in subsistence patterns a shift occurred to one described as a secular worldview: living off the land. The shift to living off the land is described as a move to a secular worldview compared to an Indigenous spiritual worldview of living with the land. In his book, Ghostkeeper documents his own shift, from the patterns of subsistencebased living in his community to the wage economy, encompassing the construction of a natural gas field and the beginning of grain farming on their land. In analysing these changes, Ghostkeeper examines the technical and social relationships involved; where the “land, equipment, and labour, or forces of production, are more or less under the control of individuals from the community; the relationships, or means of production, are under the control of forces outside the community” (2007, 4–5). Ghostkeeper explains that his community historically saw themselves as part of the land with all other living beings and that one process in these relationships includes the exchanging of aspects of the mind, body, and spirit thought to “provide life for the body through the activities of ceremony, ritual, and sacrifice” (2007, 4). He explains this as Spirit Gifting, “when one makes a living with the land, using the gifts of plants and animals for food and medicinal purposes” (ibid.). He says that this relationship with the land changed when he was awarded an oil-field contract from the company in Calgary that was completing the natural providing new economic resources will revitalize their people. However, an unknown number of people, like Ghostkeeper, have pinpointed their growing dissatisfaction with the negative impacts these new market “relationships” bring. Significantly, these self-government agreements may actually push his community further into sociocultural market rationalities. Although Ghostkeeper found a way to revitalize his Indigenous worldview and sustain it within the current global neoliberal economic system, it is important to understand how the community as a whole has responded. Collective Reflexivity Increasingly, Indigenous scholars are critiquing the application of neoliberal instruments of capitalism and governance to First Nations communities (Alfred 2005; Bargh 2007; Altamirano-Jiménez 2009b; Kuokkanen 2006; Corntassel and Witmer 2008). Maori scholar Maria Bargh equates neoliberalism as the new form of colonisation on Indigenous peoples (2007, 2). In the article “North America First Peoples: Self-Determination or Economic Development?” Castro-Rea and Altamirano-Jimenez argue that government policies in Canada focus on (1) minimizing transfer payments to First Nations, (2) bounding self-government to self-administration of services, (3) prioritizing and encouraging neoliberal economic development, and (4) promoting relations between Aboriginal people and corporations to respond to global market pressures. The authors state that this is especially targeted to Indigenous peoples who have lands with oil and gas resources on them (Castro-Rea and Altamirano-Jiménez 2008, 241). Federal involvement, especially through negotiated self-government agreements and the push for opening Indigenous lands up to marketization, impacts communities and challenges Indigenous worldviews and relationships to the land. Within a market-citizenship regime there is a widening gap between rich and poor. Historically, Cree communities had norms preventing this sort of stratification. For example, in Cree society the Giveaway Ceremony, still occurring today, is a way to express thankfulness for the gifts of sustenance throughout the year and a process of wealth redistribution. During this ceremony people bring gifts to share with others. Part of the purpose of this ceremony is to provide the “necessities to live a prosperous life, with enough food to carry families through each winter” (Makokis 2001a, 107). I explore the giveaway ceremony more extensively in chapters five and six. Elmer Ghostkeeper writes that when the Metis live in relationship with the land, the norm of sharing is principal: “The harvesters would distribute and share a large portion of moose meat with other Metis, beginning with the elders, the next of kin, the most in need, and finally others that had shared with them in the past” (2007, 44). Moving to living off the land, Ghostkeeper shares that he “viewed the land as a commodity instead of a gift.” The shift from seeing the land as a gift changes Indigenous perceptions regarding sharing these gifts with others. Ghostkeeper describes his disconnect with the land translating to an unbearable dissatisfaction withlife, motivating him to reflect on the Indigenous knowledge he had been repressing, and to develop a revitalization model (see Figure 13) to explain his own individual revitalization process (2007, 81). 