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Milton Friedman's [13 September 1970] 3,000-word essay on the question of social responsibility in business set out the case so concisely and so attractively that it shaped the culture of management and business for decades to come. From then on, the question of the purpose of the corporation was more or less settled. Essays and panel sessions on 'ethical capitalism', 'corporate responsibility' and 'stakeholders' would continue among successful people with socialist or Christian parents. But although we tried to take the opposite case seriously, everybody really knew that corporations serve the purpose of shareholder value, and that was an end to it.

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 205)

One of Friedrich Hayek's contemporaries defined economics as the 'science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses'. It's this idea of a generalised study of human behaviour under conditions of scarcity that has been responsible for the economists' intellectual imperialism. Because if you announce that you're the experts on human beings when they have to choose between different priorities under conditions of scarce resources, when aren't resources scarce? When don't people have to choose between different things they want?

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 143)

To the extent that any of it was designed at all, this world was designed by economists. Of all the social sciences, economics was the one that embedded itself in the governance and regulation of public life — the higher functions of the system, the ones that balance future and present needs. (..). Adopting the economic mode of thinking reduces the cognitive demands placed on our ruling classes by telling them that there are lots of things they don't have to bother thinking about. The adoption of economic growth and efficiency as a core philosophy and cost-benefit analysis as a method of governance means not only that thousands of possible policies can be rejected without serious consideration, but also that whole approaches to human life never need to be considered.

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 141)

During the 2000s, for example, the world's central banks thought everything was fine — they made up nicknames for the period of stability that lasted from the late 1980s to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Alan Greenspan of the US Federal Reserve called it a 'Goldilocks Economy' — not too hot, not too cold. Mervyn King of the Bank of England called them the 'NICE times', an age of non-inflationary continuous expansion. Probably the most commonly used name was the 'Great Moderation'. All the while, a huge debt bubble was building up, with house prices spiralling out of control.

— The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies (Page 134)

Whether or not they're deliberately being misleading, more often than not, researchers still don't do a gender analysis. In the review of federally funded trials mentioned above, 75 percent of the studies did not report any outcomes by gender, and 64 percent did not provide any analysis by racial or ethnic groups. In 2010, a review of 150 recent studies of treatments for depression found that only half the studies analyzed the results by gender. Of over 700 ongoing studies, nearly 90 percent of researchers said they planned to include women, but less than 1 percent said they planned to analyze their results by gender. A 2011 review of 750 studies focused on emergency medicine between 2006 and 2009 found that while the majority reported gender as a variable, less than one-fifth examined health outcomes by gender. Advocates often describe what's happened as the "add women and stir" approach. There was a sense in the nineties that just getting women enrolled in studies would "take care of the problem," explains Dr. Jan Webinski, executive director of the Sex and Gender Women's Health Collaborative. "But it's been twenty-five years and we now have a lot of research that includes women but women are still invisible. Researchers [..]. weren't required to report their research by sex, so women's side effets and responses to medications and diseases were still invisible.

— Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (7%)

There is research to back up these anecdotes, though not as much as you might imagine, only because, I came to learn, there's little research on diagnostic errors in general, which are described by experts as an enormous blind spot within the profession. But where it exists, it paints a fairly consistent picture: women are often not taken as seriously as their male counterparts when they enter the medical system. Women wait sixty-five minutes to men's forty-nine before getting treatment for abdominal pain in the emergency room. Young women are seven times more likely to be sent home from the hospital in the middle of having a heart attack. Women face long delays, often years long, to get diagnosed even with diseases that are quite common in women. And they experience longer diagnostic delays in comparison to men for nearly everything, from brain tumors to rare genetic disorders.

— Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery (1%)

Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, the corporation's scientists are not recruited to solve world hunger or eliminate carbon-based fuels. Instead, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior.

— The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (22%)

Global revenue for AI products and services is expected to increase 56-fold, from $644 million in 2016 to $36 billion in 2025. The science required to exploit this vast opportunity and the material infrastructure that makes it possible have ignited an arms race among tech companies for the 10,000 or so professionals on the planet who know how to wield the technologies of machine intelligence to coax knowledge from an otherwise cacophonous data continent. Google/Alphabet is the most aggressive acquirer of AI technology and talent. [..]. As one scholar described it, "The real problem is these people are not dispersed throughout society. The intellect and expertise is concentrated in a small number of companies."

— The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (22%)

Scientists warn that the world's capacity to produce information has substantially exceeded its ability to process and store information. [..]. Information is digital, but its volume exceeds our ability to discern its meaning. As the solution to this problem, information scholar Martin Hilbert counsels, "The only option we have left to make sense of all sense of all the data is to fight fire with fire," using "artificially intelligent computers" to "sift through the vast amounts of information... Facebook, Amazon, and Google have promised to... create value out of vast amounts of data through intelligent computational analysis." The rise of surveillance capitalism necessarily turns Hilbert's advice into a dangerous proposition. Although he does not mean to, Hilbert merely confirms the privileged position of the surveillance capitalists and the asymmetrical power that enables them to bend the division of learning to their interests.

— The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (22%)