Menlo Park, Calif.

It has become a campaign ritual. Immediately after the release of unemployment figures on the first Friday of every month, Democratic and Republican spin shifts into high gear.

“Our mission is not just to get back to where we were before the crisis. We’ve got to deal with what’s been happening over the last decade, the last 15 years – manufacturing leaving our shores, incomes flat-lining – all those things are what we’ve got to struggle and fight for,” Obama declared at the Dobbins School in Poland, Ohio.

Romney took the opposite tack in Wolfeboro, N.H.: “This is a time for America to choose whether they want more of the same; whether unemployment above 8 percent month after month after month is satisfactory or not. It doesn’t have to be this way. America can do better and this kick in the gut has got to end.”

Both candidates are only tinkering at the edges of the most important issue facing the United States: the hollowing out of the employment marketplace, the disappearance of mid-level jobs.

The issue of the disappearing middle is not new, but credible economists have added a more threatening twist to the argument: the possibility that a well-functioning, efficient modern market economy, driven by exponential growth in the rate of technological innovation, can simultaneously produce economic growth and eliminate millions of middle-class jobs.

Michael Spence, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, and David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., have argued that this “hollowing out” process is a result of twin upheavals: globalization and the hyper-acceleration of technological progress.

Just two weeks ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, stressed this theme:

If you look at the decade before the recession, the U.S. economy was not creating enough jobs, particularly not enough middle class jobs, and we were losing manufacturing jobs at an alarming rate even before the recession. And I would also put together, combined with those two problems, the polarization of the U.S. job market, the fact that we are getting more and more people at the very top and the very bottom and the middle has been shrinking.

In recent months, Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, and Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at M.I.T.’s Center for Digital Business, have raised the stakes in this discussion with the publication of “Race Against the Machine” and a collection of accompanying essays and papers by the authors.

McAfee has graphically illustrated the key findings that he and Brynjolfsson find worrisome. The red line in the figure below, the employment to population ratio, tracks the ratio of the number of people working to the total number of working-age men and women in the United States.

On his blog, McAfee explains the graphic:

Since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 G.D.P., equipment investment, and total corporate profits have rebounded, and are now at their all-time highs. The employment ratio, meanwhile, has only shrunk and is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s when women had not yet entered the workforce in significant numbers. So current labor force woes are not because the economy isn’t growing, and they’re not because companies aren’t making money or spending money on equipment. They’re because these trends have become increasingly decoupled from hiring – from needing more human workers. As computers race ahead, acquiring more and more skills in pattern matching, communication, perception, and so on, I expect that this decoupling will continue, and maybe even accelerate.

This view is controversial – especially McAfee’s argument that the decoupling of jobs from other positive economic developments “will continue, and maybe even accelerate.” In other words, the downward employment and jobs spiral will keep going, driven by structural forces. Policies to ameliorate the process – a shorter work week, a massive investment in education (for example, at the community college level), the disaggregation of complex tasks into simple functions that could be executed by mid-skill workers – may only slow the decline, not stop it. This is a deeply pessimistic vision.

“In my dystopian vision of the future, that red line (in the chart) keeps falling down – or suddenly drops off a cliff,” McAfee told The Times, adding: “All of the trends that I see and can identify are contributing to the hollowing out of the economy.”

In a videotaped interview on Bloomberg News, Brynjolfsson was somewhat more cautious:

I have to be brutally honest, I don’t think Andy and I are sure whether it’s different this time around. If you look at the data, this time it seems to be a lot more difficult. So it’s possible we are facing a regime change, a fundamental change in the way technology and employment interact with each other.

The Brynjolfsson-McAfee message has been generally well received in the high-tech community. On July 5, McAfee held the attention of an audience of young researchers and prospective entrepreneurs here at Singularity University. For over an hour after his lecture, students met with McAfee to explore the consequences of his argument.

The students’ questions:

How much can wealth accumulate for a small slice of the population at the top, while large numbers of people are forced to work for ever lower pay or to drop out of the workforce altogether? For such a future society to function, would wealth need to be (coercively) redistributed from the top to those below, in order for the mass of the jobless population to survive? Who would have power and how would tax and spending policies be determined in such a radically bifurcated, automated, workless society?

Many reviews of “Race Against The Machine” have been favorable, including those in publications supportive of free markets, including the Economist and the Financial Times.

McAfee noted in our interview that some critics have accused him and Brynjolfsson of accepting the “lump of labor fallacy” (the idea that there is a fixed amount of work available) in defiance of economic history. In the aftermath of major periods of technological advance, including the transition from agriculture to industry, employment has grown enormously.

James Hamilton, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, challenged the “Race Against The Machine” thesis in an e-mail to The Times:

I am very skeptical of the claim that technology itself is the problem. In 2005, the average U.S. worker could produce what would have required 2 people to do in 1970, what would have required 4 people in 1940, and would have required 6 people in 1910. The result of this technological progress was not higher unemployment, but instead rising real wages. The evidence from the last two centuries is unambiguous – productivity gains lead to more wealth, not poverty. The unemployment since 2007 was not caused by gains in productivity or increased automation, but instead by loss of demand for the product that the workers had been producing, for example, a plunge in the demand for new home construction.

