You dedicate much of your current issue to the inequality between the rich and the poor: the main leader, the fourteen-page special report, the International Section entire, and an article about the underlying economics (“The Rich and the Rest,” “The Few,” “Unbottled Gini,” and “The Beautiful and the Damned,” January 22, 2011). Yet, you fail to even mention the simple fact that inequality is ever more palpable. Ever more public, that is. Both within and across countries, conspicuous consumption is on the rise. The World Wide Web only helps to make it ubiquitous around the globe. For centuries, or even millennia, the poor could only imagine what was hidden behind the castle walls. Since the fall of aristocracy, though, everything is out in the open. And the media are striving to obliterate the last remnants of the crumbling walls. The rise of the new rich, who make their consumption ever more conspicuous with growing zeal, has turned the old ways of the rich and powerful inside out. Perceived inequality has thereby grown by leaps and bounds, which renders research into “actual” inequality an academic pursuit at best. The poor know what they are missing in painful detail, and the rich make sure they know it. At their peril, of course.