Odd this day
20 years ago today, Facebook was founded. Everything’s been fine since.
4 February 1982
Well, all right, that’s not the only anniversary today. In not-entirely-unrelated news, it’s also 42 years since John Kenneth Galbraith put in print one of the finest definitions of modern political thinking: ‘trickle-down’ economics, he said was
what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.
This was in the New York Review of Books, just a couple of years into the economic revolution known on one side of the Atlantic as Reaganomics, and on the other as Thatcherism, but a measure of what it meant for those of us who are sparrows rather than horses may be found in the article’s headline:
Thankfully, everything has changed since the 1980s, and we live in better, happier times.
