Ran

Ran:

For the Shakespeare lovers among you -- I'm looking at you, Cass -- Kurosawa's retelling of King Lear is on Hulu right now.



It's a good long film -- about three hours. Still and all, if you have time, there's a lot there. If any of you are inclined to watch it, and want to discuss it, this is a good place.

Map of the Mind

Map of the Mind

A map of European stereotypes:

No matter how I download it, I can't get the detail that would let you read the small letters, so just click over and see it. The site also has Europe as viewed by Americans, French, Germans, etc.

h/t ZeroHedge

Reality and Actuality

Reality and Actuality, Continued:

Htom asked for a break to put his thoughts in order before we reconvened on the subject of levels of reality -- that is, whether a thing can be "more real" than another. Here's St. Augustine on the subject:

Look around; there are the heaven and the earth. They cry aloud that they were made, for they change and vary. Whatever there is that has not been made, and yet has being, has nothing in it that was not there before. This having something not already existent is what it means to be changed and varied. Heaven and earth thus speak plainly that they did not make themselves: "We are, because we have been made; we did not exist before we came to be so that we could have made ourselves!" And the voice with which they speak is simply their visible presence. It was thou, O Lord, who madest these things. Thou art beautiful; thus they are beautiful. Thou art good, thus they are good. Thou art; thus they are. But they are not as beautiful, nor as good, nor as truly real as thou their Creator art. Compared with thee, they are neither beautiful nor good, nor do they even exist. These things we know, thanks be to thee. Yet our knowledge is ignorance when it is compared with thy knowledge.

That gives us two 'levels' of reality: God, and creation. The original claim of Mark Twain's suggested that a human creation could -- if it were also true and beautiful -- be "more real" than other things that were part of God's creation.

Confer with Tolkien's idea of sub-creation, and his creation myth in the Silmarillion. Human nature has a capacity to seize upon the True and the Beautiful as they are in other things. We can separate them intellectually from the things they are in, and think about why they are beautiful. We can take things that are imperfectly beautiful, and imagine how to make them more so. We can, in our arts, make them actually more beautiful.

Now you have Twain at Wagner's performance. Here is a distillation, in art, of what is true and beautiful. It is "artificial," because it is a work of art. It is also more real, because it is closer to the perfection that lies at the highest level of reality. This, I think, is what Twain meant: and I think it is right.

Good line

A Good Line:

I always appreciate a clever turn of phrase. This one is from Ed Morrissey:

Right now, [Obama's] got the stature of a Carter, who managed the US into malaise and then argued that we should learn to live with it.

Freedom and the Social Contract

Freedom and the Social Contract

John Mauldin posted a hodgepodge of thoughts today touching on freedom and the social contract. He (or his sources) summarized the Enlightenment view on three areas of human freedom:

1. Political freedom (voting the incompetents out, separation of powers)
   


2. Social freedom (freedom of worship, sending one’s children to the school of one’s choice, creating a union, etc.)
   
   
3. Economic freedom (the ability to create a business, hire or fire employees, etc., regulated by contract law between acting parties).

What the philosophers of the 18th century argued was that the Church had to move out of the political sphere, and the State out of the other two.

Sounds good to me. He describes how these different freedoms may manifest themselves:

In Hong Kong, . . . we enjoy one of the freest societies in the World: we have total social freedom, total economic freedom but yet very little political freedom. Still, I believe this compares extremely well with what we have in France, where the church of Marxism has invaded the State and the educational system, destroying both, while the obese State has invaded the social and economic sphere, leaving entrepreneurs without oxygen. As Tocqueville expected, we have moved towards a strange and benign “molle dictature“ [soft dictatorship].