Amar Bhidé, author of the book “The Venturesome Economy,” and senior fellow at the Center for Emerging Market Enterprises at Tufts, did not mince words responding to a request for comment from The Times:

As you might guess I find the storyline rather unconvincing and Luddite. What’s new about automation? I’ve been banging away for years about the phenomenon of non-destructive creation as a vital complement to creative destruction. The two don’t move in lock step but I have no reason to believe that non-destructive creation has ceased. Until someone persuades me it has, I will limit my anxieties to global warming, financial misregulation, a screwed up health care system, etc.

McAfee countered in an e-mail that “this time really is different,”  arguing:

All previous waves of automation affected only a small subset of human skills and abilities. To oversimplify a bit, the industrial revolution was about building machines that had (much) more brute strength than we did. For all mental work, the industrial revolution was meaningless – you still needed people.

Until recently, the digital revolution also didn’t affect that many human skills and abilities. Computers became better at math, and at some clerical abilities, but we people were still miles ahead in other areas. So employers needed to hire humans if they wanted to listen to people speak and respond to them, write a report, pattern-match across a large and diverse body of information, and do all the other things that modern knowledge workers do.

Employers also needed people if they wanted lots of physical tasks done, including driving a truck or vacuuming a floor. The same with most tasks involving sensory perception, such as determining if a soccer ball has crossed a goal line.

All of the above abilities have now been demonstrated by digital technologies, and not just in the lab, but in the real world. So employers are going to switch from human labor to digital labor to execute tasks like those above. In fact, they’re already doing so. I expect this process of switching to accelerate in the future, perhaps rapidly, because computers get cheaper all the time, are very accurate and reliable once they’re programmed properly, and don’t demand overtime, benefits, or health care.

Brynjolfsson, who is more optimistic, said in an interview with The Times, “we are hopeful that that (job growth) will happen, but there is no guarantee of it. There is no economic law that says everyone benefits from technological improvement.” He also pointed out that the surge in inequality driven by rising incomes at the very top of the distribution suggests strongly that the benefits of digitization have not been widely spread.

“The problem is not tech stagnation,” as some have argued, “but the opposite,” Brynjolfsson contends. “Technology is rushing ahead faster than humans can adapt.” The difficulty of human adaptation is, in turn, likely to get worse, he added, because technological innovation – as in Moore’s Law (predicting a doubling of computer capacity roughly every two years) – grows exponentially in scope. The total number of non-farm jobs in the country is now 5 million less than in January, 2008. The 3.7 million jobs added to the economy have not been enough to make up for the 8.7 million jobs lost in 2008-9.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee have a list of 19 proposals that they support – which range from massive investment in education, infrastructure and basic research, to lowering barriers to business creation, eliminating the mortgage interest deduction and changing copyright and patent law to encourage new (as opposed to protecting old) innovations.

Any effort to ameliorate the damaging consequences to the employment marketplace stemming from technological innovation, according to Brynjolfsson, requires substantial government action at a time when “the political system is the most dysfunctional part of our society.”

McAfee and Brynjolfsson argue that in a race against machines, humans will lose. In their view, “the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.” The question, then, will be whether humans can adapt at anywhere near the pace needed to keep up.

HOW much money do you need to be happy? Think about it. What’s your number?

Many of us aren’t satisfied with how much we have now. That’s why we’re constantly angling for a raise at work, befriending aged relatives and springing, despite long odds, for lottery scratch tickets.

Is it crazy to question how much money you need to be happy? The notion that money can’t buy happiness has been around a long time — even before yoga came into vogue. But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty.

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis — but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.

Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. In research we conducted with a national sample of Americans, people thought that their life satisfaction would double if they made $55,000 instead of $25,000: more than twice as much money, twice as much happiness. But our data showed that people who earned $55,000 were just 9 percent more satisfied than those making $25,000. Nine percent beats zero percent, but it’s still kind of a letdown when you were expecting a 100 percent return.

Interestingly, and usefully, it turns out that what we do with our money plays a far more important role than how much money we make. Imagine three people each win $1 million in the lottery. Suppose one person attempts to buy every single thing he has ever wanted; one puts it all in the bank and uses the money only sparingly, for special occasions; and one gives it all to charity. At the end of the year, they all would report an additional $1 million of income. Many of us would follow the first person’s strategy, but the latter two winners are likely to get the bigger happiness bang for their buck.

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

Indulgence is often closely trailed by its chubby sidekick, overindulgence. While the concept of overindulgence is probably all too familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a Thanksgiving dinner, the word “underindulgence” doesn’t exist. (Type it into Dictionary.com, and you’ll be asked, “Did you mean counter intelligence?”) But research shows that underindulgence — indulging a little less than you usually do — holds one key to getting more happiness for your money.

In a recent study conducted by our student Jordi Quoidbach, chocolate lovers ate a piece of this confection — and then pledged to abstain from chocolate for one week. Another group pledged to eat as much chocolate as they comfortably could and were even given a mammoth two-pound bag of chocolate to help them meet this “goal.”

