Google Glass absolutely is generating buzz, but it’s not “the sort of buzz usually reserved for Apple products”. Glass has nerds excited; Apple products get the general public excited, and often annoy nerds by being iterative improvements that press the “familiar but better” button instead of the “new and different” button.

“Familiar-but-better” is consistent with an approach to institutional change that emphasizes continuity and incrementalism (Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen’s Beyond Continuity is where I would start with this, especially their introductory chapter). The main idea is that revolution is rare, but that doesn’t mean that there is not transformation. Instead, it is a mistake to imagine that dramatic institutional transformations only happen as part of revolutions. Institutional changes are more likely to occur as incremental changes.

One reason for this is that any existing institutional structure is likely to have incumbents who benefit from it. And they often (but not always) get good at protecting their way of doing things. The second is that current arrangements define what ‘works’ and what does not ‘work’. That last one is a bit vague, but there’s a good study of the development of bicycles in Wiebe Bijker’s book Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs. It is a study of technological change, where one of his arguments is that when there is no set idea of what a bicycle is, there is quite a bit of variation in what bicycles look like. Some are sporting bikes, others are cruising bikes. The design of these bikes is variable, they are good for different things (think, old-timey giant-wheeled bicycles). When the safety bike ‘won’, alternative designs began to look like bikes that ‘didn’t work’ – they weren’t stable enough, they required wheels that were not effective, etc. The working bike then began to define what kinds of bikes came afterwards. Bijker (and SCOT studies) calls this theoretical closure.

If you are looking for revolution, then, you run the risk of being too disruptive, or having a non-working solution. I’m thinking broadly here – Lis Clemens talked in The People’s Lobby about challenges associated with women’s suffrage. Occupy Wall Street, with its alternative forms of organizing as well a message that was so different from what the Very Serious People were talking about, provoked almost across-the-board heavy handed resistance. I can feel this slipping into a kind of ‘acting within the system’ versus ‘acting outside the system’ argument, but that’s not what I am trying to get at. Instead, it is more about institutional creeping versus institutional hopscotching.

So the iPod is a better Walkman, and an iPhone is a better cell phone. Electronic futures trading is just a faster version of face-to-face trading. Revolution gets smuggled in in familiar form. You can often see incumbent players, misjudging just how revolutionary a change is, reacting late. What seemed like a small technological change which instead re-opened a theoretical closure. Suddenly the MP3 technology re-opens a conception of what works in music from ‘audio fidelity’ (which was supposed to be the promise of digital music) to ‘transferability.’ And file-sharing.

The challenge, of course, is to flesh out when a creeping change is likely to become transformational, and when it’s not.

In the end, I went with charlatan. Well, charaltin-ish. Insights in marketing and advertising is a booming and real business, and there have always been two distinct strands of the species – insights-as-analysis and insights-as-magic. The analysis group is where modern-day tech firms have found themselves: ruthlessly devoted to data (often but not always quantitative data), skeptical about the ability to see beneath the surface, so to speak. If there is magic here, it is the magic of patterns.

The insights-as-magic is more about delving into the interior of the individual (psychologists got there first, really. But anthropologists might suggest similar directions, substituting ‘culture’ for ‘individual’). There is a long history of this kind of work in advertising. For example, Rapaille seems very much like a modern-day Ernest Dichter. He coined the term ‘focus group’! Rapaille is in this same mold. His claim is that there are highly personal, deep, opaque wants/needs that are governed by images, smells, feelings that evoke them.

It is Freudian, insofar as these ‘codes’ are linked to sex, protection, survival, mother. This is what makes it kind of magical – the hooks are set quite deep into the individuals’ psyche, so if you find ways to access these hooks, you are likely going to get at least some results. But left as Freudian analysis, the insights Rapaille could offer are limited. You would need to really talk deeply to lots of people in order to find some code that overlaps more than a handful at a time.

And so he reaches instead for Carl Jung, insofar as these ‘codes’ are universally-held (otherwise, what works for me would be different than what works for you, and instead of an ad campaign you would need 30M different codes). Jung argued that there are culturally-universal archetypes (the Self, the Shadow, the Anima, etc.) that tap into these deep structures of the brain. This is the difference between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. If this is true, there are a small number of codes that work for large numbers of people!

