OK, actually, lately I've needed to justify off-sides, intimate acquaintance with characteristics of (n): small (12 > n < 1,750) vs large (>5,000) dataset manipulations for descriptive purposes or predictive power, knowing poor μ (mooooo) ≤ 5% N is an axiomatic threshhold to modeling normal macroeconomic, politcially self-serving gears which determine  or characterize populations ≥ 500K. NB the gaps.

Personally, I've no reason to believe analysis of abonormal distributions produces affirmative "national" or totalitarian governing strategy. I'm not convinced that standardizing every business input and output is a requirement of economic and lawful security and business. (Here is an interesting interview in which participatns dispute the social-level function of commecial litigation. Ambiguous to say the least. The people need righteous attys rather than "economists", desperately.) Then again, I'm a democrat, willing and able to negotiate specious benefits and losses to effect economic stability, over all and over time.

So I realized, again: all those joker citations rely on *.gov compound estimates to formulate a story fit to print. And it is that methodoligical gate to the pasture that separates the ignorant (phil.) from, at least, the skeptical.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

When facts makes theory look bad, it's urgent to kill the facts (what have they done for us lately?).

Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.

As it happens, there is another exhibition referred to today in artdaily.com which features exactly the kind of really constructed, Tolkien-illustration type painting popular at the time Friedrich was working. But even Hackert's works were seen as rather naturalistic for the period before Friedrich:

HAMBURG.- Jakob Philipp Hackert (1737-1807) regarded landscapes as natural events, and his precisely observed depictions of geological and atmospheric phenomena marked a turning point in 18th-century landscape painting. For the first time, a comprehensive exhibition of Hackert's work is being presented at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in cooperation with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Foundation of Weimar Classics).

... he spent the greater part of his life working in Italy. Here he established his reputation as an internationally acclaimed artist and contributed greatly to shaping the image of Italy before 1800. Besides veduta, harbour views and hunting scenes, Hackert above all painted atmospheric landscapes in the Roman Campagna, Tuscany and parts of Southern Italy such as Naples and Sicily.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=27453