Equality

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/19/the-wealthy-in-florence-today-are-the-same-families-as-600-years-ago/
 

The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago

Researchers compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427 against tax data in 2011 and found about 900 surnames still present in Florence

By Josh Zumbrun May 19, 2016 8:53 am ET

New research from a pair of Italian economists documents an extraordinary fact: The wealthiest families in Florence today are descended from the wealthiest families of Florence nearly 600 years ago.

The two economists — Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti of the Bank of Italy — compared data on Florentine taxpayers in 1427 against tax data in 2011. Because Italian surnames are highly regional and distinctive, they could compare the income of families with a certain surname today, to those with the same surname in 1427. They found that the occupations, income and wealth of those distant ancestors with the same surname can help predict the occupation, income and wealth of their descendants today.

As they wrote for the economics commentary website VoxEU, “The top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago.”
 

Their research was made possible by a fiscal crisis. In 1427, Florence was near bankrupt from an ongoing war with Milan and so the Priors of the Republic conducted a tax census of about 10,000 citizens. They took stock of the name and surname of the head of household, their occupation and their wealth. 

Italian names tend to be uniquely regional because of Italy's historic underdevelopment and consequent lack of geographic mobility, making it easy to track such families.

About 900 of those surnames are still present in Florence, with about 52,000 taxpayers having those names. The authors note that Italian surnames are especially good for this effort, because they are highly regional.  While not every person with a certain surname in Florence today will be a descendant of the people with that name in 1427, it’s a good bet that most are. To see how these “families” had fared over the intervening six centuries, they compared the surnames against Florence’s 2011 tax records. (As a condition of access to this data, the authors did not publish the surnames.)

They find strong evidence that socioeconomic status is incredibly persistent. The wealthiest surnames in Florence today belong to families that, in 1429, were members of the shoemakers’ guild — at the 97th percentile of income. Descendants of members of the silk guild and descendants of attorneys — both at the 93rd percentile in 1427 — are among the wealthiest families today.

The "wealthy" people being tracked over the centuries in this study are the likes of shoemakers who were, remarkably, in the top 97 percentile centuries ago in Italy. This is really the upper-middle class of centuries ago. This tells us something about how comparatively prosperous modern societies are, and -- thanks to industrialization -- how affordable something like shoes have become.
 
But this also points to what "upper income" consists of, contrary to popular perception. It's an economically heterogeneous group. The average income of someone in the top 1% of income earners in the US today is $700,000, and the minimal income is $400,000 (and this is combined family income, not individual income). So the top 1% is not just billionaires, but also dentists (as well as, say, a top police official and his wife who is an executive secretary).

And this is what is so remarkable: This study is not tracking the ancient aristocracy and its modern descendants, but relatively prosperous ordinary people whose family status has remained amazingly consistent for over half a millennia of tumultuous change.

It’s no surprise that wealth can be inherited or that one’s parents play a large role in determining your social status. Other research has found that descendants of Japan’s samurai – 140 years after the end of the order — remain elites in Japan. The economist Gregory Clark at the University of California, Davis, has written a book “The Son Also Rises” showing how wealth and status can persist for centuries.

Still, the length that Florentine families have remained high status remains remarkable. Consider, in 1427, the Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo had not been born. Florence would go from rule under the Medici family, to a Republic, back to the Medici.The city would fall to the Holy Roman Empire following the 10-month Siege of Florence. The Medici line would go extinct, the city would be taken over by Napoleon. It would lose its role as the head of a city-state to become part of the Kingdom of Italy, under Rome. The fascist dictator Benito Mussolini would rule from 1922 to 1943, followed by a Nazi occupation of Florence. Following the war, the city would undergo a period known as the “miracolo economic italiano” — the Italian economic miracle — with GDP growing more than 8% a year. Per capita GDP would grow more in this period than in the entire five centuries from 1400 to 1900.

One of the crucial distinctions in any study of or debate on equality is which type of equality is being discussed.

In the US, there has been an emphasis on Equality of Opportunity, also labeled 'income mobility'. Americans have typically been concerned with barriers to "moving up the ladder", not with the existence of a hierarchy itself. 'Fairness' for Americans means a lack of discrimination in competition, not with the need for an enforced sameness.

Europeans have typically been more concerned with Equality of Condition, or 'class stratification' or 'socioeconomic polarization'. The great project of European modernity was to tear down an entrenched ancient caste system, primarily through government action, by either subsidizing government programs to redistribute income (socialism) or promoting meritocratic competition within the public realm, in areas such as education, the military and the bureaucracy (e.g., Napoleon).

Such a caste system never existed in the United States (outside of the South). Moreover, when great, wealthy families did emerge in the US (Gates, Rockefellers, Kennedys, etc.), rather than forming a new aristocracy, these concentrations of wealth seemed to fade into relative mediocrity on their own through economic competition over several generation. Capitalist competition, rather than socialism, was seen by Americans as having a leveling effect.

(Britain is a special case, and comprises a certain persistence of a hybrid aristocracy. The Industrial Revolution created new business elites, and led to the relative impoverishment of the British aristocracy. But the new elites married into the old aristocracy, and sent their offspring to elite boarding schools where they would become assimilated into the ancient aristocratic culture. Public institutions like elite universities and government offices, rather than promoting new talent as they did in France and Germany, consciously discriminated against "uncouth" outsiders. In Britain, the ancient caste system dissolved, but a hybrid class system took its place.)

