"A thousand years ago, a great war came to Middle Earth, the Anglo-Saxon name for the world of people.
Three kingdoms fell into battle, the victors would change England forever.
Then English, led by the newly crowned King Harold Godwinson.
The Normans, their Duke William of Normandy, eager to extend his territories.
The Vikings, fearless, warlike, and fronted by the great King Harald Hardrada..."
F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.
"...[it] is really a summary of her episode of MTV Cribs. "Welcome to my home, yo, let me show you my gold toilet. It's for peeing and flushing the coke down when the heat comes in the back way."
"...Differences in the growth rates in the U.S. and other Western countries during the 19th and 20th centuries also raise questions about the degree to which the basic supply-side formula is a sufficient (rather than a necessary) condition for rapid growth. By historical standards, economic growth in the 19th century—when per capita incomes doubled—was unprecedented. But in the 20th century, incomes increased four times as rapidly as they did in the 19th century. Given the higher “base,” one might have expected growth in the 20th century to have been slower. Strikingly, the modern economy has also been less prone to lurch from exhilarating boom to devastating bust. In the 19th century, several depressions interrupted economic growth, whereas in the 20th century, apart from the Great Depression, downturns were relatively mild and short-lived—in spite of two great wars. Yet conditions in the 19th century conformed to the basic supply-side formula more closely than those of the 20th century. In the United States, government expenditures and taxes were extremely low—and, except during the Civil War, there was no income tax. There was no federal bureaucracy to impose minimum-wage laws, regulate health and safety standards, or resist monopolies and trusts. No Clean Water or Securities and Exchange acts had been passed. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs had not been conceived. And property rights—another mainstay of supply-side recommendations—were at least as secure, if not more so, in the 19th century than they are now.
Another puzzle: according to Solow’s groundbreaking research, technical progress rather than capital accumulation was the source of nearly 90% of U.S. growth in the first half of the 20th century. In the 19th century, capital accumulation made a larger contribution to growth than did technical change. Yet the new products invented in the 19th century were extraordinary. Inventions between 1850 and 1900 include the monorail, telephone, microphone, cash register, phonograph, incandescent lamp, electric train, steam turbine, gasoline engine, and street car, as well as dynamite, movies, motorcycles, linotype printing, automobiles, refrigerators, concrete and steel construction, pneumatic tires, aspirin, and X-rays. These may well overshadow inventions credited to the entire 20th century.
The smaller economic impact of 19th-century inventions suggests that they weren’t effectively commercialized; their widespread use was hampered by some combination of inappropriate features, high costs, poor marketing, or a paucity of venturesome consumption. Why in spite of a more congenial supply-side climate was this so? What changed in the 20th century that allowed the United States—and other countries with advanced economies—to extract more value from technological and scientific breakthroughs?
..."
Some of the ‘declinists’ think that what would set France right is a good dose of Thatcherism and Chicago School economics, and Steinberger considers that this sort of remedy would do much to fix the national cooking crisis. Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, Reagan was elected president in 1980, and Mitterrand’s long reign began in 1981: ‘Insofar as the restaurant business was concerned, the United States and Britain unquestionably took the better route,’ Steinberger says, and this despite the fact that Mitterrand was a very great gourmand while Thatcher was of the ‘food is fuel’ persuasion and Reagan’s favourite foods were macaroni and cheese and liquorice jelly beans.
It is well known that in the struggle of the weak against the strong, it is easier to attack the former. Those who resist will always be accused by the cowardly of exciting the hatred of the powerful.
Anyone with a mind to contend timidly that liberty is indivisible, that the life of a human being has the same value everywhere, that amputating a thief's hand or stoning an adulteress is intolerable everywhere, is duly arraigned in the name of the necessary equality of cultures. As a result, we can turn a blind eye to how others live and suffer once they've been parked in the ghetto of their particularity. Enthusing about their inviolable differentness alleviates us from having to worry about their condition.
One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate.
There's a pretty sad reason for this glut: there's the constantly-circulating idea that law school is the French Foreign Legion for the intelligent and aimless; they accept any scoundrel and turn them out a gentleman.
As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan society – ‘Look, they used to burn their witches!’ – while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake. If we’ve managed to become less credulous about advertising, to make it more normal and the bearer of more reasonable expectations, perhaps in 50 years’ time viewers will look back on the silly self-congratulatory subtexts of Mad Men, shake their heads, and be grateful that gender and sexual tolerance have likewise been normalised. Advertising circa 1960 is genuinely interesting. Would that Mad Men had been genuinely interested in it.