So yes, there is psychological theory and evidence to back up Rapaille’s arguments. But I think the relationship between his campaign codes and outcomes is as murky as…well, almost all claims about the relationship between ad campaigns and outcomes. In the 60 minutes segment, for example, he talks about Boeing’s planes, and the Turbo Chef oven, and the PT Cruiser. Turbo Chef does seem to have implemented a hearth-like design (they even call the ovens ‘cavities.’ Sweet hearthy mother! But still, have you ever even seen a Turbo Chef oven in anyone’s house, ever?

And the PT Cruiser, well, success and then catastrophe. If the cultural code for the PT Cruiser was so hard-wired into the lizard brain (in 2000), why was it such a failure in 2009? Rapaille himself blames Chrysler, but honestly, what else is he going to say?

So, the underlying question, is there value in understanding both what people do (behavioral) as well as what they say (cognitive)? Of course. And insights are important to move beyond what is, and to get at the sometimes quite-nuanced ways that people, groups, networks mobilize meaning. So I do think there is something more than relentless and singular attention to measurement. But is there a singular or small number of ‘codes’ that can overpower or sneak past the cognitive decision-making brain and get people to buy stuff? Maybe! Can that be done in isolation of other things like what a product actually does, broader economic conditions, competing meanings (by competitors in yours or adjacent fields, for example)? No.

No magic bullets.

But then I went to look for websites that would actually employ the computer as an object to think with, and I was struck by the meagerness of that landscape. I just don’t know that Papert had Angry Birds in mind when writing about the revolutionary potential of computers back in 1980. I know that there are amazing resources – Make Magazine, the printable Makerbot movement(s), code academy, MOOCs. It is a good time to be a DIY’er.

But unless you are interested in dipping your child’s toe, and foot, and whole personhood in the TV show or branded character being pitched by PBS or Disney or Nick Jr., there are many fewer spaces for kids. I guess everyone has moved to the app space, making variably-sound edutainment.

I don’t know, maybe this is pessimistic. In any event, if you are interested in education, and computers, and how they might come together, do yourself a favor and read the book.

1. Comments are terrible.

People have mostly stopped commenting entirely on this blog (a handful of readers continue to do so, and I completely appreciate it). The only places I have experienced specifically good comments are on Making Light, Unfogged, and (as the author mentions) on Ta-Nehisi Cotes’ blog. Maybe commitment to forums outside facebook or twitter are just more difficult now than they used to be, and since attention is diluted across the spectrum of internet activity, we are driven more and more to be consumers of knowledge/content rather than participants. Or maybe I’m just not an active member of Reddit and that’s the problem. Or it could be that the internet truly is a medium.

2. Dark Souls.

I’m a little obsessed with this video game, and if you want to get a sense of what you are in for, watch this great PBS Ideas Channel video about Homestuck, Ulysses, and Effort Justification. This game is far, far beyond what is reasonable, and I am inexplicably drawn to it. So, effort justification, yes.

3. Let’s Move.

Oh, I’m sorry, did you not know that we have the most amazing first lady in the world? Um, yes. YES. You can keep all the Blue hype, the remixed baby cries, the tumblr, whatever. I loved the video to Let’s Move, and I’m just going to leave it at that. Yes, it’s 2011, but you know what? Make your own list, don’t be a hater.

4. Twistable and Dunkable

We have a good friend who worked at Kraft for a long time, as a brand manager on the Oreo team. The conversations were amazingly interesting, because, well, Oreo cookies, and because brand managers who are thoughtful think a lot about their brands. She described the process of working with their internal brand police while developing the Oreo Cakester (the history of Kraft, Phillip Morris, Nabisco, is all muckety but fascinating in its own right. Oreos are now actually made by Mondelēz International). Still, the upshot was that Oreos were existentially defined as being ‘twistable’ and ‘dunkable’. So you could have a 12″ Oreo cookie made of gingerbread, theoretically, but not a ‘cake’ that wasn’t twistable. The fight to create the new product was a challenge, overcome after battles by the brand team, and the highly successful Oreo Cakester was born.

This article takes this further, chronicling the entry of Oreos into the Chinese market. My favorite part:

They started to ask other provocative questions.

Why does an Oreo have to be black and white? Davis sent us an Oreo with green tea filling. Another had a bright orange center divided between mango and orange flavor.

And why should an Oreo be round? They developed Oreos shaped like straws. In China, you can buy a long rectangular Oreo wafer, the length of your index finger.

Impossible to twist apart, but Davis points out that it makes it easier to dunk in milk.