Although the authors of this study are Europeans, their focus has been on income mobility, not stratification.

One might be quick to draw parallels to the research of Thomas Piketty, the French economist who documented the rise of income inequality, especially at the top 1%. The authors resist that link.

“The paper is about economic mobility (or persistence), that is whether the rich remain the rich,” the economists wrote in an e-mail from Mr. Mocetti, “But this does not necessarily imply that they are getting ever richer. Therefore there is not a direct relation with the Piketty argument (increasing inequality over time).”

The economists say their evidence suggests persistence is somewhat highest for the wealthiest, which they interpret as evidence for “the existence of a glass floor that protects descendants of the upper class from falling down the economic ladder.”

But they note their research is not focused on the super elite at the top 1% of income. Their finding is for the overall population. The entire top 33% of the income distribution in 1427  is likely to be wealthier today. This is a far broader group than Medici princes and dukes, with castles and estates to hand down through the centuries. This suggests that some 25 generations later, the hundreds of descendants of comfortable — but far-from-regal — leathermakers are likely to be doing quite well, and it’s not because they inherited great(x25)-grandpa’s shoes and belts, let alone his palaces.

This evidence suggests social class persists up and down the scale, for wealthy families and middle-class and poor, through renaissance and economic boom, through busts and upheavals, through military occupations and overthrows, through republics and kingdoms and dictatorships and for centuries and centuries.

This article displays a critical social awareness that one might not expect from the WSJ.

Housing prices in San Francisco

Here’s a great article about a very innovative bit of digging into the causes of high housing prices in San Francisco (“A guy just transcribed 30 years of for-rent ads. Here’s what it taught us about housing prices“).
The article, by Michael Andersen, tries to summarize a detailed analysis in a blog post published over the weekend by Eric Fischer.

Read through Andersen’s summary, then wade through some or all of Fischer’s original.

It’s really very interesting to see the data for housing and rents charted over a long period of time. These data allowed Fischer to calculate how changes in employment or rates of new construction would impact rents in the city.

The research concluded that there is no question that along with 1) high employment and 2) good incomes (both good things), the third factor that drove high housing prices was 3) a lack of new construction.

Building new things is good, there is no disputing this.

At least, that's what Fischer's research concluded.

But the Andersen's original contribution is this idea: The real trick is not just to build more, but to make sure that it is gorgeous.

He cited Prague as an example of this.

Is this true? Let's look at Prague.

Here is one of the first images I got when I googled "Prague neighborhoods".

http://cdn.wandertooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/wheretostayinpraguekarlin.jpg

Every building in Prague is distinctive and beautiful, yet surprisingly simple and modest. This is how most people in Prague live.

Nothing could be more different from the modern buildings of Honolulu, which are both generic and bland, yet expensive.

http://www.civilbeat.com/2015/11/curt-sanburn-ugly-honolulu/

This is at least partly based on the real estate market in Hawaii: Build anything cheaply, and someone will buy it.

But there might be a cultural component, of a small-town ethos of trying not to show off by being too distinctive.

http://www.civilbeat.com/2014/01/20801-urban-color-scheme-why-is-honolulu-so-beige/

Anyway, when one googles "Prague suburbs", this is one of the first images:

http://i.lidovky.cz/11/111/lngal/JKZ3ef758_smog_ostrava_032_2_.jpg

It's just as bland and crappy as anything in Honolulu. Also, it is not low-rise apartments as within Prague, but high-rise. And it is most likely owned by the government. And this is where most of the population of Prague lives, outside the city proper in big, tall, ugly public housing. Suburbs in Europe are tall and cheap. Ain't pretty, but that keeps costs down.

These elements are missing from the article. For example, San Francisco is surrounded by mountains and ocean, without much room for suburban expansion (unlike cities in Texas). No mention of that.

Moreover, even in the staunchest outposts of authoritarian capitalism, the government takes a direct hand in housing. IIRC, in Singapore, 80% of housing built by the government, although it is 90% owned by the occupant; in Hong Kong, the government owns half the homes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate

Historically, in Europe, wealthy people lived in the cities, with the poor on the outskirts. With the Industrial Revolution in England, this reversed, with the wealthy escaping to the suburbs; this became the pattern in the English-speaking world. Today, in the US, poor people are moving into the suburbs and the suburbs are expanding; young, educated, creative people are moving to the cities, but the cities are shrinking (and eventually, when they have kids, these yuppies will move to suburbs, too).

Also, Prague was historically a German colony, and for centuries wealthy Germans poured money into Prague, turning it into their own little Disneyland. Of course Prague looks beautiful, it is the Germanic version of Monaco (communism sure did not make Prague pretty).

An even less pleasant observation revolves around the orderliness of civic life and the nature of public housing in the US as opposed to Asia and Europe. In places like Singapore, any kind of disorder is simply not tolerated, and this facilitates urban life. That's very different from the US. The US is not like Japan or Germany. (This American "individualism" is related to the American penchant for houses over apartments.)

Also, it's been relentlessly observed by commenters on your blog that despite Hawaii's economy being based on tourism, the facilities in the beach parks in Hawaii tend to go unrepaired. If much or most of the housing in Hawaii were owned by the state or local government, what condition would it be in?

San Francisco's secret history of liberals displacing liberals

This New Yorker article explored the conflict between old-school liberal San Franciscans and recent newcomers from the tech industry.

