A familiar picture? If so, it’s no accident that we all accept it. It’s the dominant economic paradigm that surrounds us. It’s the central frame of discussion adopted by the entire range of news media. And it’s the result of a massive propaganda campaign waged by business interests over the latter half of this century.

During the global economic crisis before the Second World War, significant advances towards the social democratic system had been made. These moves were put on hold during the war. However, the U.S. population was quick to pick up where things had been left off following war’s termination. A large wave of strikes spread across the nation, and The U.S. business elite soon realized it was facing a crisis. It responded with a massive concerted effort to indoctrinate the American public with the business-friendly point of view.

Doubt me? Check out Selling Free Enterprise. It’s a dry academic study, mostly facts and figures. But if you can get past that, it’s a fascinating read, and some of the facts I think will astound you: during the 1950s, an entire third of elementary school textbooks was coming from the National Association of Manufacturers. Businesses undertook huge campaigns to get their message into U.S. communities, churches, schools, and social groups. Companies sent their pool of low-skilled laborers to days off work where they were educated about the dangers of high corporate taxes, unions, and the promise offered by their version of free enterprise.

While the book concentrates on the immediate postwar decades, the efforts continue right on to the present. When Reagan died a few years ago, the press was awash in reminiscing of such a strong proponent of free markets and international economic liberalization. Never mind that his administration initiated the biggest wave of Keynesian spending ever seen. Propaganda and indoctrination is alive and well in our socitety.

It’s a common misconception that propaganda is a weapon of totalitarianism. In totalitarian societies, dissenters are forcibly dealth with. But in free societies, acceptance of indoctriniation is a key priority.

Perhaps the essential difference between free and totalitarian societies in the world today is that free societies believe their own propaganda.

Here’s an example: the Euler product identity for the Riemann zeta function:

where $s \in \left\{z \in \mathbb{C}: \Re(z) > 1 \right\}$ and $p$ runs over the prime numbers.

In previous residences, where I was in a slightly more densely populated setting, I’ve left open wireless networks before only to find my latency skyrocketing; I can only assume this is due to others connecting and hogging my upload. Comcast throttles my upload to about 50KB/s. In those cases I resorted to running WEP. But if people are polite back to me, and do not ruin my internet experience, I have no problem opening up my wireless for them.

Instead, I was in the exhibition hall, representing Sage. And while I am qiute tired of answering, “well, why should I quit using Mathematica and switch to your software?”, I had a lot of fun. William and Robert Bradshaw had spent the last several weeks integrating jmol (a java program providing 3d visualization for chemists) into Sage for use in interactive 3d plotting. The results are spectacular; you can check them out by using the plot3d() command in Sage. The Jmol people have integrated really good support for stereographic vision, both in the cross-eye and red-blue sense. We definitely attracted a large crowd in our area. Robert Bradshaw somehow got his hands on lots and lots of 3d glasses, and they were a big hit.

Sage was recently slashdotted, and as a result, much of the open source community knows about Sage. However, I feel like there are very few actual mathematicians who read slashdot. So the meetings represented a great networking opportunity for us. I am willing to bet that a lot of people will go back to their departments and colleges and universities across the continent and spread the word about Sage.

Other highlights included seeing and meeting people like Neil Sloane, Eric Weisstein, and Sheldon Axler, cruising from banquet to banquet (including the rather uncomfortable feeling of being at penthouse suite NSA “Women in Mathematics” reception), and enjoying the beautiful weather in San Diego. I also got to visit with some really cool people, and write a decent amount of Sage code. The trip was fun, exhausting, and too much time spent in an exhibition hall. That said, I’m looking forward to representing Sage next year.