I'm still working on the 4th Flatland essay and will be for some time to come. So I thought I'd post something during the interim.

Two articles caught my eye recently. Both had a similar theme — inevitable inequality. I was startled to read this opening text in 700 years of Western inequality, in one chart (Vox, January 23, 2017).

We tend to think of rising income inequality as a 21st-century problem. A more equal distribution of wealth is normal, and the growing clout of the 1 percent is an anomaly. The problem is that in the long arc of history, none of that is really true. For centuries, rising inequality has been the norm in the West — and it’s the relative equality of the post–World War era that is the anomaly.

Right! Along these lines, you might review the last section of my essay Moral Failure In Liberalized Market States (DOTE, June 25, 2014). It starts off like this—