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Many scholars have pointed to January 6th as the catalyst for renewed attention on insider threats and domestic violent extremism as national security priorities.6 Both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have since recognized the evolving threat landscape since 9/11 and national and nuclear security priorities have slowly shifted from its long-time focus on international jihadists and foreign radicalization, towards domestic terrorists. In the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the issue of “insider threats” was at the forefront of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, but failed to evolve in the post-9/11 environment.7 In the weeks following the siege, a new picture of the threat landscape emerged as the Department of Justice and FBI launched a nationwide effort to investigate the participants of January 6th. The investigation revealed that most participants were adherents of extremist ideology, many of whom were radicalized online and mobilized to take part in the insurrection. Some also adhered to a DVE ideology of concern for nuclear security, accelerationism, which is described in more detail later in this paper.

What is concerning, however, is the original failure of the FBI to anticipate the Capitol attack in the first place. Before the end of the 2020 presidential race, a team of intelligence analysts tried to game out the worst potential outcomes of a disputed election. But they never thought of the one that transpired: a violent mob mobilizing to overturn the election in support of Donald Trump.8 Adam Goldman and Alan Feur write that the FBI was “[a]pparently blinded by a narrow focus on ‘lone wolf’ offenders and a misguided belief that the threat from the far left was as great as that from the far right,” thus, officials at the bureau did not anticipate or adequately prepare for the attack.9 This confirmation bias also failed to account for actors such as militia groups or white supremacists, who took a leading role in the Capitol siege.

The United States, of course, is not just any country—it is the world’s most enduring democracy and largest economy. But ever fewer Americans believe its size and power are going to save it anymore. In the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s election, Thomas E. Ricks for Foreign Policy asked a group of national security experts to assess the chances of a civil war over the next 10 to 15 years. The consensus stood at 35 percent. A 2019 poll from Georgetown University asked registered voters how close to the “edge of a civil war” the country was, on a scale from 0 to 100. The mean of their answers was 67.23, so almost exactly two-thirds of the way.

There are plenty of reasons to trust this assessment. The United States, as is stands, is a textbook case of a country on the brink of civil conflict. The political system has been completely overwhelmed by hyperpartisanship that renders each political decision, at best, representative of the will of only half the country. The legal system is increasingly a spoil of political infighting. The Oath Keepers, one of the largest anti-government militias, have effectively infiltrated police forces and the Republican Party. Elected officials have opened the doors to vandals who desecrate their own legislatures. It has now become perfectly normal for political representatives to call for acts of violence against their political opponents. “When do we get to use the guns?” is an acceptable question at right-wing rallies. Political violence is on the rise, and the response of the courts has been to legitimize vigilantism—see the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.

If the Great Resignation was emblematic of workers taking back their power, the extent to which workers are still willing to quit shows how enduring that power is. In January, nearly 4 million people quit their jobs — the monthly number was well over 4 million all last year — whereas the pre-pandemic baseline was closer to 3 million in a given month.

“There’s really strong demand for workers,” explained Nick Bunker, head of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “When there’s more competition for workers, that gives the person who’s selling their labor, the worker, more bargaining power than they would have otherwise.”

We first consider the connections between wages and inflation or economic activity using cross-correlations. Cross-correlations allow for a simple examination of the lead or lag structure between two series as well as the strength of the connections between the series. If wage inflation reliably comes ahead of price inflation in the data, then the strongest cross-correlation should be between wage inflation in quarter t and price inflation in some k-th quarter after t.

When working with price inflation and wage inflation, there are important long-run trends and short-term volatility that we would like to remove from our analysis. As a general rule, wages and prices have followed roughly similar long-term trends: both accelerated from the 1960s into the 1970s and then decelerated in the 1980s. The forecasting literature has found gains in inflation forecasting accuracy by specifying inflation in gap form as a deviation from a slow-moving long-run trend (see, e.g., Kozicki and Tinsley 2001, Clark 2011, and Zaman 2013). We borrow from this literature and construct wage inflation gaps as quarterly annualized growth in a particular wage measure less a shared long-run trend.3 To remove high-frequency fluctuations in food and energy prices in our measure of price inflation, we define the price inflation gap as quarterly annualized core PCE inflation less the shared long-term trend. We then look at cross-correlations between quarterly price inflation gaps at time t+k and quarterly wage inflation gaps at time t.

