To Need Advice: The farther out you are in a distribution, the greater the relative distance between you and the person just a little farther out. The people buying those $10 million houses are even more frustrated than you that they cannot afford a $100 million house.
Which is why we really ought to raise revenues from high income people. Whatever utility they receive from their marginal dollar is mainly positional.
In my reading, the authors do not claim that Sponsian is "a lost Roman emperor", but rather an obscure and not very important regional strongman. From the paper: "Sponsian never controlled an official mint and was unrecorded by all later historians, so he certainly did not rule in Rome."
The comments about positional and aspirational wealth are as always on target. Still, and modulo the Stanford 1% techbro entitlement, the OP's question is cogent: who exactly _is_ buying thousands of - out here Medium City, Flyover State - $750,00 - $5,000,000 houses? Who is buying and driving the hundreds of single-occupant $85,000 pickup trucks without a spot of mud or a dent on them I see every day commuting to my old tech manufacturing job? There is an enormous amount of money and property sloshing around in the upper 5%-7% of the US economy; where is it coming from?
I always smile at your "Lora" font. Reminds me that Cambridge U.P. created new fonts for Whiteside's "The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton" so that both math and script would be lossless. The series is one of the great publishing achievements, and your blog reminds of it most every day.
That Pentocostal banner reminds me of the whale ears example in Gombrich's "Art and Illusion". I've got to dig up my copy, but there's an old etching of a beached whale with distinctive ears as opposed to flippers, and Gombrich used it as an example of an artist filling in the details of an image with what he knew rather than what he saw. Gombrich led to lots of fascinating discussions back in the 1970s. It's interesting to recognize his new relevance.
To Need Advice: The farther out you are in a distribution, the greater the relative distance between you and the person just a little farther out. The people buying those $10 million houses are even more frustrated than you that they cannot afford a $100 million house.
Which is why we really ought to raise revenues from high income people. Whatever utility they receive from their marginal dollar is mainly positional.
Here is the Sponsian coin paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0274285.
In my reading, the authors do not claim that Sponsian is "a lost Roman emperor", but rather an obscure and not very important regional strongman. From the paper: "Sponsian never controlled an official mint and was unrecorded by all later historians, so he certainly did not rule in Rome."
The comments about positional and aspirational wealth are as always on target. Still, and modulo the Stanford 1% techbro entitlement, the OP's question is cogent: who exactly _is_ buying thousands of - out here Medium City, Flyover State - $750,00 - $5,000,000 houses? Who is buying and driving the hundreds of single-occupant $85,000 pickup trucks without a spot of mud or a dent on them I see every day commuting to my old tech manufacturing job? There is an enormous amount of money and property sloshing around in the upper 5%-7% of the US economy; where is it coming from?
Happy Thanksgiving, Brad!
I always smile at your "Lora" font. Reminds me that Cambridge U.P. created new fonts for Whiteside's "The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton" so that both math and script would be lossless. The series is one of the great publishing achievements, and your blog reminds of it most every day.
That Pentocostal banner reminds me of the whale ears example in Gombrich's "Art and Illusion". I've got to dig up my copy, but there's an old etching of a beached whale with distinctive ears as opposed to flippers, and Gombrich used it as an example of an artist filling in the details of an image with what he knew rather than what he saw. Gombrich led to lots of fascinating discussions back in the 1970s. It's interesting to recognize his new relevance.
Along with Sponsian we should perhaps have this one: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/24/emperor-charles-vs-secret-code-cracked-after-five-centuries
Texts and historians are time travelers, in opposite directions. As a result the timeline is constantly shifting.