It almost became a philosophical question.

If an Oreo isn’t round and black and white and crazy sweet, is it still an Oreo? What is the essence of Oreoness?

What the Chinese team at Kraft figured out is that an Oreo is an experience. You pry it apart, scrape out the filling with your teeth and plop it into a glass of milk. Their shorthand for the concept: “Twist, Lick, Dunk.” All the wild new shapes and flavors of Oreo wouldn’t work in China, unless they could somehow share that same experience.

Charming.

5. An old-fashioned urchin party.

I generally love Sweet Juniper’s blog, which is centered around living and raising children in Detroit, but in particular I am smitten with the insanely elaborate projects they do. The urchin party is a good one, but so are the costumes (both Halloween and everyday), the outings, the holiday cards.

I also appreciate the parallels between the urban destruction of Detroit and the kind of throw-back freedom from (Park Slope, Brooklyn-centered) conventional childhood that they experience. There is a more trenchant critique of class and race and urban structure in early 21st century America; SJ is not that. But it is fascinating.

6. Bret Victor’s Inventing on Principle.

This talk, and then a little later on in the year, his Learnable Programming paper/presentation, highlight for me the gap between what I want to say and what I often end up saying. I know that gap is endemic to any creative work. But I feel strong affinity for Victor’s vision of reducing the distance between creators and their work. I would say that if there is one thing that I want to accomplish in the next decade of my life, it is to do something similar with data and analysis. We need more and better knowledge; the tools are wildly complex for accomplishing this; and so we abdicate.

I know that Victor’s vision is something of a privilege for someone who can choose which work, which project, which ideas to pursue, but that’s not necessarily an excuse for it.

7. Average Ratings

Sometimes there is just a complex-but-simple solution to an important problem. And this is one of those times. The problem is, how to ‘surface’ or ‘bubble up’ positive items via ratings? And it turns out that using ‘average’ ratings is not a particularly good solution. The correct solution is to take the lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter.

This is one of those things. Like why it’s over 50% likely that someone at a bar has the same birthday as you, or why plus/minus 1.96 standard deviations cover 95% of cases in a normal distribution.

In this case, there is even convenient code in Ruby and SQL.

8. How Big are Porn Sites?

We say things like “porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet,” and then kind of shrug and think, wow. But this is a real estimate, and the statistics are crazy. The second largest porn site on the internet, YouPorn, is 6x larger than Hulu. 800 Gigabytes per second, like 2% of the internet’s total traffic. According to this article, “Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit.”

I don’t know why, but this puts me in mind of Nielsen ratings of top US TV shows. I mean, I know that it’s always NCIS, NCIC: Los Angeles, football, and Pawn Stars, but it’s still surprising (yes, JL, I know you know this already).

9. Girl Legos

In 2012, Lego started making Lego Friends, a product line aimed at girls. Predictably, feminist-leaning groups and bloggers pointed out how terribly this confirms and extends existing divisions between girls and boys. Just as predictably, people who dislike feminism talked about how feminists have their panties in a twist.

I think Lego is being greedy and lazy, and it is easier for them to add a girly line of toys than to ‘rethink’ their existing line of toys. Greedy because these are only imperfectly compatible sets of toys (the girls and ‘regular’ lines); lazy because it is easier and less financially risky to slot into existing cultural grooves regarding gender than it is to change them.

And you don’t have to support feminism (though you should) to recognize that having a ‘regular’ set of toys and a ‘girls’ set of toys is problematic. Yes, boys and girls are different. Yes, it’s great for boys and girls to play with a wide variety of toys. No, androgyny is not the only alternative. But still, this (successful, I think) line of toys is a problem, and Lego is perpetuating it and profiting by it.

10. Gender and AI

My general observation that U.S. culture hates women was confirmed quite a bit in 2012, with discussions about the routine treatment of women in tech, women at Comic-cons, women who criticize George RR Martin’s books (warning: there are some spoilers in there, as well as reasons you may not want to ever read the Ice & Fire series).

So read about that stuff, and fight it please. But also look at the article about gender and AI. Because it’s a brilliant discussion about gender, Portal 1&2 (arguably the most creative video games in the universe). Basically HAL made Siri into a girl. And German men won’t take any directions from a woman (how in the world Angela Merkel works is a mystery I don’t even want to delve into).