The human layer of corporate action is reduced and obscured; the algorithm would be the agency by which the “group-mind seeks realisation in the external world.” The range of these actions is not necessarily confined to “cyberspace,” either. The company that brought us The DAO was an “Internet of Things” start-up, named after an automated lock. The ultimate aim is not just to automate online transactions, but to enforce Ethereum smart contracts into the physical world.

From the perspective of a disruptive technologist, a DAO lacks human organs, and this obviates the need for corporate governance norms. Viewed from the perspective of legal theory, however, it would seem to entail either that (i) the “actions” of smart contracts are to be attributed to humans, in which case the smart contracts are merely muddying the waters, or (ii) that some actions by smart contracts will be acts-in-the-law (and/or acts with legal consequences) in their own right, or (iii) that a DAO has human organs, but they are poorly identified and sub-optimally regulated. All of these options speak to the need for further scrutiny.

Protocols normally allocate a substantial percentage of their token at launch to the community and treasury in order to facilitate future development, such as incentives for contributors, grant programs, liquidity mining campaigns etc. Therefore, it is natural that protocols have the majority of their treasury assets in native protocol tokens. It would be a good idea for protocols to gradually diversify their treasury by means of token exchanges with other protocols or cash out some portion to $ETH or stablecoins.

However, as of early June, we find that the majority of DAOs still hold their treasury asset in their protocol native tokens, such as $UNI for Uniswap, $GNO for Gnosis, and $AAVE for AAVE. For some, the percentage is over 95%. This results in a steep drop in treasury value, and some protocols have a more than 50% decrease in their treasury value compared to January. Since no one knows how long the bear market could last, it is not impossible for protocol tokens to drop another 50% or even more.

Working without being asked sounds swell, but discerning adults will wonder how one gets paid in such a system. Indeed, most contributors will expect a reward for their work.

The payment process within a DAO works as follows. The organization sells services or products and sets aside a pool of the generated revenues for salaries and rewards. Since contributors don’t have a contract, there are no classical ways of deciding what kind of pay is fair for each contributor. Instead, many DAOs turn to tools such as Coordinape to tackle this challenge. These solutions allow organizations to create “circles” of contributors (the equivalent of teams). Each member of the circle is given points that they can allocate to other members of the circle over a certain period of time. The higher the perceived “value” of the work done during that period, the higher the number of points received, and the higher the financial reward.

Many workers will see their annual raise shrink next year as the job market continues to cool from its torrid pace in the pandemic era.

The typical worker will get a 4.1% pay raise for 2025, down from 4.5% this year, according to a new poll by WTW, a consulting firm.

Thus, the heart of the MPF model is the relative wage and the wealth pump that it powers. When the relative wage declines, it leads to both immiseration and elite overproduction. Both, as we now know, are the most important drivers of social and political instability. However, outbreaks of instability—violent anti-government demonstrations and strikes, urban riots, terrorism, rural uprisings, and, if things really go to hell, state collapse and full-blown civil war—are the results of individual people’s actions. How does the model connect the structural drivers to people’s motivations? It assumes that the key role in all such events is played by extremists, those who have been radicalized and primed for aggression. When such radicals are few in relation to the rest of the population, they offer no serious threat to the stability of the regime, because they are easily isolated and suppressed by the police. But if they are many, they start coalescing into extremist organizations, which can credibly challenge the ruling class. The number of radicals in proportion to the total population, therefore, is a key variable that the MPF model needs to track.

The process of radicalization works like a disease that, as it spreads, changes people’s behaviors and makes them act in violent ways. The compartment of the MPF engine connecting structural drivers to unrest thus needs to model this dynamic of social contagion. It is quite similar to equations used by epidemiologists—for example, in forecasting the dynamics of COVID outbreaks.

