Economics & Empire

A homogeneous global consumer culture flattens its victims. And, perhaps in the same vein, our meanderings around the dying furniture capital of Yecla turned up nothing: virtually everything on display fitted what has become the decorative style of contemporary Spain: the sort of stuff one might find in a Copenhagen dentist’s office.

We need not rely with some desperation on the Hope that is a gift, if we can gin up optimism of our own sort.

This will not last. Greed consumes everything, until it finally consumes itself.

Here is the great secret of my generation: What our parents gave us as a gift we have received as an entitlement. No one is not grateful for an entitlement. Indeed, everyone is resentful that it is not larger. Worse, we are resentful of everybody else's entitlements because they compete with our own. Politics because a matter of getting as large a share of the pie as you can, while giving as little as you can get away with.

Events of the past several years up close could be compared to individuated and discrete dots, each circumscribed by itself alone, each self-contained and...