If you love chocolate, you might think that the students who absconded with the chocolaty loot had it made. But they paid a price. When they returned the next week for another chocolate tasting, they enjoyed that chocolate much less than they had the week before. The only people who enjoyed the chocolate as much the second week as they had the first? Those who had given it up in between. Underindulging — temporarily giving up chocolate, even when we have the cash to buy all we want — can renew our enjoyment of the things we love.

The value of underindulgence casts a different light on the current debate over restricting sugary sodas. Driven by the childhood-obesity crisis, many school districts around the country have banished soda from their campuses. Leaving aside the potential health benefits of these initiatives, banning soda for a large chunk of the day may actually improve its taste. Researchers at Arizona State University demonstrated that people enjoy soda significantly more when they can’t have it right away. (The effect doesn’t hold for prune juice, a beverage that rarely incites overindulgence.)

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s recent proposal to ban giant-size soda in New York City offers another intriguing route to underindulgence. Happiness research shows that, as the food writer Michael Pollan put it, “The banquet is in the first bite.” That first sip of soda really is delicious, catching our tongues by surprise with its bubbly sweetness. But our tongues and our minds quickly get used to repeated pleasures, and so the 39th sip is not as delightful as the first. Because limiting the size of sodas curtails these less pleasurable sips, Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal may improve our pleasure-to-calorie (and pleasure-to-coin) ratio, an overlooked benefit in the heated debate about the consequences of such initiatives for our freedom and our health.

USING your money to promote underindulgence requires a shift in behavior, for sure. But another scientifically validated means of increasing the happiness you get from your money is even more radical: not using it on yourself at all.

Imagine walking down the street to work and being approached by our student Lara Aknin, who hands you an envelope. You open the envelope and find $20 and a slip of paper, which tells you to spend the cash on something for yourself by the end of the day. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Now imagine instead that the slip of paper told you to spend the cash on someone else. Being generous is nice, sure, but would using the money to benefit someone else actually make you happier than buying yourself the belt, DVD or apps you’ve been dying to get?

Yes, and it’s not even close. When we follow up with people who receive cash from us, those whom we told to spend on others report greater happiness than those told to spend on themselves. And in countries from Canada to India to South Africa, we find that people are happier when they spend money on others rather than on themselves.

But what about individuals who are notorious for their struggles with sharing? Surely the emotional benefits of giving couldn’t possibly apply to very young children, who cling to their possessions as though their lives depended on it. To find out, we teamed up with the developmental psychologist Kiley Hamlin and gave toddlers the baby-equivalent of gold: goldfish crackers. Judging from their beaming faces, they were pretty happy about this windfall. But something made them even happier. They were happiest of all when giving some of their treats away to their new friend, a puppet named Monkey. Monkey puppets aside, the lesson is clear: maximizing our happiness is not about maximizing our goldfish. To be clear, having more goldfish (or more gold) doesn’t decrease our happiness — those first few crackers may provide a genuine burst of delight. But rather than focusing on how much we’ve got in our bowl, we should think more carefully about what we do with what we’ve got — which might mean indulging less, and may even mean giving others the opportunity to indulge instead.

EVERYONE is good, until we’re tested.

We hope we would be Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons,” who dismisses his daughter’s pleas to compromise his ideals and save his life, saying: “When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”

But with formerly hallowed institutions and icons sinking into a moral dystopia all around us, has our sense of right and wrong grown more malleable? What if we’re not Thomas More but Mike McQueary?

Eight tortured young men offered searing testimony in Bellefonte, Pa., about being abused as children by Jerry Sandusky in the showers at Penn State, in the basement of his home and at hotels.

But the most haunting image in the case is that of a little boy who was never found, who was never even sought by Penn State officials.

In February 2001, McQueary was home one night watching the movie “Rudy,” about a runty football player who achieves his dream of playing at Notre Dame by the sheer force of his gutsy character. McQueary, a graduate assistant coach and former Penn State quarterback, was so inspired that he got up and went over to the locker room to get some tapes of prospective recruits.

There he ran smack into his own character test. The strapping 6-foot-4 redhead told the court he saw his revered boss and former coach reflected in the mirror: Sandusky, Joe Paterno’s right hand, was grinding against a little boy in the shower in an “extremely sexual” position, their wet bodies making “skin-on-skin slapping sounds.” He met their eyes, Sandusky’s blank, the boy’s startled.

“I’ve never been involved in anything remotely close to this,” the 37-year-old McQueary said. “You’re not sure what the heck to do, frankly.”

He was slugging back water from a paper cup, with the bristly air of a man who knows that many people wonder why he didn’t simply stop the rape and call the police instead of leaving to talk it over with his father and a family friend.

Tellingly, he compared the sickening crime to the noncomparable incident of being a college student looking for a bathroom during a party at a frat house, and inadvertently walking into a dark bedroom where a fraternity brother is having sex with a young lady.

He said he felt too “shocked, flustered, frantic” to do anything, adding defensively: “It’s been well publicized that I didn’t stop it. I physically did not remove the young boy from the shower or punch Jerry out.”

He told Paterno the next morning and went along with the mild reining in of Sandusky, who continued his deviant ways.

