Blogs > Cliopatria > Some Noted Things

Mar 2, 2006

Some Noted Things


by Cliopatria


One of the things that constrains my own judgment on the past is a sensitivity to what historical figures can have known. There is so much that, for various reasons, I do not know about the world in which I live – and hope therefore that future historians will hold me only marginally accountable for -- that I feel some obligation to return the favor to those who went before me.

That said, Tim Burke and Brad DeLong are pointing to a couple of pretty disturbing things that may have been passing under our scope. Burke wonders why there is no outcry about the legal constraints that seem to be inexorably throttling the free dissemination of information in the public arena. Is our free access to information being lost because vigilance about it just isn't very exciting? DeLong points to changes in the distribution of financial resources in the United States in the last three decades. The big story isn't the emergence of a broadly privileged class of well educated"knowledge workers," but the spike of a tiny financial oligarchy whose resources are much further beyond those of middle-class Americans than at any earlier time in our history. The data are so astonishing that even an economic libertarian like Daniel Drezner wonders why there is no cry of alarm about it among the rest of us.

Speaking of historical blindspots, at SlateChristopher Hitchens and Jacob Weisberg have two different takes on Francis Fukuyama's latest deliverance on neo-conservatism.

Tim Burke, Tyler Cowan, and Scott Eric Kaufman pay tribute to Octavia Butler who died on Friday or Saturday.

Congratulations to Jacob T. Levy who has accepted an appointment as Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory in the Political Science Department at McGill University. A former member of The Volokh Conspiracy, Levy is one of my favorite commentators at places like Crooked Timber. Last year, when both he and Daniel Drezner were denied tenure at the University of Chicago, it seemed to suggest that Ivan Tribble was right about academic blogging. Now that both Drezner and Levy have landed on their feet – Drezner at Tufts and Levy at McGill – Tribble looks less persuasive, pathetic even.


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Ralph E. Luker - 3/2/2006

My sense is that you are correct about DeLong's claims, but that, if his claims are correct, the current dramatic disparity would be of a magnitude far greater than anything seen prior to the 1970s. I agree with you that the lasting measure of its importance is the capacity of the oligarchic class to reproduce itself. Revisions in the tax structure since 1980 would enhance that possibility, though earlier favorable tax structures apparently did not markedly enhance the ability of economic elites to perpetuate their status.

Richard Newell - 3/2/2006

I read DeLong as only making a comparison over the last few decades, not drawing conclusions about "any earlier time in our history". My reading of economic history is that such spikes occur whenever a confluence of innovations occur (or rather, innovations combined with government-granted rent-seeking). Consider the spikes of the first industrial revoultion, and the second (oil, chemicals, electricity). We now have the third (information technology and biomedical).

DeLong employs the term 'class'. As a description of shared values, etc., at a point in time, I have no problem. But I think we're a little early in the process to posit a class in the diachronic sense of a group that reproduces its position over time. That hasn't been the experience in the US with previous spikes. Were this to turn out to be an exception, that would be even more corrosive than current inequaities.