In-flight refuelling
A hoverfly extracting nectar from an obliging flower. I was reminded of aircraft in-flight refuelling methods.
Quote of the Day
”Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.”
- Pierre Bourdieu
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bizet | Minuet from L’Arlésienne | María Cecilia Muñoz, flute; Alina Traine, Harp
Thanks to Joe Dunne for alerting me to it.
Long Read of the Day
Meet the New Bosses, Worse Than the Old Bosses
Really interesting Substack post by Paul Krugman. In the 2000s, when it started to become clear that the wealth digital technology bestowed Silicon Valley moguls rivalled that of the Rockefellers, Morgans and Carnegies of the early 1900s I began to think of the Silicon Valley crowd as the next generation of ‘robber barons’. Turns out, that was a gross under-estimate. The nice thing about Paul Krugman’s post is the way he demonstrates how different the current era is. He’s not revealing anything we didn’t know already, but he makes it much clearer. And he explores the dramatic societal consequences of such wealth.
Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.
About wealth concentration: The standard source for information on extreme wealth is the Forbes 400 list. Forbes only began compiling that list in its current form in 1982, but it published its first listing of America’s top fortunes in 1918. The chart above compares the wealth of the richest 5 Americans in 1918 with that of the richest 15 in 2025 — 15, not 5, because the total U.S. population more than tripled over that period. I scale their wealth both as a percentage of total wealth and as a share of GDP.
Either way, the concentration of wealth at the very top is much higher now than it ever was during the Gilded Age. And these are numbers from last year, before the SpaceX IPO. The robber barons were pikers compared with today’s oligarchs.
This level of wealth brings with it immense political influence…
It does. And that why now is different from Gilded Age 1.0.
Do read it.
My commonplace booklet
I love this photograph by the movie director Wim Wenders which I think was taken when he was on a road trip in the US preparing for his film Paris,Texas. It reminds me of Edward Hopper’s paintings — that strange sense of emptiness.
Feedback
Apropos my little piece about David Hockney and his ‘joiner’ artworks, Euan Williamson sent me this striking image he made of the Irish playright George Bernard Shaw. It’s created from an Autochrome portrait by Alvin Langdon Coburn, taken in colour in 1907 via the Lumieré brothers’ newly-patented colour glass-plate process.
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