Since 1990, the defense industry has contributed more than $200 million to political campaigns, and in 2012 alone, it spent roughly $132 million on more than 900 lobbyists.” Over the past 10 years, from 2005 to 2015, the defense industry spent $1.319 billion on lobbying.
FIFA May Regret a Qatar World Cup After All
In 2012, as allegations of wrongdoing in the recent World Cup bid process mounted, FIFA appointed Michael J. Garcia, the former U.S. attorney for New York’s southern district, as the chief investigator for its ethics committee and tasked him with looking into the bid process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Though Garcia submitted a three-hundred-and-fifty-page-long report last fall, the chair of the judicial branch of the ethics committee, Hans-Joachim Eckert, refused to make it public, instead issuing a forty-two-page summary which Garcia called “incomplete and erroneous.” In December, Garcia made an appeal to have the report released in full, but his attempt failed and he resigned in protest.
Just How Nepotistic Are We?
Think about the N.B.A. further. The skills necessary to be a basketball player, especially height, are highly hereditary. But the N.B.A. is a meritocracy, with your performance easy to evaluate. If you do not play well, you will be cut, even if the team is the New York Knicks and your name is Patrick Ewing Jr. Father-son correlation in the N.B.A. is only one-eleventh as high as it is in the Senate.
The parental edge in football and baseball is much lower than it is in basketball, probably because there is less reliance on height.
I went through a wide range of fields and found a consistent pattern: greater success for the sons, but nothing like the edge a winning politician provides.
.. An American male is 4,582 times more likely to become an Army general if his father was one; 1,895 times more likely to become a famous C.E.O.; 1,639 times more likely to win a Pulitzer Prize; 1,497 times more likely to win a Grammy; and 1,361 times more likely to win an Academy Award. Those are pretty decent odds, but they do not come close to the 8,500 times more likely a senator’s son is to find himself chatting with John McCain or Dianne Feinstein in the Senate cloakroom.
Two Women, Opposite Fortunes
Angola has one of the richest pools of natural wealth per person in Africa, yet the country has done much less than its peers to assist ordinary people. And when the I.M.F. reviewed Angola’s books from 2007-10, it initially found $32 billion missing.