We've grown accustomed to the insane

Gifthub points to a tale of infelicitous economics - French, of course - told by the Times:

“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,” Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder.

One might wonder (the Times, vastly culpable on this score, does not), how did this come about?


One thing to understand is that in the US, wealth long ago learned to be self-concealing. Instead of flaunting in the mode of nouveaux riches, the old money followed the Cosimo de Medici/Superman model: Appear normal and be the power.


This can easily be parsed via real estate patterns. The wealthy find islands, like Longboat Key, Casey Key, or Boca Grande in Florida, which are a bit off the beaten path. They are zoned to be almost entirely private - the one "public" beach on Longboat is a strip of lovely sand with three parking spaces. They offer no Wal-Marts, no reason, really, for the hoi to show up. If you kayak around in Florida, the money - hidden behind walls or hedge from the street -- stares at you on the water from palatial terraces, balconies, lawns, tennis courts, and often, a princely yacht.

In near "completely crazy" conditions, philanthropy is tasked with a not entirely consonant set of objectives: it has to pre-emptively fend off the usual ressentiment of the less fortunate; in a sense, it's a form of protection policy, buying the goodwill of the many via the machinations of experts; it might apply a bit of salve to the soul of the Giver, who is disproportionately a Taker. In the case of a Madoff, it's a fungible triple bottom line accounting scheme with heavenly overtones, inaudible to human ears. In the case of the Koch Bros., it's an entree to social cachet, to establishing a strategic position amid a network of potentially like-minded Takers. Philanthropy so guided can do small good, but is powerless to alter the power structure that makes itself possible. Its use value, in fact, lies in reinforcing that system.

How much longer will USians indulge the polite fiction that the wealthy -- who seize the best assets of nature, of art, of time -- make it all good by sending accountants, lawyers and pony boys to tend the altars of philanthropy. A nettled Business Week will piss about salient moments of poor monarchic judgment. Face the music, USians, and it's not Lawrence Welk, or The Band, or Ol' Blue Eyes: Like the Franco-appointed King of Spain, the rich are always gleefully trumping Big Game somewhere -- rarely they're caught in the act.

Trump boys

Gay science

The Happy Tutor wishes to bring open dialog into the philanthropic community, but he has a tough crowd in his classroom:

Those who control that table, the financial planners, lawyers, and accountants . . . who control the planning table describe the conversation of purpose as "touchy feely," "soft," and essentially effeminate, he says.

Perhaps the Liberal Arts are in need of a macho injection.

Pesellino might be just the ticket:



Back-up squad includes Samson:

Trainer and Teacher

The Happy Tutor revient a ses moutons.

Mill for your thoughts

The above, via Winer, no less, seems somehow in keeping with this notice, or at least with the locus of the Tutor where I found it.

One has to admire the simplicity: 1 idea, 2 pages, $1 million.

Amid the stately frontispiece of poor

An email exchange, some context setting here. I added a few links and emended a few phrases mostly for clarity.

How do we reconcile elite traditions with democracy? - Phil asked, sending along this link and a quick reference to A.B. Giamatti and his sense of what is noble.

To Phil:

Bart Giamatti would have a lot to teach us about the possible relations of elite traditions and democracy. He might start by parsing the terms -- are all traditions elite? There are cultures and folkways that maintain a kind of eternal now of wisdom and practice among the poorest on the earth. Are all elites traditional? Are all elites rooted in the same source of eliteness? etc.

I don't know, the two things, "democracy" and "elite tradition," seem like two optimizations, each of which requires some sacrifice of the other in order to fulfill its own realized whatness. It's why, even as the poor and random waifs of democracy might have their noses to the windowpanes of private entitlement, the poor saps attending "ivory snow" decorumed events occurring in cultural and human vacuums more than likely pine for the "jazz clubs" or other rawness, the demotic ferment of open inspiration.

I spent a little time on that IPI site you linked to; its buttoned up reek of pillow mint struck me as essentially a different flavor of this, this, and this sort of thing -- the same worldwide migration of sharks circling around the hint of blood, just a different rhetorical costume.

I keep thinking there is vast opportunity for hilarity in these programmed elite masques. A Fred Wiseman docu-satire, a staging of yes-men intervention, a peeling away of the napkin from the rawer appetite beneath.

I guess I'm wondering if an aim of reconciling these things makes sense. I mean, the goal is - really it is - noble. But a synthesis that somehow avoids destroying what is so valuable in each is difficult to imagine.

The country house is a genre, a vast system of ideas, values, about man and his world, society, justice, art, law, order. The book of the people begins in Genesis with a bunch of miserable goat herders getting chosen. One of them, running from his brother's wrath, sleeps on a stone, dreams a dream, and realizes he's in the house of God. This is an entirely different system, only the image of the house is in common between them. If one is, like Peter Karoff, informed by both worlds, a certain restlessness is understandable, even necessary, if one happens to be alive at all.

I certainly can't envision a synthesis. But it seems entirely worthwhile to ask with you, what can each of these worlds learn from the other? From what you've written, Tracy Gary sounds like one who can speak to that. Confronted with democratic openness, certain Institutes might provoke a shattering laughter. Still, the man in the street approaches the works of aristocratic aspiration with a certain degree of respect or risks idiocy.

Noble Cubeta, you are writing - and we are learning from you about all this - from your perch where these worlds sit in unstable adjacency. Aristocrats walk among the million in disguise in order to feel alive, free. But when they mix among their own, walking around with their ivory snow labels, protected by buffers of time and distance and access and police, they are free to be "themselves."

low Things clownishly ascend. -

How to make any headway in your question, this quest. We might not yet know whether any reconciliation is in the cards. Consider the motives and appetites of the players. Currently among the quite extraordinarily wealthy (at least in the US) there is the appetite for private experience and pedigreed paideia. Affluent communities are being built with faculties for ongoing education. Ivy League schools offer tours to fabulous locales for those who can afford them.

I guess I'm saying, there is need, in both realms. Different needs, where one might be in a position to help the other. The possibility of exchange has to start, I'll wager, in the willingness of those in each to be open to the idea that they and their worlds do not know everything, or have everything. Can they learn from those they constitutively exclude?

The Ben Jonson vision of measure invokes music, harmony, over spectacle, in part because it derives from a calm unblinking awareness of mortality. The Big Legacy can't cheat death. Perhaps this is where the marshaled forces of USian wealth and poverty can find common ground, this absence of ground who respects no rank, no distinction, no privilege.

I know none of this helps. What can we do -- that's not a rhetorical question. You are asking important non rhetorical questions. What can I do that might be of use?