For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame. In the end, this is the lesson of the NBA lockout. A man buys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips the franchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then — as both parties happily count their winnings — what lesson are we asked to draw? The players are greedy.

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the NBA lockout, ending with a scathing indictment of today's anti-tax wealthy US citizens. I don't really care about basketball, but I do care about taxes, and the public shaming of some of the US's most embarrassing citizens gives my populist side a reason to smile.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

You know that there will be MANY rounds of revision in your future and that over the course of working together you’ll be as much a therapist as a designer. Totaling those 500 hours at WHATEVER your hourly rate is will equal a pretty good pay day.

Jessica Hische struck out on her own not so very long ago, and is sharing her wisdom regarding pricing freelance projects with the rest of us. A long read, but well worth it. Well-written. Thanks, Jessica.