11. Manhattans (the drink)

There’s nothing here that I haven’t said here. But Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s drink recipes are always amazing. I’ve made his ginger beer, and his bloody mary. Both were terrific.

12. Star Wars for kids

Honestly, there should be a nerd parent’s guide to everything. But if you haven’t heard of Machete Order, you should read that whole thread. It’s amazing. And since Disney has purchased the rights to make more Star Wars movies in perpetuity, you should get your classic house in order (although we recently watched the obviously destined to be a classic Pitch Perfect, where she mentions why the greatest reveal of all time shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone).

I’ve been wondering about how to manage screen time lately, and two things seem apparent: 1) there is a good way to do it; and 2) I am not going to figure out what that is.

13. Code Year, teaching yourself how to code

MOOCs (massive open online courses) were the rage of 2012, and if you can believe some pundits, it’s the disruption to Higher Education that we’ve wondered about for the decade. Code year is a bit less grandiose, it’s a progressive teach-yourself-to-code website. I’ve been learning Javascript this way.

This deserves a more comprehensive post, but I’ve been stymied by loops. Not that I can’t figure them out, but I seem to have stalled someplace in that section. I know, that’s not too far in. But I’m waiting for a surge of ambition and interest, as well as a somewhat less make-work project (build a blackjack game! a pretend cash register!) to get excited about continuing. No doubt that I will complete this at some point, though. It’s just too useful and too accessible to not do it.

14. It doesn’t matter where your kid goes to school

This is Felix Salmon’s take on a paper called “The Elite Illusion,” about the effects of elite, selective high schools (in NYC these are known as exam schools) on educational outcomes:

The main lesson of the paper — which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest — is that students at highly-selective schools, like Stuyvesant in New York or Boston Latin, don’t seem to perform any better than students who might well have gone to those schools but didn’t. In other words, the outperformance of such schools on tests is a function of how selective they are; it’s not a function of how good the teaching is.

The authors matched up students who were on the borders of acceptance; they compared the educational outcomes of students who were just below the cutoff with students who were just above the cutoff. And found little difference. This is one of those ‘put your money where your mouth is’ kind of arguments, whether kids of middle-class, educated, motivated parents with resources (i.e., people like me) do well no matter where they go.

I know that elite educations allow your kids to hobnob with other elite kids, and that the ‘outcomes’ – testing – are highly limited. But I am highly skeptical that the price tag of a Harvard or Columbia is in whatever sense of the word “worth it.” I am equally skeptical that private/elite elementary and middle schools are worth it either.

15. Television!

There’s nothing amazing here, but read through the third point (“TV is Broken) at least. I am in love with the ways current technology, practices, culture are embedded in historically-specific artifacts. It’s like reading Berger and Luckmann and having access to the desert island where they decided the convention of eating a meal when the sun went down.

16. Women, Having it All

This is more on the continued downward spiral of feminism today. I mean, damn, we have been dead set in 2012 on re-litigating the gains of the last 40 years. I think this Slaughter piece is misguided. To her credit, I think she re-thought it as well in light of criticism, particularly this amazing response by Rebecca Traister. The Traister piece is an example of a great argument, well presented:

It is a trap, a setup for inevitable feminist short-fall. Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the “have it all” formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism – as opposed to persistent gender inequity – that’s to blame.

After all, if feminism is supposed to provide women with complete fulfillment, and allow them to have it all, then anyone who’s less than fully pleased by her lot – who works long hours, struggles to pay bills, spends more hours over dirty dishes than her mate, who’s guilty about missing her kid’s play or her business partner’s PowerPoint, who feels tugged in ways that she perceives her husband does not – is not simply experiencing firsthand the ways in which sexism, the economic divide, the wage gap and patriarchal models for public and personal life persist. She’s not even simply experiencing the human condition of dissatisfaction and yearning.

No. Thanks to the “have it all” phantom, she’s experiencing betrayal at the hands of feminism itself. She may well be betraying herself! The movement she actually needs more of – to advocate for universal daycare, better schools, a higher minimum wage, paid family leave, a workplace culture that doesn’t continue to treat all employees as if they were “men” in a historic sense, with wives at home taking care of their lives – takes the blame because thousands of years of sexual inequity have not been reversed fully in the past 50 years.

Yes. A thousand times yes.

