Always Another Windmill

It’s a classic story of power and privilege: starting from nothing but piles of bricks, eight builders build a sprawling metropolis over several months. They develop systems of exchange and trade for valued resources, and, when the growing city starts to generate interest, they close ranks and use their consolidated power and control of resources to prevent the entry of additional builders, even while competing for resources among themselves.

But then tragedy strikes, leveling the city. Eventually, a new, more egalitarian community arises out of the ruins of Legotown.

Read the full account of lego construction in a grade-school level after-school program, and how the classroom teachers used it as an opportunity to examine issues of class, privilege, power, and hierarchy with 25 kids between 5 and 9 here: Why We Banned Legos.

(Via Geekdad.)

George Orwell’s critique of Rudyard Kipling came up in some other discussions in the blogosphere lately. This bit caught my eye:

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue.

He wrote that in 1942. It is still, I think, a pretty good summary of a core problem in the world today, although the means of accomplishing it have become much more complicated. There are now the beginnings of recognizing the standard of life problem, in the fair trade movement, but this has still rather a long way to go.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that hypocrisy is exactly the right word for playing to self-advantage under the rules of the existing world system, while using the advantage to advocate for changing those rules in ways that might be more fair. There are definite conflicts of interest in this arrangement, but I’m not certain that it’s a complete sham.

But then, I’m one of the “enlightened” ones.

The right word for the situation might be sin. But that’s a whole other essay, one that isn’t going to get written tonight.

(Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal.)

Not how, but why–what is the motivation for the fantastically wealthy to continue to accumulate wealth and become even more incredibly wealthy?

Johns Hopkins economist Christopher Carroll has done some interesting research on this question. By his findings, it’s not to be able to spend it (the super-rich accumulate wealth at a rate that boggles the imagination on what you could spend it on), or to pass it on to their children (elderly super-rich people accumulate wealth at the same rates regardless of whether they have children), or to give it away as philanthropy. His ultimate conclusion? For the super wealthy, accumulation of wealth is its own reward.

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