February 2022 Letters
by Our Readers
On the December issue:
The Market's Rise
James K. Glassman wrote an absolutely great article about the stock-market rise ("If You Bet on the American Economy, You Win," December). The only point he missed, however, is that stock-market investment may be one of the biggest contributors to the wealth gap in this country.
Andrew Wels
Rye Brook, New York
James K. Glassman writes:
According to the Feder-al Reserve, the top half of households have $133 trillion in wealth while the bottom half has $3 trillion. I am not so much concerned about the gap as about the paucity of assets such as savings accounts, mutual funds, and real estate for so many Americans. Wealth gives families security and helps them buy into the economic system. Encouraging the acquisition of assets is a legitimate—and, I think, urgent—objective of public policy.
Mr. Wels is right. Over the past 30 years, the value of corporate equities and mutual-fund shares held by U.S. households has risen by $38 trillion, but the gains for the bottom half of Americans were only about $220 billion of that, or less than 1 percent. We need to make it easier for more middle- and lower-income people to build wealth through stock ownership.
How? One way is to provide a tax credit (not just deductibility) for contributions to IRAs and 401(k) plans. Another is to allow workers to devote a portion of their Social Security taxes to qualified stocks and funds. Another is to give every child at birth a $10,000 stock account, which would be locked away until age 18 or 21 and could be used for education or home purchases or rolled into a retirement account. That would cost the Treasury $40 billion a year, and it's hard to think of a better use for taxpayer dollars.
Books, Glorious Books
Reading Joseph Epstein's article about libraries concentrated my thoughts on the matter, as I have recently sold the bulk of my own collection—about 15,000 books—to one of New York City's iconic used bookstores ("Books Do Furnish a Civilization," December). These constituted about two-thirds of my personal library, and in sorting through the approximately 22,000 books, I first felt as if I were betraying myself. These volumes and I were seemingly inseparable. Nevertheless, as I decided which books to keep, I concluded that this was an opportunity to remake myself as a teacher, scholar, and after-midnight reader. Reading books is a form of interior decoration in which the mansions of our minds are fitted out to our tastes and intellectual desires. But owning the books and displaying the ones we read goes a step further toward making public and private statements about who we are, or who we want to be known as.
I once read Max Weber's brilliant defense of value-free teaching and scholarship, "Science as a Vocation," and I took to heart his critique of the Americanization of the German universities. Weber lamented the imminent disappearance of scholars' personal libraries, which he likened to craftsmen's tools of the trade. As I got to know my graduate professors, I realized that they were men and women who had large collections pertinent to their scholarly interests. That epiphany set me off on a lifelong quest to read according to my interests, and to own my own library. Having pared it down to 7,000 books, I did so based on my present and future interests. These interests were often veiled when the collection was so much larger and unwieldy. I now feel the power of Bob Dylan's line in "From My Back Pages": "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Hooray for books and their rejuvenating place in my life.
Howard Schneiderman
Easton, Pennsylvania
Joseph Epstein's "Books Do Furnish a Civilization" is a thoughtful and entertaining piece from a wonderful writer. Regarding Epstein's remark that Borges's Library of Babel was the only book he knew set in a library, I would like to call attention to Vikram Paralkar's imaginative novel The Afflictions, which takes place in a mysterious Central Library containing a remarkable Encyclopedia of Medicine.
Philip L. Cohen
As a bibliophile with more than 20,000 books mainly in Hebrew, I enjoyed immensely Joseph Epstein's essay on libraries. In my youth, I literally crawled around many libraries in the U.S., Canada, and especially Israel looking for treasures. As it turned out, and as indicated in this essay, these treasures reflected my personal tastes. Part of the fun was searching and matching.
Joshua Leiner
Lakewood, New Jersey
James B. Meigs is not wrong to conclude that technology is only one prerequisite for fully automated vehicles and that even the technology for driverless cars in urban environments is not yet fully baked ("Tapping the Brakes on Self-Driving Cars," December). If ordering a robotic taxi to Columbus Circle may not yet be on the horizon, however, it doesn't mean that we won't soon see fully autonomous vehicles operating in other capacities.
As Meigs points out, today's systems can "almost entirely take over the task of driving in predictable environments such as major highways." Trucks spend the vast majority of their operating hours on these highways. And given the labor shortages in the trucking industry and the related supply-chain problems that have recently come to light, the market desire for self-driving trucks is increasing. Many well-funded autonomous technology companies have focused on trucking and delivery, and with the stars lining up, don't be surprised if 2022 is the year when automated trucks have their breakout moment.
Michael Granoff
Hellenism and Hanukkah
Meir Y. Soloveichik brilliantly points out the confluence of Hellenism and Nazism ("Hanukkah Unbound," December).
Man left to his own sense of right and wrong can produce a Sodom or a Third Reich. Without the Bible as our guide, the most developed of nations can concoct an efficient killing field like Auschwitz.
Sinai brought morality to the world, and it is the task of those who believe in the words of the Bible to reject the skewed paths laid out before them. Rabbi Soloveichik, in his contrasting the bright flame of the Olympic torch with the delicate light of the menorah, gives substance to the contrary idea that right makes might.
Fred Ehrman
Theaters and Screens
I always admire Terry Teachout's critical insights, but I believe he underestimates the attraction of home viewing ("Do We Really Need Movie Theaters?" December). When television broadcasters first began offering Hollywood's fare, sets were small, images were black-and-white, often ghosting or flickering, and the sounds they produced were flat and monaural. But that was yesterday's technology. Now our TVs have gleaming flatscreens, often encompassing entire living-room walls. Their images are crystalline, as brilliant as any projected in the movie palaces of yore. Add to this the rich sounds emanating from theater-like, multi-speaker sound systems that many people have. Also consider what stay-at-home viewers avoid: neighbors texting irritatingly on flickering cellphones, munching or slurping noisily on snacks, or pushing their way in front of us because they've arrived late or feel nature's urge. It's not just COVID that's keeping many of us out of the multiplex.
Frederic Golden
I enjoyed Terry Teachout's discussion of movie theaters. His analysis of the technical history of how we view films and of what the future holds was interesting. However, he addressed the question of the purpose of movie theaters almost entirely in terms of films themselves. Surely he knows that movies are often not the main reason people go to theaters. My first date with my wife was almost 50 years ago, when we saw The Towering Inferno, not a great movie by any measure but one of the grand experiences of my life. There is a tremendous amount of social interaction not involving films that takes place in movie theaters, and that is why they won't go away.
Thomas J. Straka
Pendleton, South Carolina