Is productivity even the right word, let alone the correct in the way that economists measure productivity to describe technological change? I am sure that you are old enough to remember when using a computer as a tool meant programming on paper punch cards and submitting the stack into a mainframe computer. Only a few years later the personal computer was invented. Perhaps the productivity increase from live performances to recorded and now streamed content could be measured, although the results are asymptotic, but how do we characterize Facebook and Snapchat, or a GPS app on a smartphone? How do we measure the productivity improvement in males who used to die of heart failure in their early 70s three generations ago to those lucky enough to have invasive heart bypass surgery 40 years ago, to someone who goes in for a non-invasive stent to cure a problem that may never exist for me on my statin regimen? For all of the stir caused by Picketty's book in inequality, his point of comparison is featured in his use of literary comparisons of extreme inequality as depicted by Jane Austen and Honore de Balzac. But even Picketty admits that living standards have increased by about ten-fold, which is perhaps a gross underestimate. The fact is that the the rich today are richer than they were in the Belle Epoque, but there are many more of them today because the world economy is so much more diverse and more people are put to work at compensation levels that dwarf even the upper middle class of the 18th and 19th century. Instead of the constant screeds against the rich, perhaps we should contemplate the fact that they could have only achieved that level by way of "consumer sovereignty."