Put on administrative leave, McQueary has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the school. (He was promoted to receivers coach and recruiting coordinator three years after the incident.) “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t think I did anything wrong to lose that job.”

It’s jarring because McQueary looks like central casting for the square-jawed hero who stumbles upon a crime in progress, rescues the child thrilled to hear the footsteps of a savior, and puts an end to the serial preying on disadvantaged kids by a man disguised as the patron saint of disadvantaged kids.

Bellefonte, the town in the shadow of Beaver Stadium, also looks like a Hollywood creation: the perfect sepia slice of rural Americana reflecting old-fashioned values. There’s an Elks Lodge, a Loyal Order of Moose hall, a Rexall drugstore, the Hot Dog House with hand-dipped ice cream, and a nice senior citizen shooing you into the crosswalk. This was a big “American Graffiti” weekend in town: the annual sock hop and hot rod parade.

How could so many fine citizens of this college town ignore the obvious and protect a predator instead of protecting children going through the ultimate trauma: getting raped by a local celebrity offering to be their dream father figure? A Penn State police officer warned Sandusky in 1998 to stop showering with boys; Saint Jerry ignored him.

The first witness for the prosecution, now 28, recalled that Sandusky wooed him starting when he was 12, letting him wear the jersey of the star linebacker LaVar Arrington.

In his Washington Post blog, Arrington, a retired Redskin, wrote that it was “mind-blowing” to hear about the boy’s hurt. He recalled that he had asked the kid, “Why are you always walking around all mad, like a tough guy?”

He assumed that since the boy had been involved with the Second Mile charity, he must be from a troubled home.

“I will never just assume ever again,” he said of dealing with an angry child. “I will always ask, and let them know that it’s O.K. to tell the truth about why they are upset.”

That accuser testified that at the Alamo Bowl, Dottie Sandusky, a good German, came into the hotel room while her husband was in the shower threatening to send the boy home if he would not perform oral sex. Jerry came out and she asked him, “What are you doing in there?” But she soon disappeared.

“She was kind of cold,” the young man recalled. “She wasn’t mean or hateful, nothing like that, just, they’re Jerry’s kids, like that.”

Another accuser, now 18, testified that he screamed when Sandusky raped him in the basement; though Dottie was upstairs, there was no response.

NBC’s Michael Isikoff reported on a secret file discovered in Penn State’s internal investigation, led by Louis Freeh, the former F.B.I. chief. Graham Spanier, a former university president, and Gary Schultz, a former vice president, debated whether they had a legal obligation to report the 2001 shower incident, and in one e-mail, agreed it would be “humane” to Sandusky not to inform social service agencies.

That revoltingly echoes the testimony in the trial of Msgr. William Lynn in Philadelphia, where the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua ordered the shredding of a list of 35 priests believed to be child molesters. Lynn testified that he followed Bevilacqua’s orders not to tell victims if others had accused the same priest of abuse, or to inform parishes of the true reason that perverted priests were removed and recirculated.

When a seminarian told Lynn in 1992 that he was raped all through high school by the monstrous Rev. Stanley Gana, Lynn conceded he let it fall “through the cracks.” He also admitted he “forgot” to tell the police investigating a preying priest that the diocese knew of at least eight more cases.

Yet Lynn claimed he did his “best” for victims.

Inundated by instantaneous information and gossip, do we simply know more about the seamy side? Do greater opportunities and higher stakes cause more instances of unethical behavior? Have our materialism, narcissism and cynicism about the institutions knitting society — schools, sports, religion, politics, banking — dulled our sense of right and wrong?

“Most Americans continue to think of their lives in moral terms; they want to live good lives,” said James Davison Hunter, a professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Death of Character.” “But they are more uncertain about what the nature of the good is. We know more, and as a consequence, we no longer trust the authority of traditional institutions who used to be carriers of moral ideals.

“We used to experience morality as imperatives. The consequences of not doing the right thing were not only social, but deeply emotional and psychological. We couldn’t bear to live with ourselves. Now we experience morality more as a choice that we can always change as circumstances call for it. We tend to personalize our ideals. And what you end up with is a nation of ethical free agents.

“We’ve moved from a culture of character to a culture of personality. The etymology of the word character is that it’s deeply etched, not changeable in all sorts of circumstances. We don’t want to think of ourselves as transgressive or bad, but we tend to personalize our understanding of the good.”

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor dubbed “the Elvis of cyberlaw” by Wired magazine, was seduced by his rock star choirmaster at the American Boychoir School in Princeton in the 1970s when he was 14 and turned into his supportive “wife,” as he calls it. “It made me really feel like a grown-up. Typically, sex doesn’t have to be terrible.”

In 2004, he represented another victim in a successful lawsuit against the school. He told me that “an astonishing 30 to 40 percent” of his peers there had been abused, “and everybody knew and nobody did anything.” That echoes the horror at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s, where a culture of sexual abuse by teachers developed.

And as if we needed more evidence that perversity lurks everywhere, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have been ordered to pay more than $20 million to a woman who was abused for two years, starting at age 9, by a congregation member in California. She had filed a lawsuit accusing the church of instructing elders to keep sex-abuse accusations quiet.