17. Jonathan Harris‘ talk at Creative Mornings

I have started to go to some of these Creative Mornings talks, and they are almost always good. I liked this talk a lot (particularly the section on data around 5:00 mark), and I think he got dinged a bit about his pooh-poohing of curation over creation later in the talk. But his impulses are really interesting.

18. Subcompact Publishing

The context of this article is a new app/magazine called The Magazine, but the same ideas about disruption, technology, opportunity, data, caring for your audience, creating content that is both compelling and sustainable, they are all here still swirling around. Plus, the shift from skeuomorphic digital offerings to native digital mirrors the shift in many institutions I’ve been interested in. Trading handhelds that simulated a crowd; ‘trading’ pollution allowances on the CME rather than through the EPA directly. Transitions across institutional changes are complex, but not unpatterned.

19. 7 Basic Rules for Charts and Graphs

I appreciate best practices. There is a strong place for creativity, but without foundations of common practice that creativity becomes, well, some kind of ‘to each her own’ truthiness. I wouldn’t take the final stand in charts and graphs, but still, love a good practical best practices guide.

20. Terry Gross’ last interview with Maurice Sendak

Do yourself a favor and listen to this interview excerpt, illustrated by Christoph Niemann. Terry Gross is magic. And Maurice Sendak is so wonderful he makes me cry:

“I have nothing now but praise now for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more… There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

Ok, so if you are getting paid by Seth Godin or his publisher, or website host provider, or whomever, to provide authentic synergy, or thought leadership, or influencer powerjuice, could you at least provide a bit more differentiation.

I mean, SwissMiss at least gave us an ‘Amen’ and a semi-disclosure (the short was made possible by..) that she’s being paid to promote Seth’s new book. The book for which he has already kind of distorted Kickstarter, in my humble opinion. Or as Tom Ewing noted, “Sorry, people with huge established fanbases using Kickstarter isn’t brave, experimental, unorthodox etc.” (ht JL, naturally).

Anyhow, not a major point, that ‘influential’ bloggers are using their platforms to promote stuff and get paid for it, just a note to myself to stop following quite so many of these influencing thought-leaders in the new year.

But this is of course just a line in a settings panel. My latest favorite is the commercial we saw for the board game The Logo Board Game.

The pitch for this game is that “the Logo Board Game entertains the entire family with fun facts about your favorite companies.” You can test your knowledge about your favorite brands and logos! What I like about this is that the game creator probably gets paid twice – once from the companies whose popular logos are in the game, and again from people buying the game. Synergy!

I was thinking about all of this while reading the Wirecutter’s Gifting Guide for Weird and Wonderful Humans. The guide is sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes pretty spot on, sometimes funny. But at the end, you get this:

The truth is, I’m not so into gift guides this year, and I’m not so into generic guides. After a year of working on Wirecutter, its hard to see things as anything but the most utilitarian terms, aiming for the things that have not too much or too little; in other words, my mind is in the exact opposite state ideal for finding presents for people.

I also thought back on gifts I received this year and couldn’t think of much. I did a lot of really stellar borrowing and trading–I borrowed a nice woodblock print from Nicole for my new apartment, and traded a handplane and fins for a nice sheepskin rug with Bilton.

But the best things people did for me were to show me places, teach me how to do things and to give me a couch to sleep on for a few nights.

My friend simon took me spearfishing and on hikes, friends at One World One Ocean took me on shark tagging and undersea research lab expeditions, and other friends took me to secret spots to surf.

Carolyn did buy me some nice short fins to replace a set that broke, and I got some tupperware for a housewarming gift. But mostly, this was the year where I was focused on shedding things and discouraging people from giving me things.

I don’t even want Christmas cards this year. Just give me a call and let me know how you are doing instead.

So, use this list. But let’s acknowledge that gifting is kind of weird, and maybe I am into it but I am more into showing people new things and taking them places than buying them stuff. So if you don’t feel like gifting, that’s cool to me and that’s cool of you.

I know this is the kind of statement that grates on some (probably Jenn, for instance), but I somehow find the juxtaposition of an honest-broker technology review site talking down the end of year holiday gift-cycle thoughtful, or at least thought-provoking.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, the best board game reviews consistently come from Defective Yeti’s end of year lists.

