Sarah Owen

In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

- at age 26, 30% of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16

- 58% live less than 10 miles away- 80 percent live less than 100 miles away- 90 percent live less than 500 miles away

"We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious"

"The society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise was founded by a physician named Julia Barnett Rice in 1906. Rice believed noise was unhealthy, and enlisted New York City’s gentry (including Mark Twain) to lobby for things like rules governing steamboat whistles, and silence pledges from children who played near hospitals."

The sound of gentrification is silence.