Uncoordinated decentralization in collective bargaining can allow companies to reach deals of their own with workers rather than being forced to comply with multi-employer industry-wide agreements negotiated by representative trade unions. What are the social effects and who stands to gain or lose most?

Under Emmanuel Macron’s recent labour market reforms SMEs, (small and medium-sized companies), employing fewer than 50 workers in France can negotiate deals directly with employees on specific working conditions (e.g. working hours, pay and overtime) without a union representative being present. After the multi-employer ‘exit’ strategy of Fiat in 2010-11, Italy’s Renzi government (Jobs Act 2014-15) introduced fiscal incentives (i.e. variable wage increases receive a lower taxation rate of just 10% up to a maximum of 2000 euros), which have fostered decentralized bargaining. Social partners are thereby encouraged to negotiate company-based agreements though the new legislation does not embrace the majority principle of the most representative unions as the ones entitled to negotiate at the decentralised (company) level. The result is to open the door in principle for negotiation with organisations of workers that are not necessarily signatory parties in the sectoral (national) negotiation (i.e. CCNL or Contratto Collettivo Nazionale di Lavoro) (see Leonardi, 2017).

DAOs are trying to innovate on the way people get paid. Having one entity (the market, a team, a committee, leadership…) decide on salary would be centralization, and thus unacceptable for the crypto crowd. There are interesting ideas being tested instead, but the way communities are doing it highlights the privilege of the people working on decentralized projects.

Today, pay revolves around a set of key questions. Should salaries be market-based? Role-based? Value-based? Employment-based? Ethics-based? Are they guaranteed? Localized? Negotiable? Secret or transparent? Singular, variable, tiered? Annually adjusted? market-adjusted? Are raises possible? If so, should they be tenure or experience-driven? Linked to performance? Inflation? DAOs fail to answer most of these questions.

American consumers have been frustrated by high prices over past years, but there's some good news: wages have outpaced inflation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2020, average hourly wages for most US workers have risen faster than the consumer price index, meaning income has maintained its purchasing power against rising prices.

The 80 years of law that are at stake began with the New Deal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that the Great Depression was caused in part by ruinous competition among companies. In 1933, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed the president to approve “fair competition” standards for different trades and industries. The next year, Roosevelt approved a code for the poultry industry, which, among other things, set a minimum wage and maximum hours for workers, and hygiene requirements for slaughterhouses. Such basic workplace protections and constraints on the free market are now taken for granted.

But in 1935, after a New York City slaughterhouse operator was convicted of violating the poultry code, the Supreme Court called into question the whole approach of the New Deal, by holding that the N.I.R.A. was an “unconstitutional delegation by Congress of a legislative power.” Only Congress can create rules like the poultry code, the justices said. Because Congress did not define “fair competition,” leaving the rule-making to the president, the N.I.R.A. violated the Constitution’s separation of powers.

In the chapters that follow, I’ll outline the biggest risks facing humanity. I’ll begin in chapter 2 with pandemics, such as the possibility that the next virus might combine the infectiousness of COVID-19 with the deadliness of Ebola. What can we do to shut down exotic animal markets, speed up vaccine develop- ment, and create surge capacity in hospitals? I’ll then delve into bioterrorism, and the danger of extremists developing their own versions of smallpox or the bubonic plague. How difficult is it for them to create these devilish diseases, and what can we do to prevent it?

In chapter 3, I’ll then explore climate change—perhaps the in- tergenerational issue that has received the most public attention in recent years. While much of the modeling looks at how global warming could be bad, my focus is on the chances that it’s catastrophic. This isn’t about climate change shortening the ski season; it’s about the possibility of temperatures rising by 18°F (10°C), rendering large sections of the planet uninhabitable. What does the risk of cataclysmic climate change mean for energy policy?