Then he explains how he thinks different societies can successfully adopt very different strategies for liberty:

[T]here are lots of good things – justice, wealth, individual liberty, social stability, security, equity – and we cannot maximize all of them at once. Trade-offs among these ultimate values must be made and that is what politics is about. Societies create a set of trade-offs by negotiation (and by the way democratic elections are not in themselves a mechanism for making these trade-offs; they are simply a mechanism for transmitting information to the agents who are negotiating the trade-offs; so it is a fallacy to presume as many do that only via democratic elections can a society achieve a “true” bargain) . . . .

Among the societies we describe as democratic capitalist there are vast differences in the bargains and hence in the nature of economic activity. America tolerates levels of instability, crime, inequality and pernicious religious zealotry that Europeans and Japanese consider absurd, but it gets in return a much more dynamic entrepreneurial system of wealth creation. Japanese willingly accept levels of social conformity that Westerners consider bizarre, but achieves a high level of social stability and tremendous success in economic areas (such as high precision manufacturing), where self-disciplined social cohesion is a plus.

Here's a good t-shirt on the subject.

Cathedral

Cathedrals:

When might we go to the stars?

When could we launch a 10 ton interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri based on these calculations? Assume 75 years as the maximum travel time that might be acceptable to mission scientists and assume a rendezvous rather than a flyby mission, acknowledging the need to acquire substantial amounts of data at the destination.

As to propulsion options, Millis works with two possibilities, the first being an ideal case that assumes 100% conversion of stored energy into kinetic energy of the vehicle (think ‘idealized beam propulsion’ or even some kind of space drive), the second being an advanced rocket with an exhaust velocity of 0.03c.

The result: The earliest launch for a 75-year probe is 2247, with a nominal date of 2463. This assumes idealized propulsion[.]

Once, men designed and began work on cathedrals that they knew they would not live to see finished. They trusted in those who came after them to carry on their work, until the spires reached to the heavens. It was worth investing their lives in works they would never live to finish, because they did it for the glory of God.

Today, there are still such men.

Think of us?

What Do Global Warming Types Think of Skeptics?

Well, let's go to the tape.



Thanks for clarifying! Of course, since the debate is over, what more needs be said?

Zero Tolerance for Public Schools

Zero Tolerance for Public Schools

I've been enjoying Greg Sullivan's curmudgeonly "Maine Family Robinson" series on the new RightNetwork. (Sullivan publishes the Sippican Cottage blog as well.) The newest article addresses one of my favorite topics: parents who stand up to absurd public schools. The Sullivan family always assumed they'd have to supplement the mediocre education on offer, but they pulled the plug completely and began to home-school when the craziness reached an intolerable level:

We have had personal experience with "zero tolerance" policies at schools our own children attended, and can testify that what they really mean is that the school administrators will tolerate no brake on their behavior. They will brook no discussion of their approach. The rules will be enforced capriciously, and the whim of a public school administrator can seem very capricious indeed to a sensible person, but under no circumstances will any parent or any other citizen have any input into what goes on in a school anymore. It is the same dynamic that prompts poorly informed and unreasonable people to simply call anyone who questions them in any way "a denier." It is not the issue that is being decided. Who decides is being decided. Here's a hint, parents: It's never you.

Formality II

Formality and Maimonides:

Just the other day, Eric posted a quiz that mentioned the Jewish writer Moses Maimonides. A contemporary of Saladin's (and one time physician of his), Maimonides wrote what he called a "guide for the perplexed" -- for those rational Jews who found the Torah, our Old Testament, to be full of impossibilities. They wanted to remain faithful, but were perplexed at how they should interpret such a document. This work is obviously of interest to Christians as well.

Maimonides explained different senses of ancient words, so as to show a way to read literal phrases ("came down") in a metaphysical, rather than physical, sense. One of these words is translated into English as "form," in both the physical and the metaphysical sense.

What is the physical form of a man? He has limbs and eyes, and so forth. It is the metaphysical form that matters. And what is that?

Cassandra writes at RIGHTNETWORK on the subject of making men from boys.

