Futures Are Soaring -- October 19, 2017

Futures mean squat, but (a dynamic link):

The usual disclaimer.

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The Great Leveller: 

Violence and the History of Inequality From The Stone Age to the 21st Century

Walter Scheidel

c. 2017

Review in the October 19, 2017, issue of The London Review of Books.

It is by now common knowledge that income inequality has grown by leaps and bounds as a result of the neoliberal policies of the past half-century.

The United States is a case in point – eight hyper-rich Americans today own as much as the entire bottom half of the nation’s households – but it is not an anomaly.

Such massive inequalities are a global phenomenon. In 2015, Walter Scheidel writes in The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century, ‘the richest 62 persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people.’

The disparity is stupefying; it would be hardly less stupefying if Scheidel were off by a factor of, say, two or three, and 124 or 186 individuals had as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population.

I honestly do not know whether to renew my subscription to London Review of Books and/or The New York Review of Books. But when I read articles like this one, I think, "yes, I have to review."

Memo to self: look up Gini on wiki.

Later: in response to this note, a reader sent me a long comment -- an excerpt:

Picketty's work is what I believe ignited this "wealth inequality" mantra.

I think it's bunk.

When John D Rockefeller died in the late 1930's, he was a billionaire, with a "b".  That was at a time when you could buy a men's wool Hart, Schaffner and Marx 3 piece suit for $15; a brand new car was under $1000; and an extravagant New Year's dinner, complete with fresh oysters and champagne was $1 at the most elegant hotel in New Mexico.

There were plenty of Vanderbilts, Astors, Jay Gould, Carnegie, Mellon, etc. contemporaneously. Link to richest Americans throughout history.

.... the Kleppner book was the germ of my idea.

It used a unique way for adjusting for inflation.  Each person's wealth was the numerator and the GDP (or GNP, I've forgotten) of the USA was the denominator.  If I remember it would only have taken another 65 JDR's to total our whole national economy - no one else has come close.

Back to the bunk - our generation has unprecedented access to electricity, housing, plumbing, communication, etc. as a matter of course.  Just one generation ago in rural ND, there was no electricity, plumbing was not a given and I remember getting a "party-line" telephone.  We were 55 miles from a doctor, and that was all gravel road.  So, I call "shenanigans" when anyone waves the increasing income inequality flag. 

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The Glass Universe:
The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars

Dava Sobel

c. 2017

Also by Dava Sobel: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved The Greatest Scientific Problem Of His Time, Dava Sobel, c. 1995, a copy of which I have in storage, box 6003, "the Latin,
Austen, Bronte box."

And again, reviewed in The London Review of Books, the October 5, 2017, edition.  

I've read this "computer" story many times in various publications. It looks like this may be another book to buy for the library.

It’s nice to settle in with an old-fashioned story of inheritances, dramatic shifts in social class and the occasional total eclipse of the Sun. Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars begins in the late 19th century, following the story of the women (and a few men, too) who worked at the Harvard College Observatory computing the location and brightness of the stars. Many of these women progressed from being skilled ‘human computers’ – basically people doing calculations – to making major scientific contributions: documenting the birth of new stars, working out what the stars are actually made of (surprise: almost all hydrogen and helium) and devising ways to measure distances across space. This all began happening at a time when American women still could not vote, and when many questioned whether women merited a higher education at all.

As the story moves forward into the first half of the 20th century, The Glass Universe still mostly reads like a 19th-century novel, following unexpected turns of chance and the fateful course of inheritances. There’s some science, of course – but also a tragic drowning, a fatal case of dysentery and (late in the game) a marriage plot or two. Reading the book reminded me that one reason 19th-century novels are the way they are is that the 19th century was the way it was (for a good measure of people).

These women have some control over their lives, but chance is a more powerful determinant. One observatory employee whom Sobel writes about extensively is a certain Mrs Fleming: a Scot who comes over to America pregnant in 1878. Abandoned by her husband, she finds work at the observatory as the director’s maid, and then, when it is discovered that she has a natural mathematical facility, she is hired for astronomical work. Soon enough she is supervising a large team of ‘computers’, has developed a stellar classification system and drawn attention to what are known as ‘variable stars’.