So what does the GOP stand for? Upward redistribution of income: tax cuts for the rich, reduced aid to the poor. Oh, and deregulation that raises corporate profits. Everything else is a sales pitch, not a principle 5/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 25, 2018

In London, Paris, Berlin, I hop on the train, head to the cafe – it’s the afternoon, and nobody’s gotten to work until 9am, and even then, maybe not until 10 – order a carefully made coffee and a newly baked croissant, do some writing, pick up some fresh groceries, maybe a meal or two, head home – now it’s 6 or 7, and everyone else has already gone home around 5 – and watch something interesting, maybe a documentary by an academic, the BBC’s Blue Planet, or a Swedish crime-noir. I think back on my day and remember the people smiling and laughing at the pubs and cafes.

In New York, Washington, Philadelphia, I do the same thing, but it is not the same experience at all. I take broken down public transport to the cafe – everybody’s been at work since 6 or 7 or 8, so they already look half-dead – order coffee and a croissant, both of which are fairly tasteless, do some writing, pick up some mass-produced groceries, full of toxins and colourings and GMOs, even if they are labelled “organic” and “fresh”, all forbidden in Europe, head home – people are still at work, though it’s 7 or 8 – and watch something bland and forgettable, reality porn, decline porn, police-state TV. I think back on my day and remember how I didn’t see a single genuine smile – only hard, grim faces, set against despair, like imagine living in Soviet Leningrad.

So just as Americans don’t get how bad their lives really are, comparatively speaking – which is to say how good they could be – so too Europeans don’t fully understand how good their lives are – and how bad, if they continue to follow in America’s footsteps, austerity by austerity, they could be. Both appear to be blind to one another’s mistakes and successes.

In psychology, the term “insight” is used to describe a recognition of one’s own condition, such as when a person with mental illness is aware of their illness. More broadly, it describes the ability to recognize patterns in one’s own behavior. It’s an example of metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking, and it’s something most humans are capable of but animals are not. And I believe the best test of whether an AI is really engaging in human-level cognition would be for it to demonstrate insight of this kind.

And this to me is the greatest irony of now. We are making three great mistakes in this age. 

• The first is that we cannot learn from modern history — which is the story of Trump and America and tyranny.
• The second is that we cannot learn from deep history — that the whole story of human progress has been written by lifting one another up, not keeping anyone else down, and so the seductive ur-myth of the fascist, that I rise by pulling you down, right down into the abyss, is mesmerizing societies whole. 
• The third mistake we are making, though, is more invisible, and perhaps the greatest of all — what this essay is about: we cannot learn from one another anymore.

"So maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own healthcare. They've got to make those decisions themselves."

“Meals on Wheels sounds great,” Mulvaney said during the White House news briefing, adding that “we're not going to spend [money] on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.”, Mulvaney: Proposed cuts to Meals on Wheels are compassionate to taxpayers

“We are going to do great things for the American people with Mick Mulvaney leading the Office of Management and Budget,” said President-elect Trump. “Right now we are nearly $20 trillion in debt, but Mick is a very high-energy leader with deep convictions for how to responsibly manage our nation’s finances and save our country from drowning in red ink. With Mick at the head of OMB, my administration is going to make smart choices about America’s budget, bring new accountability to our federal government, and renew the American taxpayer’s trust in how their money is spent.”

“The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that. This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”

— Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 6, 2014