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The total income hierarchy is then dominated by very high incomes from capital, especially inherited capital. This is the pattern we see in Ancien Régime France and in Europe during the Belle Époque,

the impression that patrimonial capitalism— which is flourishing in these early years of the twenty-first century— is something new, whereas it is in large part a repetition of the past and characteristic of a low-growth environment like the nineteenth century.

Silicon Valley is far from the first society sprouting from protean quests.

Michel Foucault popularized this metaphor. The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's prison design in which cells were arranged in a circle around a central guard tower so that all prisoners were put under constant surveillance with maximum efficiency by a small number of guards.

This is the Laffer curve, which was promoted by one late 20th century president, Ronald Reagan, and ridiculed by another, George H. W. Bush, as "voodoo economics."