“You don’t want to be the outsider who betrays the institution; whistleblowers are always the weirdos,” Lessig said. “There are so many ways to rationalize doing the easy thing. And it’s really easy for us to overlook how our inaction to step up and do even the simplest thing leads to profoundly destructive consequences in our society.”

I asked Cory Booker, the Newark mayor, why he ignored his security team and made a snap decision to run into a burning house to save his neighbor. He said his parents taught him to feel indebted to all the people who had sacrificed for his family. And he recoiled in law school at the idea that there was not always a legal obligation to help the vulnerable.

“We have to fight the dangerous streams in culture, the consumerism and narcissism and me-ism that erode the borders of our moral culture,” he said. “We can’t put shallow celebrity before core decency. We have to have a deeper faith in the human spirit. As they say, he who has the heart to help has the right to complain.”

FRIENDSHIP brings such blessings. And such bargains! Only because of our closeness was President Obama willing to drop his asking price and offer me a picture and a moment with him on the cheap. At least that’s what my invitation to a fund-raiser last Thursday night said.

I don’t mean the Thursday night fund-raiser: that vaunted din-din at Sarah Jessica Parker’s crib in Greenwich Village, where 50 glitterati paid 40 grand each. (I’ll multiply: that’s a $2 million haul.) I mean a second, follow-up fund-raiser, headlined by Mariah Carey at the Plaza, to which the president and first lady quickly zipped, double-dipping in Manhattan’s lucrative waters to maximize their catch.

The Plaza event was for a “small group of friends,” said the invitation, which came to me by mistake. (Like most journalists, I don’t give political donations.) The invitation also said that in light of those friendships, the “contribution amount has been kept low.” How low? I had to open up an attachment to find out: a mere $10,000 for one person, $15,000 for a couple. Pocket change! Since 250 “friends” reportedly ended up in this “small group,” that’s another $2 million haul, give or take.

Four years ago, Obama opted out of public financing for the general election, which would have given him $84 million for the September-to-November phase of the race but prevented additional fund-raising. He raised many times that — his total, stretching back to the start of his primary campaign, was about $750 million — and hugely outspent John McCain, who took public financing.

Two years later the Supreme Court, in the disastrous Citizens United ruling, cleared the way for unlimited donations to — and expenditures by — “super PACs” that could promote a given candidate so long as they didn’t coordinate with him or her. Republican bigwigs got to furious work, determined to put Obama at the financial disadvantage this time around.

And here we are, in an age of austerity surreally contradicted by the hundreds of millions being poured into campaigns. By some estimates Election 2012 will be a $2 billion affair, the majority of that probably amassed and put into play on the Republican side.

There are indeed two Americas and two economies: one in which a conservative titan like Sheldon Adelson and his relatives blithely funnel $21 million toward the lost cause of Newt Gingrich, and another in which the median net worth of an American family has dropped to $77,300, which is roughly where it was in the early 1990s.

Campaign spending skyrockets while government spending is under siege. Political ad makers get rich while infrastructure crumbles. And presidential candidates have been turned into platinum-level panhandlers. When they could and should be mulling the metastasizing challenges of a country on the ropes, they’re begging: to crowds of more than 1,000 and klatches of just a few dozen; over breakfasts and lunches and dinners; in multiple states on single days. Obama traveled to Maryland and Pennsylvania on Tuesday and pulled off six fund-raisers in as many hours.

Today’s office seekers present vague promises but a detailed pricing chart. For X amount you get a speech; for more, a photo; for even more, all of that plus banter over canapés. Politicians are like airlines. You can fly them economy, business or first class.

Or you can try to buy one of your own. Isn’t that essentially what the Koch brothers and Adelson are doing? As Nicholas Confessore reported in The Times last week, Charles and David Koch lead a group of conservative donors who have pledged to raise some $400 million during this campaign cycle for issue groups, including their super PAC, while Adelson and his family have thus far given at least $35 million to super PACs that support Republicans. Of that, $10 million recently went to Restore Our Future, which backs Romney. Adelson has said that he might spend $100 million when all is said and done.

“That is a great deal of money,” noted McCain, a longtime proponent of tighter regulations on money in politics, in an interview Thursday on “PBS NewsHour.” “And, again, we need a level playing field.”

WHAT we have, instead, is a gaudy free-for-all, so loopy and unctuous as to defy belief.

We have Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor, yukking it up on the phone with a blogger who successfully passed himself off as David Koch and said, “I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time.”

“Outstanding,” Walker responded.

We have Romney ignoring Donald Trump’s attention-mongering tantrums about Obama’s birthplace in return for fund-raising help, including a 63rd birthday lunch for Ann Romney on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan. That was in April. The cynosure of the equestrienne-themed cake was an edible Ann on an edible horse. The tally was reportedly $600,000.

We have both the Romney and Obama campaigns soliciting donations by promising to enter donors in lotteries for dinner with the candidate and one (or more) of his celebrity boosters, and we have e-mail subject lines from the Obama campaign like these: “Clooney,” “George Clooney. Really” and “Throw Bo a bone.”