The idea that this involves a conflict between the old liberals and new libertarians does not make sense because in reality both the newcomers and old timers are really more ideologically similar to one another than that (e.g., both groups are environmentalists).

In fact, one person in the article identified a reward system based on talent and effort -- meritocracy -- as the central value of the tech industry.

"Silicon Valley hasn’t really known how to describe its political ideology,” a thirty-one-year-old entrepreneur named Joe Green told me a few weeks ago. “You have strains of libertarianism, strains of progressivism, pretty universally socially liberal.”

“What I realized along the way,” he went on, “was that there actually was an ideology”—a mixture of causes, playing to the tech industry’s appetite for highly trained experts, that he’s taken to calling “the knowledge-economy agenda.” He focussed on two issues, immigration reform and education reform, that the entire industry could rally around, and has managed to inspire political sentiments where previously there seemed to be none. “If there’s anything that reflects the spirit of the Valley, it’s having a meritocracy, and the idea that anyone should be able to rise up through the system,” Green said.

But it could be argued that the belief in meritocracy is something that virtually all Americans subscribe to across the American ideological spectrum (a spectrum that is actually very narrow compared to other countries, at least before Sanders and Trump became popular). 

So the differences between old-timers and newcomers in San Francisco might be understood more accurately in economic rather than ideological terms -- liberal yuppies getting priced out by incoming liberal millionaires and billionaires.
 

Let's look to San Francisco's past for a precedent for this.

 From the 2000 census, here is a map of the United States by state and county, illustrating the population in terms of predominant ancestry (ethnicity).

 The state map in the corner right shows that the population of the northern United States is predominantly of German origin (light blue).

The southwestern US is predominantly Mexican (pink).

 The lower southeastern US -- the "Deep South" -- is predominantly African American (deep purple).

 The upper southeast is predominantly self-described as "American" (light yellow). These are basically white Americans whose ancestry goes back so far that they do not know their origins (probably English and Scottish mixed in with Native American and African). (The South was settled before the North.)

 The northeastern US is predominantly English, Irish and Italian.

Now look at the main map, of counties.

 Look at California.

Northern Cali is predominantly German, southern Cali is predominantly Mexican.

 A few counties vary from this pattern. On the eastern border, a couple of counties are English, and one county is American Indian (orange).

 Now look at the Bay Area of northern California.

 Oakland is African American.

But west of that, San Francisco proper -- San Francisco County and City -- is Irish (purple).

 Despite what most people think of San Francisco today, San Francisco has historically been working class and Irish Catholic.

When most people think of Irish Americans, they think of Boston.

But as Ken Burns pointed out on his PBS series on Irish Americans, the two most important Irish-influenced cities in the US are Albany, New York (the seat of government) and Butte, Montana (the focus of labor unrest in the western US). (Boston is really ruled by old-time WASPs, which might include the Kennedy dynasty, who "real" east-coast Irish Americans dislike.)

The point is, the history of San Francisco since the 1960s involves outsiders pushing out the locals, who were/are working-class liberals. But there are no long articles in the New Yorker about that.

 Also, long before that, Irish Americans in California were instrumental in pushing out the Chinese with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. No one raised a fuss about that.

The Irish also used their ties and connections to gain power in the unions and subsequently exclude non-Irish workers. With the demise of the Gold Rush and the completion of the transcontinental railroad, both Irish and Chinese workers became unemployed. With competition for jobs greater, Irish-led unions stirred up resentment and discrimination against the Chinese, with Dennis Kearny, leader of the Workingman's Party of California, raising the cry of "The Chinese must go!"

Is societal "progress" a manifestation of modern entropy?*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_mundi

The world soul (Greek: ψυχὴ κόσμου, Latin: anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body. The idea originated with Plato and was an important component of most Neoplatonic systems:

Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.

The Stoics believed it to be the only vital force in the universe. Similar concepts also hold in systems of eastern philosophy in the Brahman-Atman of Hinduism, the Buddha-Nature in Mahayana Buddhism,^{[citation needed]} and in the School of Yin-Yang, Taoism, and Neo-Confucianism as qi.

Other resemblances can be found in the thoughts of hermetic philosophers like Paracelsus, and by Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Schelling and in Hegel's Geist ("Spirit"/"Mind"). Ralph Waldo Emerson published "The Over-Soul" in 1841 which was clearly influenced by the Hindu conception of a universal soul. There are also similarities with ideas developed since the 1960s by Gaia theorists such as James Lovelock.

[[[[in ancient philosophies, the organizing principle of the universe (e.g., water, fire, etc.) was a unifying principle, and so was considered spirit or soul. Rather than a disembodied entity, soul was a holistic, unifying force.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism


[[[[The word 'telos' originally meant whole, not goal (according to Heidegger). Likewise, Kant's term 'purposiveness' meant holism, not a goal (according to Cassirer). There may be a tendency to re-imagine a cosmic unifying purpose as a goal or purpose.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negentropy



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_biological_complexity

[[[the emergence of complex life anywhere is extremely improbable



[[[[the emergence of intelligent life is even more improbable


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_of_Progress



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy


Tocqueville

Donald Trump's personality and motives

How President Obama precipitated Donald Trump's serious effort at a presidential bid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html

Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature

By MAGGIE HABERMAN and ALEXANDER BURNSMARCH 12, 2016

Donald J. Trump arrived at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in April 2011, reveling in the moment as he mingled with the political luminaries who gathered at the Washington Hilton. He made his way to his seat beside his host, Lally Weymouth, the journalist and socialite daughter of Katharine Graham, longtime publisher of The Washington Post.