Thanks to the role touring now plays with bands, it’s become increasingly common for your favorite act to come through town multiple times during the lifespan of a new album. “We never used to see third cycles for tours,” says Andy Cirzan, a promoter at Jam USA in Chicago. “It’s increasingly commonplace. Bands want to build momentum, or they just need money.” Yet that strategy has its pitfalls. “You have to make sure you don’t hit markets too much,” says Stevenson. “You might get a short-term financial gain, but it might hurt you – ‘Oh, I saw them already,’ or, ‘I’ll catch them next time.’ That’s the kiss of death. Familiarity breeds contempt.”

I’m sure these people do their jobs well. But, you know, birds of a feather flock together. But also, opposites attract. And like breeds like. And familiarity breeds contempt.

“Does one of my carpenter’s tools qualify as the millennium’s best? I discount power tools. I had used a portable circular saw, a drill, and a sander for finishing and cabinetwork, but these are chiefly laborsaving devices. Not that productivity isn’t important. Ken kern, the author of The Owner-Built Home, estimates that cutting all the two-by-fours for the frame of a small house would take seven full days using a handsaw, and only thirty minutes using a power saw. I appreciate the ease of cutting wood with power tools, but the result, while more quickly arrived at, is no different than if I use a handsaw.”

Ultimately, he ends up with the screwdriver, which not only fastened, but also provided the technological basis for the olive press, as well as highly accurate instrumentation (read: microscopes and other scientific equipment).

I don’t know a better, more succinct analogy for the differences between technological change and institutional change than this. One of the first questions I ask of any new, seemingly-disruptive technology is, ‘Is this a power saw, or is it a screwdriver?” We could ask it of an iPad, of Obama’s get out the vote efforts, of social media, of Google Maps, of the use of the filibuster by an obstructionist minority in the US Senate, of Arab Spring, of Occupy. It is a powerful heuristic for thinking through institutional change.

I bring this sociological point up in order to talk about some of the resentment we’ve seen from billionaires – actually not just billionaires, but really the thin sliver of American society currently touted as ‘producers’, or ‘job creators’ – towards Obama. Despite the empirical evidence that the wealthiest Americans are doing ever increasingly well compared to the rest of the country, the hyperbole from some of the wealthiest Americans is surprising.

Freeland thinks this is about tone and deference. Felix Salmon thinks it is “one part narcissism, one part greed, and one part tactical,” and he makes some great points, especially about the world-views represented by Obama and Romney.

I think, instead, this resentment could be explained in terms of reciprocal, redistributive, and market exchange. In short, when people who are used to market exchange (where the norms of self-interest apply most strongly) are required to engage in redistributive exchange (where the norms of collective good apply most strongly), they believe they are engaging in reciprocal exchange (where the norms of gratitude and deference apply most strongly).

Market exchange is what we commonly think about when we talk about how people make money. We can talk about the morality of profits, the relationship between capital risk and reaping those benefits, the power and politics involved with extracting the legally lowest cost labor available. Some of the resentment from rich folks is likely that they could be making ever more money with more favorable regulation, etc. (not less, as you often hear. That’s a bit of BS – it is more favorable regulation that people want).

But when it comes to government, there is a confusion of redistributive and reciprocal exchange that is going on. If you see taxes as a social responsibility, then it is not a problem. In fact, it is in your own (broadly construed) self-interest! This is the heart of Elizabeth Warren’s discussion about fair taxation. People instead see ‘benefits’ going to lazy, undeserving people. The redistribution is wrong! It should be going to the places I want it to go!

And so, instead, it feels like a gift. And a gift that is not being treated correctly! If you give a gift, what should flow back is gratitude, and social deference – gift givers have a higher status than gift receivers.

About two-thirds down, Chrystia Freeland relates the ‘tone’ billionaire Leon Cooperman objects to, the sense of entitlement felt:

Last July, before he had written the letter, Cooperman was invited to the White House for a reception to honor wealthy philanthropists who had signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of their net worth to charity. At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of “Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems,” a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didn’t send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didn’t write to Courtney. (After Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtney’s book, promptly wrote her “a very nice note,” Cooperman said.)

Kids getting school lunches are not sufficiently appreciative of the hard work the ‘creators’ have done in order to provide them. Workers are not sufficiently appreciative of the opportunities their employers provide. And people at the top are used to getting deference. Lots of it. Exclusive deference. So if one candidate is doing everything possible to signal he is one of you, and the other won’t have his daughters read the vanity-published poetry of your 14-year-old granddaughter, well, then you feel indignant about it. It becomes just like not wearing Aunt Judy’s sweater when she comes to visit.