Bo as in the First Dog. The money hunt enlists all creatures great and small.

We have early, primary-season assessments of candidates that hinge largely on what sort of fund-raising chops they seem to have. It’s a bizarre qualification for governing, but a transcendent one, and that’s been true for a few nutty decades now. George W. Bush in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, Rick Perry this time around: all generated excitement because all generated money. Before the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary comes the first fund-raising report. It’s nearly as relevant a verdict.

We have difficulty taking anything at face value. Did Cory Booker, the Newark mayor, denounce the Obama campaign’s attacks on Bain Capital because he was really all that nettled by the negativity, or was he pacifying Wall Street, whose largess, which he enjoys, can be essential to a New Jersey politician? It’s impossible not to wonder.

We have a financial arms race, which leads to a barrage of negative attack ads, which turn an already incendiary partisanship positively sulfurous.

Last week, as the fund-raising frenzy came into more ghastly relief, there were calls for a constitutional amendment to dismantle super PACs and for the Supreme Court to revisit Citizens United.

There was also a speech by Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, who likened the Obama campaign’s complaints about conservative megadonors to President Nixon’s so-called enemies list. McConnell praised Citizens United as a victory for free speech.

Hearing the word “free” in this context was the most surreal wrinkle of all, because right now we’re shackled to a system that demeans the people running for office, corrodes voters’ trust in them and doesn’t do any honor to this democracy of ours.

Jeff, as CTR have fallen, fraud has risen. So we  have a double whammy conspiring against the metric. Of course the only way out  is as you suggest…giving people what they want; content. It is too simple.  Nassim Taleb had a simple way to measure “fragility”. He did not receive  accolades until he hired a team of mathematicians to complexify his formula.  Maybe that is what you need…something to turn the simple idea into something  incomprehensible.

Another life form curved into sight down the street: a girl laughing down at her gloveless fingers which were texting on some hand-held device.

This sight is so common that it no longer surprises me, though strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one saltwater lagoon to another.

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.

But, at exactly the same time, we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

I’m certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders. We’re losing track of our senses, and spending less and less time experiencing the world firsthand. At some medical schools, it’s even possible for future doctors to attend virtual anatomy classes, in which they can dissect a body by computer — minus that whole smelly, fleshy, disturbing human element.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards. But they don’t report everything. Or even most things. We’d collapse from sheer exhaustion. They filter experience, so that the brain isn’t swamped by so many stimuli that it can’t focus on what may be lifesaving. Some of their expertise comes with the genetic suit, but most of it must be learned, updated and refined, through the fine art of focusing deeply, in the present, through the senses. Once you’ve held a ball, turning it in your hands, you need only see another ball to remember the feel of roundness. Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable. Subtract the subtle physical sensations, and you lose a wealth of problem-solving and lifesaving details.

As an antidote I wish schools would teach the value of cultivating presence. As people complain more and more these days, attention spans are growing shorter, and we’ve begun living in attention blinks. More social than ever before, we’re spending less time alone with our thoughts, and even less relating to other animals and nature. Too often we’re missing in action, brain busy, working or playing indoors, while completely unaware of the world around us.

One solution is to spend a few minutes every day just paying close attention to some facet of nature. A bonus is that the process will be refreshing. When a sense of presence steals up the bones, one enters a mental state where needling worries soften, careers slow their cantering, and the imaginary line between us and the rest of nature dissolves. Then for whole moments one may see nothing but the flaky trunk of a paper-birch tree with its papyrus-like bark. Or, indoors, watch how a vase full of tulips, whose genes have traveled eons and silk roads, arch their spumoni-colored ruffles and nod gently by an open window.

On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as engage in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive.

WHAT’S the difference, I asked a tech-writer friend, between the billionaire media mogul Mark Zuckerberg and the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch?

When Rupert invades your privacy, my friend e-mailed back, it’s against the law. When Mark does, it’s the future.

There is truth in that riposte: we deplore the violations exposed in the phone-hacking scandal at Murdoch’s British tabloids, while we surrender our privacy on a far grander scale to Facebook and call it “community.” Our love of Facebook has been a submissive love.

But now, not so much. In recent weeks it seems the world has begun to turn a jaundiced eye on this global megaplatform. While that may not please Facebook’s executives, it is a good thing for the rest of us — and maybe for the future of social media, too.

The recent history of the Facebook phenomenon has been a serial bursting of illusions.

Most conspicuously, there was the disappointing public stock offering — disappointing, at least, to the prospectors who hoped to flip the stock for a quick payday. As my colleague Joe Nocera pointed out, the I.P.O. did exactly what it was intended to do; it raised $16 billion for the young company to invest in its long-term future. Moreover, the plummeting value of the stock since the launch has generated a healthy skepticism about other new Internet businesses. Still, it can’t be fun for Facebook insiders to wake up to headlines containing words like “fiasco” and “debacle,” or to read press coverage suggesting that advertisers are not sold on Facebook as a brand platform.