A short while later, the humiliation started.

The annual dinner features a lighthearted speech from the president; that year, President Obama chose Mr. Trump, then flirting with his own presidential bid, as a punch line.

He lampooned Mr. Trump’s gaudy taste in décor. He ridiculed his fixation on false rumors that the president had been born in Kenya. He belittled his reality show, “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

Mr. Trump at first offered a drawn smile, then a game wave of the hand. But as the president’s mocking of him continued and people at other tables craned their necks to gauge his reaction, Mr. Trump hunched forward with a frozen grimace.

After the dinner ended, Mr. Trump quickly left, appearing bruised. He was “incredibly gracious and engaged on the way in,” recalled Marcus Brauchli, then the executive editor of The Washington Post, but departed “with maximum efficiency.”

That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world. And it captured the degree to which Mr. Trump’s campaign is driven by a deep yearning sometimes obscured by his bluster and bragging: a desire to be taken seriously.

…

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he had encountered many who doubted or dismissed him as a political force before now. “I realized that unless I actually ran, I wouldn’t be taken seriously,” he said. But he denied having been troubled by Mr. Obama’s derision.

“I loved that dinner,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I can handle criticism.”
…
“A lot of people have laughed at me over the years,” he said in a speech days before the New Hampshire primary. “Now, they’re not laughing so much.”

What makes Donald Trump tick? 

Egotism. 

Where did it come from?

One theory of the narcissistic personality is that the narcissist suffers from poor self-esteem due to parental neglect or abuse, and overcompensates through self-love. A more recent theory is that the narcissist was raised by his or her parents to think of him- or herself as superior to others.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/03/09/how-parents-create-narcissistic-children/

<blockquote>

The authors also wanted to determine what differentiated narcissists -- who tend to be more aggressive and even violent than other people, and are at higher risk for depression, anxiety and drug addiction -- from people with strong self-esteem. As mentioned above, parents who show their kids warmth and appreciation without promoting the idea that they are superior tend to raise children with solid self-esteem.

</blockquote>

Donald Trump was sent to a military academic at the age of 13 because he was very aggressive and destructive, according to Wikipedia. Also, he had a brother who died from extreme alcoholism. But there is no indication of how Trump was raised from the article.

I also read a quote from Trump that he feels like he is basically the same person that he was in fifth grade (10 years old). He seemed to acknowledge his own emotional regression.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/08/04/how-to-spot-a-narcissist/

<blockquote>

Narcissism, in lay terms, basically means that a person is totally absorbed in self. The extreme narcissist is the center of his own universe. To an extreme narcissist, people are things to be used. It usually starts with a significant emotional wound or a series of them culminating in a major trauma of separation/attachment. No matter how socially skilled an extreme narcissist is, he has a major attachment dysfunction. The extreme narcissist is frozen in childhood. He became emotionally stuck at the time of his major trauma of separation/attachment.

In my work with extreme narcissist patients I have found that their emotional age and maturity corresponds to the age they experienced their major trauma. This trauma was devastating to the point it almost killed that person emotionally. The pain never was totally gone and the bleeding was continuous. In order to survive, this child had to construct a protective barrier that insulates him/her from the external world of people. He generalized that all people are harmful and cannot be trusted.

The protective insulation barrier he constructed is called a false persona. He created a false identity. This identity is not the true person inside. The many types of false personas or identities that an extreme narcissist creates can vary.

</blockquote>

I once read a study of historical figures that seems to reconcile the two theories of narcissism (parental overvaluation versus childhood trauma). It argued that the family dynamic of certain people (e.g., Adolf Hitler) involved 1) a cold, distant disapproving father (or step-father) who might have even been a violent alcoholic, and 2) a warm, doting mother who whispered encouragingly to her young boy about his eventual rendezvous with a glorious destiny.

The following article might suggest that Donald Trump fits this profile, if only somewhat.

http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-pivotal-childhood-moments-in-the-art-of-the-deal-2015-9

Disturbingly, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama fit the profile more obviously.

Which brings us to the subject of Obama’s prolonged ridiculing of Trump.

Would Trump do that? Judging from Trump’s history in the primaries, no. Trump mocks other candidates as soon as they criticize him, and then Trump reconciles with them as soon as they cease their attack (or as soon as they lose).

This leads us to the mystery of who the real Barack Obama is, a man hidden behind layers of projection by the public and behind a false persona.

Tripartite society: Critical thought and the composition of society*

Circles, Squares and Triangles

The following is an exerpt from an NPR interview with the recording artist M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam), who is from south Sri Lanka.

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/05/243083622/i-built-the-platform-myself-m-i-a-on-being-heard

 In my head, I had sort of justified it all by saying human beings break down to three categories: You've got circles, squares and triangles.

 Squares are people that are neutral. They live life by knowledge and logic and scientific approach to finding information and truth, and they build people very practical things. So if you go to a square and say, "I'm homeless," he'll build you a building. He won't think anything past that. Squares give us the tools and shelter and grids and roads and blah, blah, blah.

And then you have the triangles, who are people that are led by power and money and ego. These things all work on a pyramid structure: You have one person at the top and billions at the bottom.

And then you have the circles, who are just led by love. The concept of the universe is built on circles. I think evolution is built on a circular sort of shape, and any natural organisms have circular things in common: If you cut a tree you get circles, natural disasters happen in circular forms, and the planets are circles, our eyes are circles.

