As the economic crisis deepens and widens, the world has been searching for historical analogies to help us understand what has been happening.
Professor Riley's quantitative approach, along with teams of Yale graduate students who applied it elsewhere around the nation and the world, also widened the split between scientists and naturalists, between people who analyze the world and those who rhapsodize about it, Mr. Kroll said.
But here he is, exhibiting rare passion and moral outrage, fed by resentment of the demonstrators who have torn apart the decorous fictions of the rich helping the poor, when on every index, inequality has widened in the world.
The OECD expects growth to stay well below its trend rate in 2010, widening the rich world's output gap the distance between the economy's actual and potential performance to an extraordinary 8.5% of GDP.
Globalization in recent decades, urged along by free trade agreements and World Bank loans to poor countries, has drastically widened the disparities between the first world and developing nations.
But here, too, social perspectives intruded: 50percentt said they expected Internet-based business to widen the gap between the world's rich and poor.
Delegates to a United Nations summit meeting on poverty and development expressed concern this week that the growing power of the Internet risks widening the divide between the world's haves and have-nots.
Mr. Frank, considered perhaps the single best debater in Congress, fears that granting China permanent normal trade status would widen the gap between the world's economic haves and have-nots.
If US dominance of the Internet is having any effect, it's in spreading those choices to the rest of the world: widening the range of ways in which everyone – no matter where they live – might choose to be offended.