Then there is the persistent attention to the dark side of life online. It wasn’t an entirely new thought a year ago when I fretted in this paper that the faux friendships of Facebook and the ephemeral connectedness of Twitter were displacing real rapport, real intimacy. The response at the time — “Luddite!” “Sacrilege!” — suggested that a fair number of people had elevated a very useful tool into an object of mindless worship. But the research keeps reinforcing the argument that social media, while an innovation with a wonderful menu of practical uses, are not a happiness machine. “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” asked the cover of The Atlantic magazine last month. A resounding “yes” — lonely, and narcissistic and actually ill — was the answer.

Nor can Facebook’s marketing missionaries be pleased that their product shows signs of becoming simply uncool. While Facebook has colonized much of the world’s population, there is anecdotal evidence that teenagers are moving their online party to other platforms — Twitter, Tumblr, X-Box — in part because Facebook became a place where mom and dad hang out. You know the zeitgeist is trending against you when your product is mocked on “Girls,” the aggressively hip HBO millennials melodrama.

SHOSHANNA: Oh My God! You’re not serious? I mean — that’s like not being on Facebook.

JESSA: I’m not on Facebook.

SHOSHANNA: You are so [expletive] classy …

You may find a bit of poetic justice in this if you recall that, before it acquired its messianic aura, Facebook had its origins in an algorithm with the not-so-lofty mission of letting horny Harvard boys rate the looks of female classmates.

We should be as suspicious of the Facebook-is-over hype as of the original euphoria. Lee Rainie, who studies Internet culture at the Pew Research Center, said that polling does not reflect a significant Facebook backlash so far; the empire is still growing toward a billion users, and more and more people say they use it every day. What has changed is that users say they are more wary of posting private information — especially when contemplating a job hunt, a college application or a budding romance. And many Facebook users — a third, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll — are cutting back the time they spend there.

“The infatuation phase is morphing into a more mature phase,” Rainie told me.

Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society adds that this reckoning is mutual, and natural, as Facebook grows from a plaything born in a college dorm room into a very serious enterprise. “Even Facebook has to lose its own romantic vision of itself,” he said.

After a period of idealizing social media, the public is beginning to recognize that these are enterprises with ambitions and appetites. They are businesses. Public companies have an imperative to grow profits, which Facebook will do by monetizing you and me — serving us up as the targets for precision-guided advertising.

One of the most interesting stories I’ve read in the recent, more aggressive spate of coverage was Somini Sengupta’s report in The Times about Facebook’s entry into the Washington influence game. Every company, of course, protects its interests in the places where laws are made and adjudicated, so in hiring its corps of Washington insiders and dispensing cash from its political action committee, Facebook is just joining the mainstream. But Facebook’s way of friending the powerful is original. It ingratiates itself with members of Congress by sending helpers to maximize the constituent-pleasing, re-election-securing power of their Facebook pages. “If you want to have long-term influence, there’s nothing better than having politicians dependent on your product,” one envious Silicon Valley executive told me.

What might Facebook want from its new friends in Washington? It’s not hard to imagine. Since Facebook’s most promising path to prosperity is selling ads based on your likes and dislikes, the company will be wary of any government attempt to enforce privacy standards that interfere with the company’s ability to mine your information. Since the company is jostling for dominance with the likes of Google, Apple, Twitter and Amazon, it will be paying attention to antitrust actions that could curtail its ability to use its market muscle. (Jonathan Zittrain sent me a graphic that gives you a little sense of Facebook’s power in the marketplace. In 2010 Facebook was displeased with the developers of a game called Critter Island, one of many online games and services that basically rent space and services in the Facebook condominium. Facebook simply disabled the game, and the chart shows the user base collapsing from 14 million to zero in a couple of days.)

Beyond Washington, activists for various causes have upbraided Facebook for failing to protect dissidents who use the site to expose and mobilize against oppressive regimes. Critics say the company’s policy of forbidding pseudonyms — intended to assure more civil behavior online (and, a cynic might speculate, to enrich the value of the user base to advertisers) — makes it a risky communications tool in authoritarian states.

“That’s fine if you live in an ideal world,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, whose recent book, “Consent of the Networked,” examines the corporate sovereigns of cyberspace. “If you’re an activist in China, it leaves you extremely vulnerable.”

Her book persuaded one high-profile journalist, Steve Coll, to announce in The New Yorker that he was renouncing his citizenship in “Facebookistan,” which he had come to see as a highhanded corporate autocracy.

MacKinnon herself is not encouraging an exodus. She favors sticking around to help Facebook become more responsible. “It’s kind of like China — do you engage, or disinvest?” she said. “I’m still at the engagement stage. The main thing is that people need to act more as constituents, not as passive residents.”

And in fact, she says, Facebook has responded to activist pressure by, among other things, becoming an observer at the Global Network Initiative, an important forum for the advocacy of privacy and free expression.

Somewhere on his way from Harvard geek to Silicon Valley titan, Mark Zuckerberg adopted an ideology of “radical transparency.” He is getting what must be an uncomfortable dose of that now. This surge of scrutiny ought to make us smarter, more sober consumers. The challenge for Facebook is how to retain the trust of its wised-up users even as he commoditizes us — that is, how to sell us on without creeping us out.

