Thursday Morning Links

• “The poor” in the United States today are not, generally speaking, hungry. Around a third of Americans are considered overweight; nearly half are obese. If we break this down along class lines, the heaviest Americans tend to be the ones with the lowest incomes. The wealthiest Americans, by contrast, are the likeliest to be thin; indeed, there is probably no correlation stronger in contemporary sociology than the one between a below-average B.M.I. and one’s class background. One is almost tempted to say that what Our Lady prophesied in the Magnificat has been fulfilled not in some future eschatological sense but here and now, as a mere description of socioeconomic markers—the hungry have indeed been filled to the point of bursting with ultra-processed foods, while the rich have voluntarily absented themselves from the table. [The Lamp] 
• Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% — from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800. Hours fells but unemployment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact in 1870, about 30% of a person’s entire life was spent working — people worked, slept, and died. Today it’s closer to 10%. Thus in the past 100+ years or so the amount of work in a person’s lifetime has fallen by about 2/3rds and the amount of leisure, including retirement has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There’s no reason we cannot do it again. [Marginal Revolution]
• Without physical optics there would have been no microscope, and until the perfection of the microscope, the biologist was in the main limited to what his unaided senses told him. It was by means of the compound microscope that the development of the cell theory was made possible in the nineteenth century. Similarly it is by means of the new tools and techniques developed in many instances by the physical sciences that the door to a biology of molecules has only recently been opened. [Rockefeller Foundation]
• “Concerning the advancement of learning,” Bacon writes in a letter to King James I in 1611, “I do subscribe to the opinion of one of the wisest and greatest men of your kingdom: That for grammar schools there are already too many, and therefore no providence to add where there is excess.” Quite right. Bacon was advising the king with regard to the charitable disposition of property; why, in our day, does Harvard need another two-hundred-million-dollar “charitable” gift to pile into its fifty-seven-billion-dollar endowment? [The Lamp] 
• Old money, ever prudent, armors itself against these barbs, toughening up via a series of rituals Aldrich calls the three ordeals. In the ordeal of education, one is constantly under pressure to establish personal bests in all fields—academic, athletic, social—and become the kind of seemingly effortless “all-rounder” Aldrich’s Harvard yearbook showed him to have been. The second is the ordeal of nature—the struggle of mountaineers or yachtsmen against elements indifferent to the size of their trust funds. Both practices seem to have endured into our own time. The third ordeal, military service, has faded in importance since the day Teddy Roosevelt marched into Brooks Brothers to order up the uniform he wore when he led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. Somewhere between the estimable naval service of a John F. Kennedy or a George H. W. Bush and the rather less glorious contribution of George W. Bush to the Texas Air National Guard, the military lost its hold on old money’s imagination, perhaps to the detriment of both institutions. [The New Criterion]