112 S Jobin Figure 13: Revitalization model. Ghostkeeper (2007, 81) This model is informed by Anthony Wallace’s (1970, 188) group revitalization theory and adapted to fit an Indigenous context. Within this rediscovery, Ghostkeeper reflected on the normative and behavioural ideals in an Indigenous worldview, acknowledging the diversity within. For Ghostkeeper, During the process of self-appraisal, using the concept of the ideal self (what I really wanted to be), I rediscovered a repressed code from my traditional knowledge, the concept of spiritual exchange, which I now refer to as “Spirit Gifting.” I revitalized this concept as a part of my way of knowing to form a new code which blends both traditional and Western scientific knowledge in a way that had been impossible for me before. (2007, 80) Elmer Ghostkeeper decided to once again live with the land. However, for him this did not mean a complete rejection of Western scientific knowledge practices. The ethic does require a continual critical and reflective approach, thoroughly examining how decisions and actions will impact the roles and responsibilities that Indigenous peoples hold as central to their identities. There also needs to be collective deliberations on how a people (for example, the Cree) will apply their collective revitalization. This is explored further in chapters five, six, and seven. For Ghostkeeper, and other Indigenous leaders, it is not necessarily about trying to protect themselves and their communities from outside influences at all costs. It is, however, about critically examining detrimental governmental and market governing forces.50 It is crucial to fully understand the two-pronged approach of settler-colonialism: state domination and economic exploitation. Selfdetermination is not achieved by replacing one colonial logic with the other. The process of Indigenous collective-reflexivity should guide community visioning and decision making. Ghostkeeper’s personal narrative shows how market citizenship can be incompatible with Indigenous worldviews regarding reciprocal relationships, especially surrounding resource development endeavours. Relations with the land shape Indigenous identity. In this chapter, I explored the specific disruptions that neoliberalism as governmentality has on Cree peoplehood. The next chapter delves deeper into Plains Cree peoplehood. Archival evidence shows that the Cree conceived of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 50 Chapters five to seven provide examples grounded in ᓀᐦᐃᔮᐃᐧᐃᐧᐣ(Nehiyâwiwin; Creeness). 114 S Jobin themselves as a distinct people, partaking in international trade and embarking in foreign affairs. Without continual individual and collective reflexivity, perpetual discontent might settle in, making capital accumulation and self-determination a hollow achievement.

Dussel, Quijano, and Wynter lead us to the understanding that what happened in the Americas was a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war—which represented a sort of exception to the ethics that regulate normal conduct in Christian countries—into a more stable and long-standing reality of damnation, and that this epistemic and material shift occurred in the colony. Damnation, life in hell, is colonialism: a reality characterized by the naturalization of war by means of the naturalization of slavery, now justified in relation to the very constitution of people and no longer solely or principally to their faith or belief. That human beings become slaves when they are vanquished in a war translates in the Americas into the suspicion that the conquered people, and then non-European peoples in general, are constitutively inferior and that therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom. Later on, this idea would be solidified with respect to the slavery of African peoples, achieving stability up to the present with the tragic reality of different forms of racism. Through this process, what looked like a "state of exception" in the colonies became the rule in the modern world. However, deviating from Giorgio Agarnben's diagnosis, one must say that the colony--long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination--served as the testing ground for the limits and possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets." It is race, the coloniality of power, and its concomitant Eurocentrism (and not only national socialisms or forms of fascism) that allow the "state of exception" to continue to define ordinary relations in this, our so-called postmodern world. Race emerges within a permanent state of exception where forms of behavior that are legitimate in war become a natural part of the ordinary way of life. In that world, an otherwise extraordinary affair becomes the norm and living in it requires extraordinary effort." In the racial/ colonial world, the "hell" of war becomes a condition that defines the reality of racialized selves, which Fanon referred to as the damnes de la terre (condemned of the earth). The damne (condemned) is a subject who exists in a permanent "hell," and as such, this figure serves as the main referent or liminal other that guarantees the continued affirmation of modernity as a paradigm of war. The hell of the condemned is not defined by the alienation of colonized productive forces, but rather signals the dispensability of