Today’s world has little use and even less respect for manly strength and character. Too often we confuse manliness with maleness, defining masculinity down to an uninspiring collection of barely controlled biological urges. This is a grave mistake, for a world with diminishing standards and few enforceable rules needs men more than ever.

What is the essence of masculinity? How can we cultivate and honor it in our sons? Harvey Mansfield once defined manliness as “a quality that causes individuals to stand for something”. If men have a salient quality, surely it is strength of body, mind, spirit, and character.

Here is Maimonides' take on the form of men. He is writing about Adam, and his children. (This is Chapter VII of Part I, for those of you who are interested in following along).

...it is said of Adam, "And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat (va-yoled) a son in his own likeness, in his form" (Gen. v. 3).... Those sons of Adam who were born before that time were not human in the true sense of the word, they had not "the form of man".... It is acknowledged that a man who does not possess this "form"... is not human, but a mere animal in human shape and form [i.e., has the physical "form" but not the metaphysical "form" -Grim].

Yet such a creature has the power of causing harm and injury: a power which does not belong to other creatures. For those gifts of intelligence and judgment with which he had been endowed for the purpose of acquiring perfection, but which he has failed to apply to their proper aim, are used by him for wicked and mischievous ends; he begets evil things, as though he merely resembled man, or simulated his outward appearance. Such was the condition of those sons of Adam who preceded Seth. In reference to this subject the Midrash says: "During the 130 years when Adam was under rebuke he begat spirits, i.e., demons."

Such sons were animals in the flesh, and demons in the spirit. That is what occurs when the body of a human male is filled with a spirit that lacks the form of manhood.

Immigration Catch 22: Part Deux

Immigration Catch 22: Part Deux

The new complaint is that the Social Security Administration sent Meg Whitman a letter in 2003 (six years before she fired her fraudulently-documented housekeeper) noting a discrepancy in her social security number. Does this mean she failed to take appropriate action to fire her sooner, and therefore has managed to be both a scofflaw aider/abettor of immigration fraud and an ice-cold Simon Lagree? Just to show you how crazy this story can get, the Ninth Circuit (which includes California) has ruled that receipt of a Social Security no-match letter is not “just cause” for firing the worker when the worker is covered by a collective bargaining agreement; immigration advocates assert that this standard applies to all employers. What Whitman did, apparently, was turn the no-match letter over to the housekeeper with instructions to handle it. Was that enough? Too much? Both at once? What a sorry state of the law.

Nor is this a question of hypothetical impact and of interest only to nitpicking immigration-law buffs or people running for high office. Although I missed this news item when it happened several weeks ago, I now see that the DOJ has sued the community college system in Maricopa, Arizona, for illegal discrimination in hiring because it required non-citizen job applicants to show green cards. (Well, OK, maybe it still doesn't matter to most people, only to those on the DOJ hit list, like citizens of Arizona.) I really have not been paying attention, because I did not know that the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) prohibits employers from demanding certain kinds of documentation until after the hiring decision is made. Even then, their options are strictly circumscribed. Per the EEOC website:

Employers should not ask whether or not a job applicant is a United States citizen before making an offer of employment. The [IRCA] makes it illegal for employers to discriminate with respect to hiring, firing, or recruitment . . . based on an individual's citizenship or immigration status. . . . IRCA requires employers to verify the identity and employment eligibility of all employees hired after [1986], by completing the [I-9] Form, and reviewing documents showing the employee's identity and employment authorization. The law prohibits employers from rejecting valid documents or insisting on additional documents beyond what is legally required for employment eligibility verification . . . based on an employee's citizenship status or national origin. For example, e.g., an employer cannot require only individuals the employer perceives as "foreign" to verify their employment eligibility or produce specific documents, such as Permanent Resident ("green") cards or Employment Authorization Documents. It is the employee's choice which of the permitted documents to show for employment eligibility verification. As long as the document appears reasonably genuine on its face, and relates to the employee, it should be accepted. . . . Because of potential claims of illegal discrimination, employment eligibility verification should be conducted after an offer to hire has been made. [emphasis supplied]

One Maricopa applicant produced a California driver’s license, Social Security card, and a Department of Homeland Security form attesting to his permanent legal status, but he was still asked to fill out more immigration paperwork and present a green card. When he failed to present a green card, his job offer was withdrawn.

