September 2006 Atlantic Magazine

by philg

The September 2006 Atlantic magazine (nothing available online), though a pale shadow of even one week’s New Yorker, has some interesting articles. One journalist visits the pilots of Predator drones as they sit in trailers near Las Vegas and fire missiles at people we don’t like in Iraq or Afghanistan. Clive Crook writes about how most of America’s productivity gains between 1966 and 2001 have ended up in the pocket of the workers with salaries in the top 1% (this is based on a paper by Dew-Becker and Gordon). This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. An article by Sheelah Kolhatkar covers the Starkey International Institute for Household Management in Denver, Colorado where retired military officers learn how to become “household managers” (just one big house) or “estate managers” (all the houses and the jets too).

If we combine these last two articles with some business energy, the question becomes “What kinds of products can we produce for the next generation of billionaires?”

8 thoughts on “September 2006 Atlantic Magazine”

  1. Isn’t it obvious? Custom androids (and obviously gynoids as well), and official licensed ones too.

    After all, there’s only so much Paris Hilton to go around, andf a party just isn’t a party without her.

    After that… well, I predict a boom in personal genome sequencing, stochastic simulations of your progeny to determine the appropriate combination of traits from you and your spouse in order to perpetuate the family fortune, Long term storage of hereditary information, and similar services.

    Landscaping will become passe. Instead, we’ll have custom ecosystem engineering.

    Beyond mere personal training and personal chefs, there will be whole suites and stacks of services aimed at unobtrusive health optimization. Example: wider choices of ‘enriched’ and ‘fortified’ staple ingredients, so that even your pancakes (omega-3 fortified eggs, glycemic-index balanced flour, calcium-enriched milk, etc. ) are actually specifically adjusted to be the best pancakes they could be *for you*. Not to mention an automated larder that makes these choices much simpler based on your morning urinalysis (surreptitiously conducted by your toilet), etc.

    Digital paper, when it gets good enough, will be everywhere. Digital wallpaper, digital paper plates, etc. This will create a huge market for custom artwork, designs, and patterns, ordered out of high-end catalog services, created as a limited edition by a ‘celebrity’ designer, or perhaps custom created by a ‘personal’ artist, depending on your social circle.

    Ok, that’s all I’ve got right now.

  2. Oh, and ‘conspicuous conservation’ and ‘conspicuous sustainability’ will become *very* fashionable, and I expect it to have a huge impact on the architecture of the next generation of mansions.

  3. When talking about statistics such as “top 1%” one ought to remember that a person does not necessarily stay in the top 1% for a long time, as CEOs often are fired (in dilbertspeak, “they leave to spend more time with their families”.) A lot of people may be mislead into thinking that this 1% is like the old European permanent aristocracy; in reality people move in and out of this group often.

  4. It’s sad, the Atlantic used to put not only most of each magazine online for free, but years of their archives. It was a great resource — sad to see it go.

  5. Jon, do you know if anyone has data on ‘churn’ as a function of income bracket, and how this has changed over time?

    It’s been my observation that the USA does not recycle it’s elites quite as thoroughly as it used to. Ands that there are, in fact, fewer nouveau riche running around than in the past as it gets harder to break into the higher brackets if you weren’t born there.

  8. “this is not necessarily a bad thing, of course”

    Actually, it most certainly is, particularly when combined with declining socio-economic mobility. It’s socially destructive in many ways, and if it continues long enough, the fed-up 99% will simply vote to take by law what they have been denied by the free markets.

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