racialized subjects, that is, the idea that the world would be fundamentally better without them. The racialized subject is ultimately a dispensable source of value, and exploitation is conceived in this context as due torture, and not solely as the extraction of surplus value. Moreover, it is this very same conception that gives rise to the particular erotic dynamics that characterize the relation between the master and its slaves or racialized workers. The condemned, in short, inhabit a context in which the confrontation with death and murder is ordinary. Their "hell" is not simply "other people," as Sartre would have put it-at least at one point - but rather racist perceptions that are responsible for the suspension of ethical behavior toward peoples at the bottom of the color line. Through racial conceptions that became central to the modern self, modernity and coloniality produced a permanent state of war that racialized and colonized subjects cannot evade or escape. The modern function of race and the coloniality of power, I am suggesting here, can be understood as a radicalization and naturalization of the non-ethics of war in colonialism." This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and enslaving certain subjects-for example, indigenous and black-as part of the enterprise of colonization. From here one could as well refer to them as the death ethics of war. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving; it also includes a particular treatment of sexuality and femininity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that places people of color within the murderous and rapist view of a vigilant ego, and the primary targets of this rape are women. But men of color are also seen through these lenses and feminized, to become fundamentally penetrable subjects for the ego conquiro. Racialization functions through gender and sex, and the ego conquiro is thereby constitutively a phallic ego as well." Dussel. who presents this thesis of the phallic character of the ego cogito, also makes links, albeit indirectly, with the reality of war. And thus, in the beginning of modernity, before Descartes discovered ... a terrifying anthropological dualism in Europe, the Spanish conquistadors arrived in America. The phallic conception of the European-medieval world is now added to the forms of submission of the vanquished Indians. "Males," Bartolome de las Casas writes, are reduced through "the hardest, most horrible, and harshest serfdom"; but this only occurs with those who have remained alive, because many of them have died; however, "in war typically they only leave alive young men (mozos) and women.""5 The indigenous people who survive the massacre or are left alive have to contend with a world that considers them to be dispensable. And since their bodies have been conceived of as inherently inferior or violent, they must be constantly subdued or civilized, which requires renewed acts of conquest and colonization. The survivors continue to live in a world defined by war, and this situation is peculiar in the case of women. AsT. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Renee T, White put it in the preface to their anthology Spoils oJ War: Women oJ Color, Cultures, and Revolutions: A sexist and/or racist patriarchal culture and order posts and attempts to maintain, through violent acts of force if necessary, the subjugation and inferiority of women of color. As Joy James notes, "its explicit, general premise constructs a conceptual framework of male [and/or white] as normative in order to enforce a politicaljracial, economic, cultural. sexual] and intellectual mandate of male [and/or white] as superior."

Settler colonization trains people to see each other, the land, and knowledge as property, to be in constant insatiable competition for limited resources. For the vantage of the settler, the focus becomes maintaining those property rights, and all others are positioned in relative locations around that center, being erased from visibility or antithetically supporting the settler center while never being able to achieve its status. But even a cursory understanding of cognition, culture, and consciousness tells us that, as Bakhtin (1986) theorized, our ideas, our words, have all been said before. He put it like this: Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere [we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense]. Each utterance refutes affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account ... . Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication. (91) Bakhtin meant response not only in the literal sense of what was just uttered before, but in a much farther-reaching sense, including people near and far in myriad contexts. Responses involve speakers and listeners. There is an answerability in the roles we have with each other. How we interact is not just about that specific moment and context, but echoes across contexts. It’s related to poststructural feminist theorizations of subjectivity (e.g., Ahmed 2006; Grosz 1994), in that the ways that we come into being in space and time, how we carry ourselves and act, are dynamic mixtures of affordances that have been shaped by and echo longstanding yet not sealed histories (Gordon 1994). Our social locations and histories have an impact on not just what we say but how we say it, and what meanings are made of our utterances. Considering educational research’s role in the perpetuation of settler-slave-Indigenous relationships, those of us employed as educational researchers are answerable to these deep trajectories. Given these deep trajectories, research and researchers who have succeeded, have been validated through settler colonial structures of schooling and, consequentially, also have contributed to creating a science that reflects misunderstandings about race, class, and gender (Jordan-Young 2011). Educational researchers must, as one example, answer to ways in which the field has allowed for learning to be lost in the pursuit of test score-driven achievement. Answerability means that we have responsibilities as speakers, listeners, and those responsibilities include stewardship of ideas and learning, not ownership. As educational researchers, how can we become and stay fundamentally answerable to the core endeavor of learning, not test score production or unachievable achievement in a stratified society? Learning, like all practices, is conducted in context so cannot be seen as a cordoned off space that is not subject to settler colonial relations. Rather, learning is fundamentally about coming into being and altering that being; in other words, it is a subjective act. Coming into being is, in essence, about being-in-relation. Therefore, the study, theorizing, and praxis of learning is the space our integrity should hold and where it has, instead, shown the most discipline-specific manifestations of settler colonialism. How educational research serves learning provides a place to more fully embody decolonial stances, as it has the potential to materially alter how educational research is conducted and for what purposes. I propose a repositioning toward learning, an alteration of researching bodies in places. For this, I must draw on work largely outside educational research. In her study of the places of learning found in media, architecture, and pedagogy, Ellsworth (2005) draws attention to the fundamentally transitional space that is learning. Rather than how the tradition of schooling has materially designed conditions for the transmittal and disciplined mimicry of expert knowledge, and educational research has, in turn and in cahoots, truncated learning to be measureable achievement, meant to be predicted, Ellsworth encourages the reader to think about the conditions that make learning possible but still unpredictable. She follows the traditions of thinkers like Grosz (1995), Massumi (1995), and Winnicott (1989), who attend to the social self as one in constant motion, constantly reconfiguring itself, learning, in relation to time, space, and materiality. She wrote: Learning never takes place in the absence of bodies, emotions, place, time, sound, image, self-experience, history. It always detours through memory, forgetting, desire, fear, pleasure, surprise, rewriting. And because learning takes place in relation, its detours take us up to and sometimes across the boundaries of habit, recognition, and the socially constructed identities within our selves. (Ellsworth 2005, 55) Through several examples, Ellsworth draws our attention to, in part, the interior changes involved in spaces designed for pedagogy. For example, in discussing how the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham sets up exterior conditions for interior alterity, Ellsworth (2005) writes, “Such places of learning implicate bodies in pedagogy in ways that the field of education has seldom explored. As they do this, they encourage and challenge us to move away from understanding the learning self merely through notions of cognition, psychology, or phenomenology or as being subjected to ideology” (6). Core to this framing is learning as a constant becoming and unbecoming, a constant inquiry and coordinate-taking, which sounds a lot like what research is supposed to be. Such a stance opens up spaces to depart from paradigms that theorize freedom, here to learn, as defined relative to restrictions, as in freedom from, but rather freedom as expansive, as in freedom to (Grosz 2010). Learning and knowledge, then, are better approached, particularly in the name of decolonization, as fundamentally quixotic, even wild (Sandoval 2008). Consider another example of learning, also imbued with research, this one from choreography. In 2009, an actor named Gregg Mozgala started to work with choreographer Tamar Rogoff (Genzlinger 2009). Mozgala has cerebral palsy, and Rogoff has no formal understanding of the biology, neuroscience, or physical therapy knowledges of cerebral palsy. But their way of working together and taking cues from his body, rather than working around it, altered deeply his way of being with his body. And what they did was use