So that was my thing; I'd sort of worked it out. I'd said the reason why there's so much imbalance in the world is because human beings can lose touch and become overly developed in one area. When you have that, it's dangerous, and they become led by something that is not in balance.

The trifunctional hypothesis: soldiers, priests and farmers

That resonates with the ‘trifunctional hypothesis’, which argues that there is a common social structure and cultural framework within the societies that speak the Indo-European language group, which stretches from south Asia to Europe (and the Americas).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifunctional_hypothesis

The trifunctional hypothesis of prehistoric Proto-Indo-European society postulates a tripartite ideology ("idéologie tripartite") reflected in the existence of three classes or castes—priests, warriors, andcommoners (farmers or tradesmen)—corresponding to the three functions of the sacral, the martial and theeconomic, respectively. This thesis is especially associated with the French mythographer Georges Dumézilwho proposed it in 1929 in the book Flamen-Brahman, and later in Mitra-Varuna.

According to Dumézil, Proto-Indo-European society comprised three main groups corresponding to three distinct functions:

1. the function of sovereignty
2. the military function
3. the function of productivity

Sovereignty fell into two distinct and complementary sub-parts, one formal, juridical and priestly but worldly, the other powerful, unpredictable, and also priestly but rooted in the supernatural world. The second main social division was connected with force, the military and war while the role of the third, ruled by the other two, was productivity, herding, farming and crafts. Proto-Indo-European mythology was divided in the same way: eachsocial group had its own god or family of gods to represent it and the function of the god or gods matched the function of the group.

Many such divisions occur in various contexts of early history.

• One example is the supposed division between the king, nobility and regular freemen in early Germanicsociety

• The three Hindu castes, the Brahmans or priests, the Kshatriya—the warriors and military—and theVaishya—the agriculturalists, cattle rearers and traders—are associated with three philosophical qualities (gunas), Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas respectively. The castes are socio-economic roles filled by members of society.

…

• The three divisions of the ideal society described by Socrates in Plato's The Republic.

• Terje Leiren discerns a grouping of three Norse gods that corresponds to the trifunctional division; Odin as the patron of priests and magicians, Thor of warriors, and Freyr of fertility and farming.

This map illustrates the distribution of Indo-European language speakers (in 1950).
 

http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Indo-European-Language-Family-Map.png

So, in the Indo-European language-culture group (Europe and south Asia), there is a common tripartite division between king, priest and commoner. In contrast, in the semitic cultural groups like Arabs and Jews, there is no clear division between a military-political leader and a religious leader. (For example, the Calif is an inheritor of Mohammad’s domains and rulership, and the Jewish messiah was imagined as a warrior-priest. Jesus broke from this by privatizing Judeo-Christianity – “Render unto Caesar what is his” - and in this way Christianity seems more European than semitic.)
 

Plato: Rulers, Thinkers, Workers

As referred to above, Plato divided society into Rulers, Thinkers and Workers. The Rulers utilize practical reason (phronesis), Thinkers engage in theoretical reason (theoria), and Workers use craft (techne).  Perhaps the Rulers match with triangles,Thinkers with circles, Workers with squares.

Plato divided the human soul into three parts as well. His metaphor for the soul was a chariot pulled by two winged horses. One horse represented Appetite, the other Spirit; the charioteer represented Reason. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_Allegory

Plato paints the picture of a Charioteer (Greek: ἡνίοχος) driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses:

"First the charioteer of the human soul drives a pair, and secondly one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character. Therefore in our case the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome."

The Charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature (e.g., righteous indignation); while the other represents the soul's irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature. The Charioteer directs the entire chariot/soul, trying to stop the horses from going different ways, and to proceed towards enlightenment.

The noble white horse that represents Spirit is noble and obedient, but driven by hunger for glory or respectability, the way the unruly black horse is driven by physical hunger. From the text itself:

http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/plato3.htm

The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. They at first indignantly oppose him and will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful deeds; but at last, when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to do as he bids them.

If one were to juxtapose this psychological allegory onto Plato’s political theory, the results are startling. One would assume that the Charioteer would correspond with the Rulers. However, the chariot driver corresponds not with the Rulers, but with the rational Thinkers. The noble white horse corresponds with the Rulers, and the unruly black horse with the Workers. (In a pre-Christian society, nobility is associated with the elites, and the mass of humans are portrayed as jealous, ignorant and dangerous.) But the implication is that society, like the soul, might be best guided by Thinkers, and that Rulers might be surprisingly compliant (at least, compared to the Workers).

Confoundingly, in MIA’s scheme of human types - squares, triangles, circles - the squares, not circles, are rational, and the elitist triangles are not noble. So there is a kind of misfit between Plato and more recent tripartitions.

Freud: Id, ego and superego

A classic divergence between Plato and modern psychological tripartitions is found in Freud’s conceptions of the id, ego and super-ego. In fact, Freud was explicitly inspired by the Platonic metaphor of the chariot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego

Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction our mental life is described. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralising role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.^[1] The super-ego can stop one from doing certain things that one's id may want to do.

The id sounds a lot like Plato’s black horse of Appetite and his Workers (and Dumezil’s caste of commoners).