Marina Keegan’s ode to college life became her last  column ever after she was killed in a tragic car accident days after  graduation.

By Megan Gibson  May 29,  2012

The piece below was written by Marina Keegan ’12 for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week. Keegan died in a car accident on Saturday. She was 22.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team.  When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake.  We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard?  Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to.  Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

We’re so young.  We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy – and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.

For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that…

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.

By Chris Hedges

In January, attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran asked me to be the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that challenged the harsh provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, in a 68-page opinion, ruled Wednesday that Section 1021 of the NDAA was unconstitutional. It was a stunning and monumental victory. With her ruling she returned us to a country where—as it was before Obama signed this act into law Dec. 31—the government cannot strip a U.S. citizen of due process or use the military to arrest him or her and then hold him or her in military prison indefinitely. She categorically rejected the government’s claims that the plaintiffs did not have the standing to bring the case to trial because none of us had been indefinitely detained, that lack of imminent enforcement against us meant there was no need for an injunction and that the NDAA simply codified what had previously been set down in the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act. The ruling was a huge victory for the protection of free speech. Judge Forrest struck down language in the law that she said gave the government the ability to incarcerate people based on what they said or wrote. Maybe the ruling won’t last. Maybe it will be overturned. But we and other Americans are freer today than we were a week ago. And there is something in this.

The government lawyers, despite being asked five times by the judge to guarantee that we plaintiffs would not be charged under the law for our activities, refused to give any assurances. They did not provide assurances because under the law there were none. We could, even they tacitly admitted, be subject to these coercive measures. We too could be swept away into a black hole. And this, I think, decided the case.

“At the hearing on this motion, the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021,” Judge Forrest noted. “Plaintiffs are therefore at risk of detention, of losing their liberty, potentially for many years.”

The government has 60 days to appeal. It can also, as Mayer and Afran have urged, accept the injunction that nullifies the law. If the government appeals, the case will go to a federal appellate court. The ruling, even if an appellate court upholds it, could be vanquished in the Supreme Court, especially given the composition of that court.

We had none of the resources of the government. Mayer and Afran worked for weeks on the case without compensation. All of us paid for our own expenses. And few people, including constitutional lawyers of Glenn Greenwald’s caliber, thought we had a chance. But we pushed forward. We pushed forward because all effort to impede the corporate state, however quixotic, is essential. Even if we ultimately fail we will be able to say we tried.

This law was, after all, not about foreign terrorism. It was about domestic dissent. If the state could link Occupy and other legitimate protest movements with terrorist groups (US Day of Rage suffered such an attempt), then the provisions in the NDAA could, in a period of instability, be used to “disappear” U.S. citizens into military gulags, including the government’s offshore penal colonies. And once there, stripped of due process, detainees could be held until, in the language of the law, “the end of hostilities.” In an age of permanent war that would be a lifetime.

Human existence, as I witnessed in war, is precarious and often very short. The battles that must be fought may never be won in our lifetime. And there will always be new battles to define our struggle. Resistance to tyranny and evil is never ending. It is a way, rather, of defining our brief sojourn on the planet. Revolt, as Albert Camus reminded us, is the only acceptable definition of the moral life. Revolt, he wrote, is “a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. … It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

The lawyers and I and the other plaintiffs mounted this challenge because what had been solidified into the legal code was a palpable wrong. Victory or defeat was not part of the equation. Not to challenge this law would have meant being complicit in its implementation. And once resistance defines a life it becomes reflexive.

“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Vaclav Havel said when he was battling the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”

Rebellion is an act that assures us of remaining free and independent human beings. Rebellion is not waged because it will work; indeed in its noblest form it is waged when we know it will fail. Our existence, as Camus wrote, must itself be “an act of rebellion.” Not to rebel, not to protect and nurture life even in the face of death, is spiritual and moral suicide. The Nazi concentration camp guards sought to break prisoners first and then kill them. They understood that even the power to choose the timing and circumstances of one’s death was an affirmation of personal freedom and dangerous to the status quo. So although the guards killed at random they went to great lengths to prevent people in the camps from committing suicide. Totalitarian systems, to perpetuate themselves, always seek to break autonomy and self-determination. This makes all acts of resistance a threat, even those acts that will not succeed. And this is why in all states that rule by force any act of rebellion, even one that is insignificant, must be ruthlessly crushed. The goal of the corporate state, like that of any totalitarian entity, is to create a society where no one has the capacity to resist.

It is not going to get better. The climate crisis alone will assure that. The corporate state knows what is coming. Globalization is breaking down. Our natural resources are being depleted. Economic and political upheavals are inevitable. And our corporate rulers are preparing a world of masters and serfs, a world where repression will be our daily diet, a world of hunger and riots, a world of brutal control and a world where our spirits must be broken. We have to stop asking what is reasonable or practical, what the Democratic Party or the government can do for us, what will work or not work. We must refuse now to make any concessions, large or small. We must remember that the lesser of two evils is still evil. We must no longer let illusions pacify us. Hell is truth seen too late. In large and small ways we are called to resist, resist, resist, as we race heedlessly into the abyss.