the principles of research—looking, inquiring, keeping track, and doing it all over again constantly. Like the pauses noted at the start of this article, meaning making and performance was interrupted, slowed down, with observation and bio feedback to return again. This created the space for learning and knowledge production. More specifically, Rogoff introduced Mozgala to a tension-releasing shaking technique. They began doing intensive oneon-one sessions of body work, Ms. Rogoff using her knowledge of the body and dance-training techniques to help Mr. Mozgala find individual bones, muscles, and tendons that he had thought were just collateral damage of the cerebral palsy. Much of this, in the medical field, would be understood to be evidence of neuroplasticity, and although it certainly is, it also speaks fundamentally to what research is. It is contextual, it is about constant coordination of self with other, self within self, and it is in constant motion. I offer these extra-educational examples not to barter in tacit antiintellectualism or to imply that deep, rigorous, discipline-specific study is unimportant, but to promote a radical reconfiguration of being and being-inrelation to knowledge and learning, to foreground “a politics of liberation rather than a politics of recognition” (A. Smith 2010, para 31). If we are to be other than owners invested in settler colonialism, educational research needs a radical restructuring of its relationship to knowledge. Rather than property, we should see knowledge, and more specifically knowledge about learning, as what we are answerable to. We should see ourselves as stewards not of specific pieces of knowledge, but rather of the productive and generative spaces that allow for finding knowledge. To be sure, this is not a new thought or appeal. Much of postmodern and poststructural thought embraces the idea that human practices are much more complex than can be predicted through fine-tuned measurements. Rather, my appeal is that we cease to see the problem in educational research as the lack of application of these ideologies. The problem is not simply one of failure to execute postmodernist or poststructural thought in practice, as these epistemologies do not, in and of themselves, include a critique of the genealogies of coloniality. Interrogating the logics of settler colonialism frees us to counter those logics. It also demands a productively more precise articulation of researcher reflexivity in relation to settler colonial structures. This kind of being-in-relation addresses and destabilizes potentially deterministic readings of settler colonial structures as some being settlers and others not, which in turn runs the danger of locating responsibility to counter coloniality partial rather than pervasive. Spivak (1990) addressed the less useful pauses that some of her White male students expressed when they had come to grips with their social locations, pauses that were more self-serving than answerable to structures of coloniality. She explained: I say to them: ‘Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?’ Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very deterministic position. ... From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will see that you have earned the right to criticize, and you will be heard. (62–63).

As Fanon notes, decolonization is best understood not as a temporal event but as a process. Moreover, it is a process that can only be understood through study of the intellectual, historical, and political dimensions that constitute it. It is here that digital humanities is best poised to intervene: in the affordances of digital technologies that help make decolonization legible and reveal its limits.

Fanon argues that decolonization is necessarily a violent process—violence was a tool of colonial projects, so the master’s tools will dismantle the master’s house. For Fanon, the violence takes physical and figurative forms—the violence engaged by the colonizer against colonial uprisings, armed struggle, the epistemic violence of colonialism, and the violent process of its undoing. In the case of digital humanities, such violence appears in discursive forms. These include reproducing colonial influences in the production of digital knowledge and centering epistemologies and ontologies of the Global North, namely the U.S. and western Europe, which in turn decenters those of Indigenous communities and the Global South. Fanon is a key figure here because his analysis is located in the dynamic between the colonizer and the colonized, between the settler and the native. This is not to say that invoking decolonization is only speaking to the political fact of colonization. On the contrary, it encompasses epistemological dimensions because the political realities of colonization are interdependent with displacement of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The existence of colonization relies on not only ongoing occupation of land but also occupation of regimes of knowledge erected to maintain and legitimate such occupation.