The id (Latin for "it") is the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains a human's basic, instinctual drives. Id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. It is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. The id contains the libido, which is the primary source of instinctual force that is unresponsive to the demands of reality. The id acts according to the "pleasure principle"—the psychic force that motivates the tendency to seek immediate gratification of any impulse—defined as, seeking to avoid pain or unpleasure (not 'displeasure') aroused by increases in instinctual tension

The ego is a lot like Plato’s rational charioteer and Thinker (and perhaps Dumezil’s warrior caste, although one would associate this with the noble white horse…).

The ego (Latin "I") acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id's drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bring grief. At the same time, Freud concedes that as the ego "attempts to mediate between id and reality, it is often obliged to cloak the Ucs. [Unconscious] commands of the id with its own Pcs. [Preconscious ] rationalizations, to conceal the id's conflicts with reality, to profess ... to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding." The reality principle that operates the ego is a regulating mechanism that enables the individual to delay gratifying immediate needs and function effectively in the real world. An example would be to resist the urge to grab other people's belongings, but instead to purchase those items.

The super-ego, however, is not like the Plato’s aspiring and ambitious noble white horse, although it might correspond with his Thinker (although the ego does, as well). It does correspond to Dumezil’s Priest; indeed, the super-ego sounds more like the Judeo-Christian conscience.

The superego (German: Über-Ich) reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly taught by parents applying their guidance and influence. Freud developed his concept of the super-ego from an earlier combination of the ego ideal and the "special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured ... what we call our 'conscience'." For him "the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency," while as development proceeds "the super-ego also takes on the influence of those who have stepped into the place of parents — educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models."

While Freud’s theory of the self was modeled after Plato’s, the gulf between the two theories is as fundamental as that between the two societies from which they sprang, an ancient warrior society that valorizes honor, versus a modern, Christian, urban society that values conscience. (Moreover, none of this corresponds with MIA’s typology of squares, circles, triangles, although it does line up somewhat with Dumezil’s kings, priests and commoners.) While the elites in the old societies were violent but brave and generous, today the elites are stingy, opportunistic businessmen and ambitious politicians. From the 1963 movie “The Leopard”:

Prince Don Fabrizio Salina: We [aristocrats] were the leopards, the lions, [while] those [new modern elites] who take our place will be jackals and sheep, and the whole lot of us - leopards, lions, jackals and sheep - will continue to think ourselves the salt of the earth.

David Icke, conspiracy theorist: alien lizardmen, sheeple and the madmen

Now here’s another interesting tripartition that Don Fabrizio might approve of, from the contemporary British conspiracy theorist David Icke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke

David Vaughan Icke (/aɪk/; IKE, born 29 April 1952) is an English writer, public speaker and a former professional footballer and sports broadcaster. He promotes conspiracy theories about global politics and has written extensively about them.

…

At the heart of his theories lies the idea that a secret group of reptilian humanoids called the Babylonian Brotherhood (including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson and Boxcar Willie) controls humanity, and that many prominent figures are reptilian. He further proposes that the Moon is an artificial construct — "probably a hollowed-out planetoid" — from which the reptilians broadcast an "artificial sense of self and the world" that humans mistakenly perceive as reality.

Yes, Mr. Icke believes that the global elite are evil, shape-shifting lizardmen from another dimension.

Icke argues that humanity was created by a network of secret societies run by an ancient race of interbreeding bloodlines from the Middle and Near East, originally extraterrestrial. Icke calls them the "Babylonian Brotherhood." The Brotherhood is mostly male. Their children are raised from an early age to understand the mission; those who fail to understand it are pushed aside. The spread of the reptilian bloodline encompasses what Norman Simms calls an "odd and ill-matched" group of people, extending to 43 American presidents, three British and two Canadian prime ministers, various Sumerian kings and Egyptian pharaohs, and a small number of celebrities including Bob Hope. Key Brotherhood bloodlines are the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, various European royal and aristocratic families, the establishment families of the Eastern United States, and the British House of Windsor. Icke identified the Queen Mother in 2001 as "seriously reptilian."

At the apex of the Brotherhood stands the "Global Elite," identified throughout history as the Illuminati, and at the top of the Global Elite stand the "Prison Wardens." The goal of the Brotherhood – their "Great Work of Ages" – is world domination and a micro-chipped population.

Icke introduced the reptoid hypothesis in The Biggest Secret (1999), which identified the Brotherhood as descendants of reptilians from the constellation Draco, who walk on two legs and appear human, and who live in tunnels and caverns inside the earth. He argues that the reptilians are the race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eliš. According to Barkun, Icke's idea of "inner-earth reptilians" is not new, though he has done more than most to expand it.

In Children of the Matrix (2001), he added that the Anunnaki bred with another extraterrestrial race called the "Nordics," who had blond hair and blue eyes, to produce a race of human slave masters, the Aryans. The Aryans retain many reptilian traits, including cold-blooded attitudes, a desire for top-down control, and an obsession with ritual, lending them a tendency toward fascism, rationalism and racism.

Actually, the so-called ‘Aryans’ were Indo-European speakers who migrated out of southern Russia six thousand years ago into Europe and Asia. The idea that they were noble conquerors became part of German Nazi myth. Interestingly, George Dumezil was basically a Nazi, and his trifunctional hypothesis might be an attempt to suggest that there is some kind of common cultural essence shared by ‘Aryan’ peoples. (So, David Icke is actually the normal guy by comparison, although not as intelligent as Dumezil.)

For Icke, society is comprised of three factions, with the reptilian elite as leaders.

