Social comment

Social comment was the broadest heading in the column, and two pieces carry it: the airline pilots and hedge fund managers whose pay diverged, and the television series used to argue about medical costs and West Coast culture. Both are arguments about what people accept as normal, made from a described case rather than from a national aggregate.

In the portal, that line of work continues as measurement. Society takes incomes, thresholds and index formulas and asks what each one counts; policy and regulation does the same for the rules that decide public money. Both entries below appear in more than one archive index because their author filed them under several headings at once. Each has a single address, unchanged, and keeps the date and signature it was published with.

What people accept as normal is not itself a published figure, which is the difficulty both pieces run into and the reason the portal narrowed the question to measurement. A threshold, an index weight and a revision are all written down somewhere; a shared assumption is not. These entries can be read as the column’s record of the second kind of thing, made at the time and signed. They are listed below in publication order, each under its own date.