MORALITY AS A LUXURY GOOD: That’s a subject that Megan McArdle has been writing about, and it also comes up in this review (from Nature) of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s novel Lucifer’s Hammer. “The authors’ main theme is that, comet or no, a civilization has the morality its machinery allows it to afford.”

That, of course, is why prosperity and progress have strong moral components, though hairshirt types often treat both as mere self-indulgence.