If you don't check enough, you may get raided for hiring illegals. Federal immigration law says hiring "an unauthorized alien" can result in fines of up to $3,000 per worker. If you check too much, you may be sued for discrimination. The Maricopa suit seeks damages of $1,100 per applicant. It all depends on whose campaigns you've been contributing to, I suppose. If you're a conservative running for office, you may be lucky enough to be sued under both standards.

h/t HotAir

Is This Really How It Happened?

Is This Really How It Happened?

I'm pretty sure I remember this differently, but the New York Times wouldn't lie to me, would it? Here's their take: the engine of the Tea Partiers' discontent was not the 2009 Stimulus Bill or GM bailout or ObamaCare. It was the 2008 TARP bill! But TARP was structured so that there was a good chance taxpayers would be paid back in full, and what do you know, that may actually be happening, in spite of all subsequent efforts to divert TARP paybacks to other social experiments. So it turns out the Tea Partiers never had anything to complain about, and they should STFU.

Alternate reality per my memory: conservatives were very queasy about TARP, but were just barely willing to tolerate it, because we were very afraid that an intense liquidity crunch would throw the financial system of the U.S. --- if not the world -- into chaos. We'd often wondered whether President Bush had genuinely conservative economic principles, but we at least believed he wouldn't lie to us, and that he was advocating the best course according to his judgment and the judgment of his advisors. The bill was in fact structured so that taxpayers should be paid back, and there was a decent chance of that happening. So we held our nose and for the most part reluctantly supported our president.

Then the new gang took over, and the worst part about TARP appeared to be not so much that it smelled like expensive crony capitalism, but that it opened the floodgates for massive new federal spending that (1) wasn't aimed at easing a critical liquidity crunch that could destroy the financial system, (2) had no prayer of being paid back, (3) was much larger and seemed calculated to lead to endless iterations, and (4) made the crony-favoritism aspect of TARP look like faintly amateurish gestures in contrast. And, what do you know, the Tea Party erupted in outrage and growing influence.

But now that it turns out TARP may not have been so awful, which we always thought was reasonably possible though not guaranteed. So the Tea Partiers should be happy as clams and embrace Spendulus and every other Keynesian nonsense anyone can dream up. Well, OK then!

Another possible interpretation: Government interventions in the economy probably can be held to a benign level, and may be implemented in ways not totally doomed to failure, if they are not administered by spend-happy lunatics in simultaneous control of the White House and both houses of Congress, including a filibuster-proof majority. It follows that we should go out on November 2 and elect fiscal conservatives dedicated to limited government. They won't always be able to stop the madness, and they may occasionally succumb to madness themselves, but they'll do less harm less often. So: go Tea Party.

Fertility

On Fertility:

It's really all a question of fertility.

Sights from San Francisco

On a business trip to San Fran and of course I thought of all of you.

Masonic Building

(same building)

Public school building (below)

Statue I stopped in road to take picture of (same as Masonic building)

And, my sight seeing tour this time, the "Mission Dolores":

Established in October of 1776, it served as a place for native people to be converted to Christianity. Buried in the cemetery are about 6,000 people, though it's tiny. Europeans were given stone tablets, native people got wood, and many of those (actually, all but the one recently restored) are gone. It was recommended that I go to this place and I'm so glad I did. I usually try to see some sights when I travel, and religious venues are high on my list.

I liked how this painting is depicting Jesus (in the Trinity) as three persons.

Chandeliers in the gift shop.

Though this looks like St. Francis, patron of both this Mission and the City, it's actually Father Junipero Serra, who founded the Mission.

The headstone above shows two children who died very close to one another. Lots of young people were lost in that era to illness.

