Lifestyles of the Superrich and Not So Famous

Friday, September 8th, 2006

Donald Boudreaux explains that most Americans are living Lifestyles of the Superrich and Not So Famous; they just don’t realize it:

My listeners think me mad. “I’m middle-class, not rich” surely is what most of think to themselves. And they’re right about being middle-class — but they don’t realize that to be middle-class in America today means to be superrich by historical standards.

Here’s a small sample of the many ways in which ordinary Americans today are Bill-Gates-like rich compared to almost all humans who’ve ever lived:

None of us has ever starved to death

We have indoor plumbing and artificial light

We bathe regularly

We have solid roofs over our heads, rather than bug-and-vermin-infested thatched roofs

We routinely converse in real time to people one mile or one thousand miles away

We don’t get smallpox

Our life expectancy is decades longer

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Bob Sykes: Greer seriously underestimates Chinese MS and PhD production. They outproduce the US by a factor of 8, and 8 of the top 10 technological universities in the world, the peers of MIT and Cal Tech, are in China. Chinese engineers and scientists lead the world in the production of new patents and papers in high-quality journals. We use 5G networks and AI programs to play games and make pornography. The Chinese use them to optimize their factories and transportation systems. They are a serious...
Jim: The only Chinese scientific product worth caring about is DeepSeek—and it is very, very much worth caring about.
Phileas Frogg: I’m curious as to the sustainability of this, in light of the historical defaults in Chinese culture and character. Either way, the West is going to be having a rough go of it for the next few decades.
Jim: Was Hitler’s Germany actually reflective of Ulyanov‘s methodology “imitated”?
Jim: Was Stalin’s reorganization a necessary precondition to Russia’s success in the Second “World” War?
Bob Sykes: The word “totalitarian” was coined by Mussolini to describe his new Fascist (also his coinage) government in Italy. He started out as a senior member of Italy’s Socialist (Marxist) Party, but was expelled when his supported Italy’s entry into WW I so that it might expand its territory. He was expelled because he promoted nationalism over the doctrinaire internationalism of the working class. Fascism, Naziism, and Communism were all competing mass movements of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s. They all...
Phileas Frogg: “Despite the magnitude of the problem, there appears to have been no real mechanism for catching anyone up once they’d fallen behind. As a result, these cities had 7-26% of students lingering 2 or more years behind age level in their work (and as many as 13% of students 3 years behind!)” Because they hadn’t fallen behind, they were/are – with rare exception not worth mentioning or addressing at an institutional level – exactly where their abilities had sorted...
Jim: For an interesting experiment, run that comment through this prompt: I will provide a brief passage of prose. Examine it along the following dimensions, in sequence: 1. Information density, worldview density, and rhetorical density (classify each as high or low, with concise justification). 2. Structural comparison: identify the prose tradition its form belongs to (e.g., numbered theses, manifesto, essay, op-ed) and trace that form’s lineage. 3. Content mapping: determine which intellectual...
Jim: The occupational schooling regime is characterized by the following principal attributes: 1. Strict student segregation by age 2. No meaningful student segregation by ability 3. Strictly verboten student segregation by race (however defined; even the several white races are forbidden the right to be free of each other) 4. Regimented curricula designed with no consideration for differing student ability 5. The notion that teachers are somehow responsible for their students’ differing ability 6. The...
Phileas Frogg: “Although ABT-263 worked in mice, it is too toxic for widespread use in humans.” Now I’m curious which specific enzyme mice have, or have in greater abundance, that we don’t that allows them to metabolize ABT-263.
Jim: >a German Jew defected to a foreign military to fight against his putative homeland >that Jew thereafter held communist sympathies >he even hated George S. Patton the Great >mfw
Jim: Aisurgen: “Why the comments section on this, the best intellectual stimulating blog on the Internet is full of insane anti-American conspiracists? The riddle.” The United State is many times more anti-American and conspiratorial than any of us—and I mean this literally—could ever imagine.
Isegoria: It’s one flavor of Open-plus-Disagreeable.
Aisurgen: Why the comments section on this, the best intellectual stimulating blog on the Internet is full of insane anti-American conspiracists? The riddle.
Jim: This problem compounds because of the F-35’s heavy ground footprint. The jet depends on maintenance facilities, diagnostic systems, spare parts inventories, fuel and munitions stores, and the skilled maintainers who keep the fleet flyable. Supply-chain attaqs at the commercial-military boundary lurk in our future. The dependency graph is not unique to software.
Isegoria: “The Japanese should have looked East” was a reference to Ghost Fleet, TRX: The U.S.-Japanese combined air-defense network was designed for a threat from China, to the west. They get attacked from the other direction.
Jim: T. Beholder, your foundational premise that “modern Homo [s]apiens [s]apiens is little different from Cro[-M]agnon man” is farcical on its face. There are enormous differences in physiology, psychology, sociality, and capability between H. sapiens sapiens subspecies today. The descendants of Aztecs reliably fail to manipulate electricity when proven blueprints for working systems along with every foundational component are made available to them, let alone the descendants of Bantu, who...
TRX: “The Japanese should have looked east.” They did. Korea had been fully incorporated into Japan as a colony back in 1910. They bit off a chunk of China in 1931, and went back for the rest of it in 1937. At the time they attacked Pearl Harbor, they were still expecting to wrap that up Real Soon Now. Also note they had invaded French Indochina, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singabore, and other chunks of Dutch, French, and British territory. There was no effective resistance to any of that. By the time they...
Isegoria: Thanks, Bill! I’ve fixed it.
Bill: Your “mentioned” link above is broken.

Isegoria

Lifestyles of the Superrich and Not So Famous

Leave a Reply

Search

Recent Comments

Categories