Formation of the Risk-Societies and the Sliding Signifiers of the Precarious Self Through the mobilisation of fear alongside the unsettling display of formidable sovereign power in envisaging the pleasures and risk with the uncanny elements of the crony capitalist economy, Western liberal democracies with the end of the Cold War and biopolitical power adhere to the uncanniness of the “war of terror”. Assessing what it might mean to the politics of precautionary risk to its circulation value and the articulations of risk and “risk consciousness” (Beck 1992: 34) under the rise of liberal traumatised subject within the context of the “War on Terror”, Jean Baudrillard aptly contends regarding the September 11, 2001: “The fact that we have dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of it – because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree – is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience” (Baudrillard 2002:5). What Baudrillard professes is the unconscious sincerity—the flurry of dreams and the important insights into the unconscious consciousness of risk and the “War on Terror”. And the shift to Risk Society from the Industrial one with the political and industrial narratives, Ulrich Beck harbours on the fallacy of the historical past in paving the way for the “European global domestic policy” and “ecological enlightenment” (Beck 1999: 69–70). The “War on Terror” with its ontological anxiety, as Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen finds, palpably present in the Western consciousness in the 1990s and the lack of clear revelation from al-Qaeda on the purpose behind the attack on the Twin Towers construes the framework of globalisation that influences the Western framings of post-Cold War world order and the Western anxieties. Here Rasmussen’s version of justification is worth quoting: This way of constructing 9/11 shows the reflexive nature of security policy in the late modern age. The new reflexivity manifested itself in the conclusion that even the U.S. had become a vulnerable ‘risk society.’ […] Terrorism is regarded as an inherent risk in modern sociability because it is constructed as the negative consequence of the globalization process. The very process by which the West is believed to be transcending the modes of conflict and production of the 20th Century thus entails the creation of new threats and new modes of conflict. (Rasmussen 2002: 327) Rasmussen’s framework of the declared and undeclared and the known and unknown which forms the crux of globalisation with imperialist consciousness makes a sense of breach between the knowledge of “structural risks” and the apprehension of these risks about the subject at risk. As Baudrillard and Rasmussen establish a sense of foreboding risk before 9/11 under the global political order of variable power relations, the “globalization” process emerged out of the innumerable phenomenon linked with the end of the Cold War finds a bodily tension in the proclamations of Western leaders as President Bush after the 9/11 attacks announced that the “barbarians had declared war” (Rasmussen 2002: 333) only to create “us” and “them” with the gloomy side of globalisation and cultural convictions of superiority. Phenomenologically, the shifting realms of “us” and “them” attracts the essence of the popular refrain—“Why do they hate us so much?” And this is explicitly showcased by Mohsin Hamid in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) with the disorientation between the fantasy and the substantiality of globalisation under the rubric of terror/fear. With Changez we can palpably feel the racialisation and segregation, as the narrator in the text recapitulates his life and times in New York, It was a testament to the open-mindedness and – that overused word – cosmopolitan nature of New York in those days that I felt completely comfortable on the subway in this attire [“a starched white kurta of delicately worked cotton over a pair of jeans”]. Indeed, no one seemed to take much notice of me at all. (Hamid 2007: 55) Hamid also begins his narrative: “I was a New Yorker with a city at my feet. How soon that would change!” (51) to suggest the shifting frames of paranoia with the fetishised harnessing of strange and visceral emotions. Here, the repercussions of global politics of fear as a repressed unconscious risk proffers the calculus of anxiety/risk—reinvigorating the sign of imperialism, as Ahmed argues that Bush “turns the act of terror into an act of war, which would seek to eliminate the source of fear and transform the world into a place whereby the mobility of some capital and some bodies becomes the sign of freedom and civilisation” (Ahmed 2004: 73). The affective and shared phenomenological inclination to the joy of killing the aliens with the pleasures of risk, or what Žižek has succinctly put as the “unknown knowns” (Žižek 2006: 52), becomes a strange imperative. Drawing on Žižek’s foregrounding of anti-Semitism, it can be argued that fundamentalist activities in proximity to Islam has been “invested with our unconscious desire” and this particularities transport us “to escape a certain deadlock of desire” with the threatening of all substantive bonds of liberal democratic essence, what he finds as the “pathological stain” of democracy, that fail to deliver its belonging and subscription to a nation-state unprejudiced. (Žižek’s 1989: 48). The desire-machine works in tandem with the spectres of modernity—it embodies a duality and irresolvable aporia at the heart of the project of the western nation-state. In his State of the Union address in the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush said, “Freedom is at risk and America and our allies must not, and will not, allow it” (“Text of President Bush” Washington Post 2002). Here the rhetorical explanation of the narrative between the people’s freedom and the terrorists’ hatred of it finds a structural alterity in his other address to an anti-terrorism summit of Central and Eastern European leaders held in November 2001. Bush categorically exhorts the dangers inherent by proclaiming that “given the means, our enemies would be a threat to every nation and, eventually, to civilization itself” (“Transcript” Washington Post 2001). Bush’s narrative about Islam and the Western civilisation stands as a totem of the “pleasures of risk” (Lacan 2006: 52) in the Lacanian “jouissance” with the unconscious fantasies under the structures of desire of the “post-political biopolitics” (Žižek Violence 2009: 34) as the central concern of politics. Žižek has expounded the crisis of liberalism at the end of the Cold War in the same way Francis Fukuyama laments the passing of ideology, identity and recognition in the age of post-politics, The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by an economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-history period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. (Fukuyama 1989: 17–18) The official rhetoric and disastrous provocations of state leaders weaponise the stakes of the War on Terror by validating the ceaseless war narrative of civilisation and the civilised. Mohsin Hamid in “Discontent and Its Civilizations,” unsettles Samuel P. Huntington’s pre-9/11 postulation that civilisations adhered by religion and ethnicity rather than political ideology of nation-states, will define the essence of global politics in the 21st century. These notions of civilisations “are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalisation’s brutality. They allow us, for example to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor” (Hamid 2015: 8). Representationally conflated with Huntington as what they (both Bush and Huntington) uphold the values of Western civilisation, the disavowal of cultural realm under civilised/ uncivilised construction of civilisational taboo that enforces the hate of the other smouldering as a cultural legacy of late-modern Europe testifies to a shift in the orientation of the assimilative forces of secular modernity.

