Times: US middle class no longer word’s richest

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 3 Comments
The American middle class

In Canada, this man would have a nice beer.

The New York Times is running stories about inequality, and they are running hard. Today brings news that the American middle class is no longer the richest in the world. Our hardworking suburban football fans were tied with Canada’s hockey-gazing layabouts in 2010, and data suggest we’ve been surpassed since. Our poor—families at the 20th percentile of US income—make substantially less than families in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands. But those are all socialist countries. Our working poor may not have as much money, but they have freedom. In the decade since “freedom” became the most important word in American rhetoric, per capita income has shrunk at the 40th, 30th, 20th, 10th and 5th percentiles.

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Piketty: Inequality returning to 19th-century model

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Economist Thomas Piketty wears a dress shirt in the French style.

Economist Thomas Piketty wears a dress shirt in the French style.

If you like totalizing theories of economics the way I do—which is to say, if you like reading descriptions of those theories—you have probably heard about Thomas Piketty and Capital In the 21st Century. The English translation of the 700-page book has been well-received since its publication last month, and Piketty has been interviewed in just about every outlet imaginable, including the New York Times. That one is worth reading, if for no other reason than for his observation that the income distribution that characterized the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when “the top 10 percent of the distribution was full of rental income, dividend income, interest income,” is coming back.

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Down in Kentucky, where we’re from

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 1 Comment

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Last week, Kristian Sparks, age 5, shot and killed his two year-old sister Caroline with a rifle that had been given to him by his parents. The gun, a .22 marketed for children as My First Rifle, was kept loaded and standing in a corner of the Sparks home. Burkesville, Kentucky is the town where all this responsible behavior took place, and according to the Times, the people who live there don’t want to be seen as a symbol of America’s gun culture. A family friend says that “pointing fingers doesn’t really accomplish anything.” Three mourners at Caroline’s funeral attacked reporters across the street. And there’s this quote from county coroner Gary White:

Down in Kentucky where we’re from, you know, guns are passed down from generation to generation. You start at a young age with guns for hunting and everything.

That’s kind of a weird thing to say while standing in Kentucky.

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Scientists measure awesome power of internet comments

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 20 Comments
Nerds

Nerds

I’m going to present two claims, and you can decide for yourself which is more compelling:

  1. Differentiation of species occurred over millions of years through natural selection of hereditary traits.
  2. Differentiation of species occurred over millions of years through natural selection of hereditary traits, you prick.

The second one just sounds truer, doesn’t it? That is the odd finding of this study, helpfully summarized by one of the authors in last weekend’s New York Times. First of all, I think we’re all glad that there is a Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and it is printed. Second, the study focused specifically on online comments sections, finding that comments which contained epithets, profanity and ad hominem attacks affected readers’ viewpoints more powerfully than equivalent comments without those attacks. Civilization is doomed.

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Regarding wishes

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 7 Comments

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Since the US government and most history ground to a halt over the weekend, I’m going to take a moment to address one of the comments on Friday’s links. I’ve gone back to reading the comments, because Aksimet cannot be trusted to distinguish rap videos from Cialis advertisements on its own. Anyway, Matt offered the following question about the Dungeons & Dragons spell Wish:

Isn’t wish open to the DM’s interpretation? Like if you wish for a meteor to crush your enemy, the DM can also have the meteor crush you? Or were my friends just major douches?

“Or,” huh? The theme of today’s post is don’t make me choose.

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