In Infinite Love is the Only Truth (2005), Icke introduces the idea of "reptilian software." He says that there are three kinds of people. The highest level of the Brotherhood are the "Red Dresses." These are "software people," elsewhere called "reptilian software," or "constructs of mind." They lack consciousness and free will, and their human bodies are holographic veils.

A second group, the so-called "sheeple" – the vast majority of humanity – have what Icke calls "back seat consciousness." They are conscious, but they do whatever they are told and are the main source of energy for the Brotherhood. They include the "repeaters," the people in positions of influence who simply repeat what other people have told them. Doctors repeat what they are told in medical school and by drug companies, teachers repeat what they learned at teacher training college, and journalists are the greatest repeaters of all.

The third group, by far the smallest, are those who see through the illusion; they are usually dubbed dangerous or mad.

Icke’s ideas are ... unorthodox and ... interesting. But they are nevertheless consistent with the various tripartitions discussed above. Metaphorically, it accords with a ‘conflict theory’ critique of society, like that of the sociologist C. Wright Mill’s 1956 book “The Power Elite”.

Don Fabrizio and David Icke describe the majority of people as passive “sheep”, whereas, in an earlier period of history, for Plato (and, by implication, in Freud), the majority seems to be more dangerous (e.g., the black horse of Appetite, the Id). For example, in traditional philosophy, the most important moment in history is not some war or grand event, but the trial and death of Socrates. Athenian politicians blamed their country’s problems on Socrate’s method of teaching, which systematically questioned authority; the Athenian public - for no good reason - agreed to put Socrates to death. (To some extent, Socrates himself manipulated the situation in order to produce this tragic outcome in order to teach his disciples about human nature.) Remarkably, this pattern of event finds a parallel in the trial and death of Jesus. The elites are corrupt and obsessed with power and status; the common people are fickle and irrational and will go along with anything.

One can find something like the formation of this attitude in the life of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was always a very good writer, but at some point he suddenly became a great writer. But this transformation also saw him take on a critical attitude, although it was subtle and disguised. This turning point supposedly happened just after the murder of his friend, the playwrite Christopher Marlowe (in 1593), who was rumored to be involved in political intrigue. Being a critical intellectual means having a healthy wariness of the elite, but it also involves a certain apprehension toward the general populace. But not everyone can contain their feelings about the fickle mob. Such was the case with the Roman general, Caius Marcius Coriolanus, in Shakespeare’s telling of his tale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TArNqebm_Gg

His tragic flaw is that he cannot stand to be dishonest, and must always tell the truth (much like Jim Carrey in the comedy “Liar Liar”, only not funny). He assumes that his status as a Roman war hero entitles him to be undiplomatic in public. Unpopular and vulnerable, the elites plot against him and the easily swayed public turns against him. Is the play really about the likes of Marlowe? Is it a cautionary tale to other writers?

Star Trek: Kirk, Spock and Bones

Everybody’s favorite tripartition is perhaps from Star Trek. It’s the ‘trinity’ of Kirk, Spock and Bones.

MIA might say that Captain James Tiberius Kirk is a triangle; Mr. Spock is kind of a square; Dr. McCoy is a humanitarian circle. 

Dumezil might say that Kirk is a warrior, Spock is a priest and McCoy is kind of a farmer. 

Plato might say that Kirk is a Ruler, Spock is a Thinker, and Bones is a Worker; therefore, Spock corresponds with the charioteer, Kirk with the noble white horse of ambition, and Bones with the dark horse of appetite. Freud might identify Kirk as the id, Spock with the ego and Bones with the superego. 

David Icke might claim that Kirk is a lizardman, Spock is enlightened, and Bones is a sheeple.

But none of that makes much sense. The categories don’t fit.

[[[[[Star Trek, Liberal Internationalism (paradox of quantum mechanics: mere observation creates changes
[[[Starship Trooper, fascism

[[[the reaction to this is the counterculture radicalism: Star Wars
[[[but the rebelliousness of Star Wars is adopted in Silicon Valley ("disruption") and by neo-conservatives who disparage tradition and convention, but who themselves represent the technocratic establishment
[[[the British realism of Dr. Who (Newtonian: every action creates an opposite and equal reaction)

[[[National Geographic used to be Star Trek, or even Starship Trooper, but it has become Star Wars and Dr. Who

[[[[[harry potter, elite boarding school for freaks, Jews

[[[holy trinity is Gnostic, not Christian (also, St. Augustine's determinism in Protestantism)

[[[[memes evolve like genes

Journalists as passive-aggressive priests

Passive-aggressive behavior defined:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior

Passive-aggressive behavior is the indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullen behavior, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible.

For research purposes, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) revision IV describes passive-aggressive personality disorder as a "pervasive pattern of negativistic attitudes and passive resistance to demands for adequate performance in social and occupational situations."

This is somewhat different from a popular conception of passive-aggressive behavior, which could be better described as thinly veiled hostility. But the basic idea -- aggression indirectly expressed -- is shared.
There is one theory that religion is a kind of indirectly expressed aggression. Humans have aggression, like all animals. But humans are more sophisticated in dealing with their aggression, so they find scapegoats (outsiders) onto whom they can channel their anger and maintain group harmony and cohesion. Religion provides rules and structure and order that people crave, but religion also provides outlets for the very disorderly impulses that religions repress.