Sharma and Nijjar ’23 [Sanjay Sharma, Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. Jasbinder S. Nijjar, lecturer in sociology at the University of Surrey; “Post-racial politics, pre-emption and in/security”; 05-01-2023; European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 27, no. 2; doi.org/10.1177/13675494231168177; accessed 07-25-2024] dliang

Pre-empting racialized terror

In the United States, real incomes have been stagnant since the 1980s, and that negatively affects American economic soft power. Soft power is the ability of civil society to attract other nations to its standard of living. There are two types of soft power: economic and cultural. American economic soft power captivates foreign citizens with the promise of a prosperous American way of life through high real incomes. In other words, it is the power of the American people to export the American Dream. Economic soft power is the driving force behind cultural soft power because it facilitates an innovative environment with financial incentives for new entrepreneurs in the arts, sciences, and technology. Professor Joseph Nye credits American jazz, rock & roll, blue jeans, Harvard University, and Hollywood with American cultural soft power. He says the Soviet Union was brought down not by a military power, but by this very cultural soft power.1 American economic soft power was at its highest peak during what is called the Harvard School of antitrust enforcement (1948-1978) policies in the 1950s and 1960s during the golden age of small businesses. The Harvard School antitrust policies set up an economic environment where many firms entered the market, increasing demand for labor which increased wages. On the other hand, the Chicago School of antitrust policies (1978-2008) that were adopted in the 1970s led to the rise of monopolies that decreased firm entry and wages. In this thesis, I look at the relationship between real incomes and firm entry (i.e., firm births minus firm deaths) to answer the following question: Does firm entry affect real incomes? First, I look at worker productivity to see if the average wage increase of the U.S. worker was justified by increased corporate revenues during the 1950s and 1960s. I also examine wage stagnation that started in the 1980s through the same framework. Second, I offer a theoretical answer to my thesis question (whether firm entry does affect real incomes) by analyzing the impacts of both the Harvard School of antitrust policies and the Chicago School of antitrust policies on firm entry. Specifically, I look at antirust policies designed to maximize market efficiency through increased competition (1950s and 1960s), and antitrust policies that seek to maximize corporate efficiency through market consolidation (since the 1980s). My theoretical analysis reveals the negative impact on firm entry by (1) collusive behaviors, (2) markups and (3) post-1978 antitrust court decisions. My findings show that over the last 40 years, antitrust policies have maximized short-term efficiencies of large corporations but have damaged economy-wide market efficiencies. The Chicago School of thought predicted non-collusion among monopolies but faltered in practice when faced with increased horizontal shareholding of American corporations and the subsequent cartelizing effects, which infringed firm entry. My analysis of markups reveals an increase in prices that defied Chicago School antitrust policy predictions, which assumed that corporate consolidations would decrease prices due to diminishing marginal costs of production. Price increases by market monopolies led to the rise in attracting capital by large corporations and shrinking investment opportunities for smaller new firms. I predict that an antitrust policy designed to maximize market efficiency through competition will increase firm entry, thus raising real incomes on working- and middle-class Americans. An antitrust policy that seeks to prioritize corporate efficiency through market consolidation decreases firm entry and real incomes. As firm entry increases, companies compete with each other, and prices are contained for fear of lost revenue. High numbers of new firms in the economy disseminate power among many market players and diminishes horizontal shareholding by market monopolies. I start my empirical analysis by looking at productivity, real incomes, and firm entry. The more productive a company, the higher the revenue, thus increasing the financial power of a company to distribute extra wealth in the form of higher wages. Since there are many factors that can affect real incomes apart from firm entry, I incorporate commonly used measures—four-year college degrees, productivity, GDP, and CPI—into my regression analysis. Background