The headstone below is for a guy whose modest marker was overshadowed by a prominent one (a rather big production,) and I wanted to give him some "press."

The below hut (called a tula) would have been a traditional living structure of the Ohlone (pronounced Ah-loney) Indians, the indiginous people of this area. Some descendents have restored parts of the cemetery to include proper homage to the people that lived here first, and who are buried alongside the European settlers.

Look carefully at the below picture. I was attracted by the wooden marker and its contrast to the stone tablets, and asked the groundskeeper about it. He explained some of the history. I found out that he is the great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of the people memorialized on the wooden marker! And there he was watering the flowers in front of their grave! I asked if I could take his picture and then sent it to him on my cell phone. His family is active in the Missions today. I didn't want to show his photo since he has no idea I'm listing any of this on a blog. But I can tell you it is sweet to look at the whole picture with him tending his great (x 6!) grandparents' grave marker. I was glad I was there to take the shot. I feel as though I witnessed a bit of history just by being there.

Some other random shots after the break:

Exploiting Illegals

Exploiting Illegals

I'm really confused. Is Meg Whitman, candidate for California governor, an evil Republican because she employed an illegal alien, or because she didn't? If I understand correctly what happened, she found a housekeeper through a service and employed her for several years at $23/hour until she discovered that the housekeeper was an illegal alien who had fraudulently been using her sister's Social Security number.

This is what happens when we keep a law on the books that we're not willing to enforce. You're screwed whether you obey the law or not. Public sympathy is against the illegal aliens as an amorphous group but solidly in the court of any individual illegal alien who's not an outright drug trafficker or child molester. This is most true when the illegal alien is thwarted in the sympathetic quest to earn a living. As one irritable commenter to this Daily Beast story put it: "Meg is just honoring the time honored tradition of exploit cheap illegal labor, so coveted by the elite Right." This, in spite of the fact that Whitman only found out that her housekeeper was illegal when the housekeeper asked for help on that very subject, whereupon Whitman fired her. This wasn't someone she hired for slave wages from the local corner pool, knowing she could pay a pittance because the worker couldn't afford to come out of the shadows and complain.

Once Whitman learned the worker was illegal, she had absolutely no tolerable options as a candidate for office. She couldn't continue to employ her, but firing her was callous. She couldn't turn her over to the authorities, the way a stern but caring employer might regretfully turn her in for burglary or drug possession, because the authorities aren't in the business of doing anything about an illegal alien and haven't been for some time. So Whitman cast her housekeeper out into limbo, where she was picked up by political operatives, exposed as unemployable, and used as a prop.

It would have been nice if Whitman had helped her housekeeper when she was asked, but what form would that help take? It's not as though the housekeeper has some kind of legal option to pursue, short of returning to Mexico and applying for citizenship through the ordinary channels, a completely hopeless task. Was the housekeeper asking for help, not in the legal sense, but in the sense of hiding her charade? If Whitman had been caught doing that, she'd have been crucified.

So we're left with this kind of political posturing:

Antonio Gonzalez, president of the non-partisan Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, said he believed that the housekeeper’s story might do some damage to the Whitman campaign. “I think it will hurt Meg Whitman because Latinos are sensitive to this issue,” Gonzalez said. “It’s not about the law, it’s about humanity, respect, and human rights.”

Well, it sure can't be about law. The legal system is broken on this one.

Best Worm Ever

Best Worm Ever

I'm starting to see stories about the "Stuxnet" computer virus that is supposed to have struck industrial control programs in Iran more heavily than in other countries, and therefore may be a deliberate attack on that country's nuclear weapons development peaceful nuclear energy program. There aren't that many newspaper articles about it, nor any that have much to say other than that it's a truly impressive piece of malware. I finally found a site written by people with more hacker mojo. The Motley Moose claims that the virus exploits something called "zero day vulnerability," which refers to a flaw that the software's developer has not yet even discovered, let alone tried to patch. A single zero-day vulnerability, the Moose claims, would establish the ordinary hacker's reputation for life. Stuxnet exploits four of them. Also, the virus, which may have been hanging around stealthily since 2009, seems to be mutating in response to clean-up efforts.