This is particularly true of Christianity, which is a remarkably passive religion. In fact, the Christ figure in Christianity is a role model of passive stoicism AND simultaneously the scapegoat targeted for abuse. (The Hebrews used to have a ritual in which a goat -- the 'escape-goat' -- would be touch by the people, transferring their sins to the goat, and the goat released into the wilderness. Christianity is a psychologically sophisticated version of this.)

Fairly or not, there is now in Western popular culture an image of a Christianity (especially the Catholic Church) that is simultaneously heavily pushing a guilt trip over sinfulness, but secretly fascinated with sin itself.

In fact, the feelings of guilt that are amplified by religious authorities serve to enhance the excitement of being transgressive; and it is religious authorities in particular who engage in the most sinful and transgressive behaviors possible (short of murder). That's not just hypocritical, it's pathological. Moreover, in propagating a sense of guiltiness, religious authorities thereby channel their own aggressive impulses -- sadism, essentially -- against a subdued population. So guilt serves multiple covert functions for the Church hierarchy. At least, this is the image one now gets of religion in popular entertainment.

In literature, the mix of extreme conformity and scapegoating is found in the recent "Hunger Games" trilogy. The novels and movies describe a dystopian futuristic society where involuntary gladiatorial combat among teenagers is used both as a vent for popular anger and frustration, and also as a display of absolute state power.

The ancestor of "Hunger Games" might be the short story "The Lottery".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery#1996_TV_film

"The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson, written in the month of its first publication, in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker. The story describes a fictional small town which observes—as do many other communities, both large and small, throughout contemporary America—an annual ritual known as "the lottery." It has been described as "one of the most famous short stories in the history of American literature."

The initially negative response to the story surprised both Jackson and The New Yorker. Readers canceled subscriptions and sent hate mail throughout the summer. The Union of South Africa banned the story.
 

In the story, one person is selected by lot to be stoned to death. Apparently, the story cut a little too close to home back in 1948.

Does journalism sometimes serve a kind of passive-aggressive, scapegoating function of redirecting aggressive impulses toward officially sanctioned targets?

Here is an interview in the NY Times Magazine by Anna Marie Cox with the actress Melissa Gilbert, who is now running for Congress.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/magazine/melissa-gilbert-never-saw-congress-in-her-future.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&moduleDetail=inside-nyt-region-2&module=inside-nyt-region&region=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region

 According to 90% of the comments, this interview is both hostile and trivial. The comments also state that this is typical for the interviewer (Cox) and for the Magazine, which is somewhat distinct from the NY Times.
Perhaps celebrity gossip in venues like People Magazine or the National Enquirer specialize in this function. These publications are a manifestation of the urge to 1) punish pseudo-"elites" who transgress moral boundaries, 2) luxuriate in the fame and wealth of celebrities, and 3) fantasize about the alleged transgressions. (These magazines also provide a venue where disgraced celebrities can prostrate themselves with apologies to a flattered public.)

The pseudo-elite is a prime target for scapegoating because they have wealth and status but no real power. The Jews are the classic case of this. Prior to WW2, two-thirds of the physicians, attorneys and journalists in Hungary were Jews. The professional class is magnet for jealousy. This is amplified if it is a religious minority (e.g., Protestants in Catholic countries in Europe) or there is a foreign background (e.g., ethnic Chinese in southeast Asia). But the real decision-making elites remain off-limits to criticism. But wealthy celebrities like top athletes and entertainers are even less entrenched in the power structure than professionals are, making them even more vulnerable to the tabloids. Indeed, some celebrities derive their wealth solely from their celebrity status (e.g., the Kardashians), so they court controversy and sympathy simultaneously (they want to be vulnerable).

At the local level, journalism is still collapsing. The collapse continues, and local journalism is beginning to look more like blogging, in terms of quality but also in terms of financial compensation. But will the nature of journalism at the local level alter to look like tabloid journalism, with an increasing personalization of issues and a moralization of tone?

Journalists are not critical intellectuals at odds with the status quo, despite what they may think. Journalists tend to be orthodox in outlook, and reflect the political orthodoxy. In the 1950s, almost all journalists were conservatives, just as the status quo was conservative. It has been said that in the 1950s, there were only three voices of social criticism to be found in the mainstream:
 
1) The journalist Edward R. Murrow, of CBS.
2) The sociologist C. Wright Mills, of Columbia.
3) Mad Magazine.

Social criticism emerged later in journalism and academia and the media, but in some ways it derived from these three small sources. (Notably, Rolling Stone magazine and Playboy magazine engaged in serious journalism that was a challenge to the mainstream.) By the 1970s, there was a cultural revolution, where the prior criticism by outsiders was now the dominant orthodoxy, and journalists were now generally liberal.
But, again, that early social criticism from the likes of Mills and Murrow (and Mad Magazine) had the quality of the kind of critique one expects from intellectuals in Europe. They were the exception in their fields. Most mainstream journalists generally don't go for critique, they go for the dominant orthodoxy. If journalists have so uniformly become liberal, it's because the society itself has changed. Journalists have simply conformed to the new status quo.
 
In this sense, journalists are more like priests than they are like philosophers. (This is also true of politically correct conformist professors who follow in the wake of C. Wright Mills, who was himself always anti-orthodox and a non-conformist.) Journalists are enforcers of the dominant, orthodox morality, and at an unconscious level they engage in the passive-aggressive dynamic of channeling aggression toward acceptable scapegoats. This is what social media and blogs now do more overtly, and it may be what in the future local journalism will specialize in. Character is destiny.