United States antitrust law, which for most of the 20th century facilitated a competitive environment for firm entry and increased per capita incomes, has allowed market concentration and the spread of monopolies since 1978.2 The number of annual startups that contribute to the creation of well-paying jobs in the U.S. has declined rapidly over the last 40 years. Increased productivity raised corporate revenues and translated into high real incomes for working- and middle-class Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the same type of growth in productivity increase has not raised real incomes since the late 1970s. In the latter case, corporate surplus has been deployed toward higher executive pay and investments in mergers and acquisitions, which further consolidate corporate power. As a result, 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and income inequality is at an all-time high.3 The rise of monopolies after the Civil War devastated firm entry in the U.S. economy and prompted creation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. President Theodore Roosevelt actively enforced American antitrust law and fought relentlessly to increase firm entry, earning the nickname “Trust-buster” because of progressive regulatory reforms and antitrust prosecutions during his presidency from 1901 to 1909.4 Antitrust continued to be a major movement with the election of Woodrow Wilson as President in 1911. Wilson surrounded himself with progressive policymakers like Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, “the Great Commoner,” who understood the daily challenges facing Americans; also Louis Brandeis, “the People’s Lawyer,” who later served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939.5 Brandeis graduated from Harvard Law School with the highest grade point average in the school’s history, a record that stood for eight decades. Brandeis was the founding father of the Harvard School of antitrust philosophy. He argued that the goal of antitrust law was to increase firm entry. He reasoned that small firms were more efficient than large ones. Brandeis was aware of the economies of scale that large companies could generate, but he knew that, in practice, large companies used economies of scale to drive out small competitors by lowering prices in the short term. He believed that once competition was eliminated, large corporations used economies of scale to monopolize markets and to increase prices. Brandeis was the architect of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914, which established the Federal Trade Commission, an antitrust enforcement agency. President Wilson and Brandeis also were behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System, which sought to break up the New York banking monopoly and divide it among 12 regional reserve banks across the United States. President Wilson believed that “the great monopoly in this country is the money monopoly. So long as it exists, our old variety of freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question.”6 The Wilson-Brandeis antitrust movement was designed to create a competitive environment through efficient markets where giant companies were unable to monopolize industries. Literature on the early antitrust movement describes a continuous legislative fight to keep monopolies out and to promote competition. A seminal work by Philip Longman looks at the antitrust developments and their subsequent impacts on real incomes. 7 The Wilson-Brandeis movement continued through the 1930s via legislative policies like the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936, sometimes called the “Magna Carta of Small Business,” which prevented the formation of chain stores in local economies.8 Policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration further prevented patent monopolies and provided signals to business executives regarding how they should conduct their operations to avoid violating public trust. In 1950, the Celler-Kefauver Act was passed to close a loophole in asset acquisitions involving firms that were suppliers or direct competitors, thus preventing horizontal shareholdings. These governmental policies promoted market efficiencies by promoting the creation of small firms to avoid large corporate waste and increased competition. These policies also led to regional convergence of real incomes, so that workers in St. Louis were earning as much as workers in the New York metropolitan area. This trend ended with the reversal of antitrust polices in 1978. Figure 1 shows the rising trend of working- and middle-class family income (blue and brown lines), which stagnates following 1978, the year that marked a major antitrust policy shift toward less antitrust enforcement.