NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - There are 700,000 more millionaire households this year than in 2004, according to a survey released Wednesday.

Households with a net worth of at least $1 million excluding primary residences rose 8 percent to a record high 8.9 million, according to an annual report by TNS Financial Services, a market research and polling firm.

In the wake of Katrina everyone heard that the poverty rate in America has been increasing steadily. Haven’t people figured out this is how Republican trickle-down policy works? Sure it’s successful: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (and more numerous), which is just how they like it. The net result is an increase in GDP, so it must be good.

Up scheming of ways to torture students over the eigenvalue problem. My best classes are where I design a self-contained tutorial that takes them through a problem and solution without my even being there. The eigenvalue problem deserves such treatment. It is so ubiquitous, it should be easy to find an enguaging application. Often I look to historic papers to buid a tutorial around. I like students to see they are not far from understanding some of the great works. With the Leggett talk looming I wonder if I’ll have time to do it right.

Shot a 76 yesterday at The Cheap Course. Granted, it was a par 59… but not too shabby. I’m really cracking those Calloways… I keep dropping clubs and still overshooting. I just purchased a few wedges off ebay. When those arrive, I’ll just need new fairway woods to feel fully equipped. The old woods are actually wood, and have a sweet spot measured in millibarnes. I think I now hit my 5-iron about the same distance as that 5-wood.

Plus, a lot of the courses around here are short (with the notable exception of Hulman Links, a Beast I will probably dare tackle just once before the year is done). I find myself without a reliable lay-up or safe driver.

Notable Carver essay, to which I have nothing to add.

Been reading: Penrose and Capote (In Cold Blood). Penrose has got me thinking in good directions. In a few weeks we’re having a visit by Anthony Leggett, recent Nobel Laureate in Physics, who works in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Some of the thoughts I’ve had coming from Penrose’s ideas will make good conversation fodder.

Capote is a master. The greatest feat of any writer is to be invisible. As we say in Guitar Craft, any idiot can play something complicated. Capote’s prose is not simple; but he makes it seem simple, natural, and inevitable. Brilliant.

In the mean time I’ve got to get PR for Leggett’s visit in order, keep two student research projects progressing, and re-format a paper to antiquated standards for re-submission.

The press and electronic media, far more than the drab press releases of any government, are the engines of mass propaganda today, and it should be borne in mind that the press … is driven by the need to deliver consumers to advertisers … Whatever the individual aspirations of its reporters and editors, the ideology of media journalism is the ideology of consumerism, presentism, competition, hyperbole (characteristics evoked in its readers and watchers)–as well as skepticism, envy, and contempt … At best [liberal democracies] can manipulate information and resort to deception, thus poisoning the history on which they themselves must ultimately depend. (Bobbitt p. 226)

To summarize Bobbitt’s thesis on the decline of the nation-state: the nation state’s raison d’etre of providing for the security and welfare of its citizens is under assault from advances in weaponry (proliferation of WMD) , market globalization, and communication. Thus constitutional structures will adopt to the market-state.

There is no reason why a state cannot grow out of its deficit, but to do so … it will have to increasingly abandon the objective of the government’s maintaining the ever-improving welfare of its citizens … the corperation was a nation-state vehicle to improve the welfare of its citizens … making it feasible for the State, through regulation, to temper the profit motive with concern for the public welfare. The revolution in debt financing in the 1980’s changed this… (p. 222-223)

From what I understand the beneficial model of the corporation broke down during the Civil War, giving us the era of robber-barons, the great Depression, etc. Reagonomics was the last nail in the coffin. The socialists had the courage to recognize the problem with capitalism; they just didn’t have a good solution. It is a simple matter of positive feedback which must be curtailed.

The problem for the nation-state is capitalism has gone global, and there’s no regulation at this scale (not that there’s adequate regulation on the national scale). I’m rather fond of the idea(l) of the state as servant to its population. Strong international regulation of commerce is necessary for states to even maintain their own economic sovereignty. The WTO needs to be an arm of the UN, and be given teeth. I find the global nation-state more appealing than the global market-state. But it is too late.