Though naturally all eyes are on the U.S. or Israel as suspects, it's not clear yet who dreamed this stuff up. The virus may have been intended to drift around until it located a specific target, but it's impossible to be sure whether the target has been found. In the meantime, though, Iran has announced another delay in its nuclear program.

There is a very interesting discussion in the comments thread at Moose that clearly was written by a bunch of cybersecurity professionals. I couldn't follow most of it, but it was obvious they were both confused and impressed.

Here's a detailed report. I'm just glad I use a Mac.

Dang Kids Today Can't Hold Their Liquor

Dang Kids Today Can't Hold Their Liquor

How many times has this happened to you? You put together a nice birthday party for your three-year-old, invite a few dozen of his friends, you think everything's going to be nice. But the evening wears on, pretty soon there are 150 people there, and after midnight someone starts throwing beer bottles. Lots of them. Next thing you know, 75 people are in a drunken brawl and two guys go to the hospital. Who could have seen it coming?

Apparently Elmwood, Ohio, hasn't caught up with the whole diversity thing, because they had to send to Wyoming for a police officer who spoke Spanish and could sort out the melee.

Lord's Prayer OE

"And Forgyf Us Ure Gyltas"

H/t: a friend I knew in Iraq, who also reads TYWKIWDBI.

Nano-Scale Solar Cell Structures

I feel like more geeky stuff today, so here goes: Stanford University reports that several of its nanotechnology gurus have published a new paper about a gimmick that may revolutionize solar cell technology.

Solar cells often employ a thin layer of light-absorbing material sandwiched between reflective plates. We've known for some time that their efficiency can be increased by certain tricks for making the light bounce around in there as long as possible, because it increases the chances that each photon will be absorbed and turned into electricity rather than spat back out unused. A common method is to scratch up the top plate so that it has lots and lots of sparkly faces oriented in all directions, which randomizes the reflective patterns. For reasons that are beyond me, but that follow from the wave equations that describe the behavior of bouncing and resonating lightwaves, there is a theoretical upper limit on how much benefit can be squeezed out of this trick. The formula that describes the efficiency veers wildly up and down for reflective film thicknesses very near zero, but quickly starts to squiggle back and forth in a narrow range that approximates the efficiency limit as the film thickness increases. The Stanford guys may have found a way to exploit that interesting behavior near the "zero."

Up to now, no one paid much attention to the eccentric behavior of the efficiency formula near zero, because a solar cell's reflective film has to be thinner than a single wavelength of typical sunlight for the off-the-charts tail-end of the formula to matter. These days, however, with the explosion of nanotechnology, it's getting possible to make films even thinner than the wavelength of visible light, which is between about 400 and 700 nanometers (one billionth of a meter). This is seriously small; a single nanometer is only 10 to 30 times longer than the radius of most atoms. It is about 1/50,000 as thick as a human hair. It's so small that many of the rules of thumb that work for structures that are many times as big as a single light wavelength start to break down.

Back to that theoretical limit: for relatively thick films, it settles down to four times the square of the refractive index of the transparent layer. As this nifty graph from the Stanford gurus' paper shows, there is an initial squiggle before the function settles down around its limit, which is shown as 4n² on the "y" axis. In this early "off the charts" territory, where the transparent layer has a thickness of less than a single wavelength of visible light (shown as "one" on the x-axis in the graph), the efficiency can be anything from very bad to very good. In the "sweet spot" between 0.5 and 1.0 wavelength (shown on the graph by the red vertical stripe), the efficiency is at least equal to the "ideal" 4n² and can go up as high as several times that much before dropping back to normal, where it then stays no matter how thick the reflective layer gets. The new idea is to cherry-pick the best efficiencies by building nano-thin solar cell layers with a thickness of between a half and a full light wavelength, which is to say a few hundred nanometers, or still only 1/100 of the thickness of a human hair. This approach not only promises to increase the efficiency of absorbing light but also to decrease the volume (and therefore cost) of materials needed for such thin layers. So this work may lead to much cheaper and more efficient solar panels.