The evidence is clear: we live in an increasingly vulnerable world. Maps with isometric lines indicating flood zones tell us about the ever-growing likelihood that the places we live will be inundated in future hurricanes, torrential rains, or even high tides. Emergency exercises reveal that governmental response systems are not prepared to deal with future disease outbreaks. Stress tests isolate weak links in national and global financial systems that would be exposed in the event of a panic or an economic downturn. Network analyses point to alarming vulnerabilities to accidents or attacks (whether cyber or physical) on critical nodes of power systems. Models of climate change demonstrate the vulnerability of cities and critical infrastructures to heat waves, drought, floods, and landslides. This mountain of evidence points to a troubling contemporary reality: the vulnerability of the vital systems on which modern life depends to a startling range of potentially catastrophic events.1

Discussions of vulnerability and preparedness are often, understandably, caught up in the urgency of recent disasters and future threats: a looming hurricane; a critical system that is prone to failure; a virus that is a single mutation away from causing a deadly pandemic. And experts, policymakers, and scholars often search out the sources of vulnerability in relatively recent changes in the structure of our collective existence. Intensifying global flows of people, goods, and capital, they argue, make our world increasingly interdependent and therefore subject to sudden disruptions that spread through financial systems, electricity grids, information networks, or human bodies in rapid circulation and close proximity.2 But there is another way to think about our vulnerable world. Rather than taking vulnerability for granted as a category of understanding—and investigating how our vulnerability became so acute and pervasive—we can ask how it became possible to think about our world in this way in the first place. More specifically, we can ask how we came to think of our world in terms of a particular kind of vulnerability. When did government first become concerned with the disruption or breakdown of life-sustaining vital systems? For what purposes were the techniques that, today, generate such an extraordinary profusion of evidence about our vulnerability originally invented? How did norms such as resilience and preparedness become political obligations, to which policymakers and officials are held accountable?

Wherever the President of the United States travels, a military aide-de-camp carrying “the football” is just a few steps away. It isn’t the kind Tom Brady throws. In the laconic jargon that national security officers use, “the football” is a briefcase that allows the President to launch a nuclear attack.

These days “the football” seems closer to being used than at any time in the last half-century. President Trump has issued thinly veiled threats of a nuclear first strike against North Korea. His emotional volatility makes those threats terrifying. Because of a deep flaw in our legal order, this is an existential fear rather than a theoretical one.

That doesn’t mean Democrats should unilaterally disarm, however. It may sound counterintuitive, but serious threats to name more justices to the court could lead to a more moderate and legitimate court.

A credible threat to pack the court would create powerful incentives for the current justices to moderate their views on important issues and preserve the court’s credibility.

But that’s a half-truth. The other half of the story, the inconvenient history, is that the court-packing threat worked.

Sure, Roosevelt didn’t get his additional bench slots to fill. But that was not the main objective of the threat. FDR wanted his program. And he got it.

Every action or decision has some kind of effect on something or someone, if only in an indirect way. How we approach these decisions or actions we take can have a huge impact, not just on those directly involved, but on others we could hardly fathom would be affected. You never know what little action may be the tipping point for another action and or reaction.

When you hear the words “The Butterfly Effect”, most of you will probably think of the movie. That was about the chaos theory, meaning one series of events leads to another and the effect of changing the course of those events.

If systemic threats sometimes justify constitutional hardball, then scholars of democratic erosion and resilience are in a good position to help policymakers reflect on how such tactics can be deployed in maximally legitimate fashion. One issue here is timing – that is, how to know when we have reached the point where hardball tactics are merited. With regard to Court expansion, both its normative legitimacy and its political viability are likely to increase if and when the Roberts Court acts as a partisan roadblock to a Democratic administration. If the conservative justices refrain from doing so, they may be able to forestall Court reform. But the historical pattern suggests that emergence of an obstructionist Court is likely, at which point Democratic Court reformers will be emboldened. I have argued that judicial obstruction of legislative expansions of voting rights (and related democracy reforms) would provide particularly weighty justification for Court reform. In theory, the threat of such judicial contributions to democratic erosion might justify preemptive action – for example, expanding the Court before it eviscerates a new voting rights act – but in practice, such preemptive action would require substantially greater political investment. Convincing the American public that court-packing is called for would be a tall order on any occasion, but it is more likely to succeed once the Court has begun actively obstructing a broadly popular policy agenda.