In related news, the Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Houston will hold an event on Sunday, October 10, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "buckyball," the foundation of carbon nanotechnology. This event honors the winners of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Robert Curl, Sir Harold Kroto, and the late Richard Smalley, who together demonstrated in 1986 that carbon vapor could condense in the form of 60-atom symmetrical balls called "buckminsterfullerenes" or "buckyballs." The idea of nanotechnology, which is not confined to carbon, dates back at least to Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's comments on the subject in the 1959. In 1981, physicists Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binning opened the door to great advances in the nano world by inventing the scanning tunnel microscope, a new type of electron microscope with a magnifying power of 10 million. (To the upper right is an STM image of a carbon nanotube, a stretched-out version of a buckyball.) For this accomplishment Rohrer and Binning were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986. Today, nanotechnology is revolutionizing not only manufacturing but medicine. A young person casting about for a career could do far worse than this field.

Are the Rich Getting Richer, and Should I Care?

Are the Rich Getting Richer, and Should I Care?

Earlier this month, the Canadian Financial Post ran a column by Terence Corcoran on "The U.S. Income Divergence Myth." He started with graphs created by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, including one included in the Obama budget, appearing to show that the percentage of wealth controlled by the top tenth of the richest Americans hovered around 40% just before the Great Depression, plummeted afterwards and stayed relatively stable in the 30%-40% area until the 1980s, then spiked to nearly 50% recently. (I can say "plummeted" and "spiked" about a range of movements of this kind because the graph is helpfully truncated at 30% on the low side and 50% on the high side.) Corcoran pokes holes in a number of aspects of these conclusions, including the exclusion of any consideration of taxes and regional differences in cost of living. He also points out that the increase in the share of the top 10% is almost entirely driven by the top 1% and has a lot to do with the revolution in earnings by pop figures such as entertainers and sports stars.

Then he gets to the question that I think is the most interesting:

Why [does] inequality of incomes — before or after tax —— even matter in a market economy where no kings rule by force and no aristocracy plunders the people?

Formality

Formality:

So, we had an interesting discussion below about Wagner, and how an artificial thing might be 'more real' than reality. Let's talk a little more about that.

Let's say you have been sitting on rocks all your life. You are used to it, but you have noticed that some rocks serve the purpose of sitting better than others. For example, rocks that are flatter, and of a certain size, are superior for sitting purposes than rocks that are sharp or angled. At some point, you take this knowledge and sort out what the truth is about 'that which is good for sitting.' You use this knowledge to build something you decide to call a chair.

The chair is an artifact, not a thing found in nature. Yet it is superior for your purpose to any rock you will find in nature -- or any log -- or anything else you might sit upon. This is because you have extracted from reality, and purified, the truth about sitting and what kind of things are good to sit upon.

That same rather prosaic model can be applied to moral questions. Let's say I see three people do something that I admire, but in which I can see that they are acting from mixed motives. I can extract the thing I admire from their mixed motives, and hold it up pure in my mind. This is the thing I call "good," and in some way it is a more real good than any of the three things I saw.

An artist can do this too. Twain wrote: "I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion." What is it to be great? What is it to be fine? Well, what is it to be good? It's the same process of extraction and purification, so that we have the idea without adulteration. It makes perfect sense for art to be able to be greater and finer than reality.

Then, though, we come to "real." Here we have a question. Is it real? Is it "more real"? What would it mean for it to be "more real"? If it is extracted from reality, and purified of the admixture of impurities that we always ever find in reality, how is that making it "more real"? I think Twain is right, but it's important to understand just why and how he is right.