Even Deep History is Not That Far Away

The Dunbar Number is 150. It is an estimate of the number of people one might have in a social circle.

If we go back 150 lifetimes - assuming 40 year life expectancies - we go back 6,000 years, which takes us to around 4000 BC.

4000 BC corresponds roughly to the early Bronze Age, a time when human societies were increasingly using metalworking, developing urban centers, and establishing complex social structures in various parts of the world.

How far back is that?

Well, Mesopotamia was just in the Copper Age, leading into the Early Bronze Age. Mesopotamia, particularly in the region of modern-day Iraq, was seeing the rise of complex societies. These groups would eventually develop into the Sumerian civilization, one of the world's first known civilizations, which arose in the later parts of the 4th millennium BCE. No dynasties had yet emerged in what would become ancient Egypt, China, or the Indus Valley.

The people you know represent enough lifetimes to take us back to pre-history.

What do I take from that? Even deep history is not that far away - fewer generations than the number of people we know.

 

Time to Move Beyond Blase to Bedazzled at Biden's Policies and the Biden Economy

The Biden presidency is setting a bar for economic performance that has never before been hit and is unlikely to be matched again. This is not by chance.

A few things to remember about Biden.

1. Obama gave him responsibility for leading the 2008 Great Recession recovery efforts. Obama was opposed at every step of his presidency and in the economic recovery, with unemployment persistently and depressingly high, his recovery plan was one more defined by austerity than stimulus. The unemployment rate in his first term averaged 9%. That was an extraordinarily painful period for Americans that - unsurprisingly - created extremists on both side of the political divide, from the Occupy Wall Street crowd who denounced markets and banks to the Tea Party folks who denounced government and regulation. Biden clearly learned that cautious recoveries are of little benefit to communities, families, or government budgets. Austerity in the face of a recession is a ridiculous way to recover.

2. Biden has been around forever and this is an asset. Biden knows the personalities and weaknesses of world leaders you've heard of and policy makers and staffers who you've never heard of. Biden knows which sharp policy wonks have ideas for stimulating investments, create jobs, and lower carbon emissions. He knows how to get people from across the aisle to vote for his infrastructure spending. Put more simply, Biden knows policies, policy makers and politicians - American and foreign. This makes him incredibly effective.

3. Biden's policy wonks are at work on programs that will never get properly covered because they're largely too ... well, wonky to appeal to the average reader who just wants to hear why they should be offended at Trump today or get confirmation that this week - sure enough - Biden is another week older. Someday some of his policy makers will write fascinating books about the causes and consequences of this economy and a few of us weird people who delight in things like that will delight in that; most people will remain blissfully unaware.

4. Biden consciously incurred a big fiscal deficit in his first year knowing that the best way to reduce long-term debt is to stimulate an economy to its full potential. He realized that the first priority was to put Americans back to work and then household and government budgets will strengthen. But his policy was not a one year, one trick policy. He's stimulating investments in local communities that result in new infrastructure, new factories, and new training programs. And the result is dramatic: projections of long-term deficits have halved since Biden has taken office. link

Biden's policies are stimulating the economy from a number of directions. He's ignited a variety of infrastructure projects. The interstate highway bill Eisenhower signed into law stimulated GDP growth by roughly 0.5% per year for decades. (And when average GDP growth is close to 2%, 0.5% extra is extraordinary.) The interstate highway bill stimulated the economy during highway construction. That won't surprise you. And then it stimulated the economy as people used it, stimulating travel, trade, and inter-city and interstate exchange as chains like McDonalds and Hilton Hotels emerged. Biden is not just stimulating the economy with various infrastructure projects and subsidies to alternative energy projects and manufacturing, he's setting us up for years of extra economic activity as these new bridges continue to stimulate trade and travel and these new factories continue to support jobs and productivity.

The most extraordinary outcome of Biden's policies is the incredible rate of job growth. One of the elements behind that that is rarely reported? The extraordinary rate of new business formation. This statistic gets hardly any coverage and yet seems to me the most important of all economic statistics - speaking as it does to the levels of optimism and long-term implications for the creation of new jobs, new products, new services, new markets, and new wealth. New business formation in the decade of the 2020s is running at TWICE the level it did in the decade of the 2000s. Double. 2X. So, so much more. And the ripple effect of that is one reason that in the first quarter of 2024 - now in the fourth year of the recovery from the worst of COVID - job creation is running at an even higher rate than it did last year.

The phenomenal rates of business formation and job creation are not the product of chance. They are the result of policy choices from a politician who delights in politics and policy in a time when it is so very stylish to hold politicians, politics and policy in contempt. Fortunately, Joe Biden still thinks that politics and policy matter, and rather than blow things up the way his predecessor did, he's building an economy that creates jobs and businesses at the fastest rate in your lifetime.

Lincoln's 44 Days Without War

In 1861,
March 4, Lincoln was inaugurated for his 1st term as president
April 12, Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, officially beginning the Civil War.
Lincoln had 39 days of peace in his first term.

In 1865,
March 4, Lincoln was inaugurated for 2nd term
April 9 - Sunday - Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox
April 14 - Good Friday, Lincoln was shot
April 15 - Saturday morning - Lincoln died
Lincoln had 5 days of peace in his second term.

In the 1,504 days of his presidency, Lincoln had only 44 days without war.


"There have been 16,000 books and articles published on Lincoln—125 on the assassination alone—more than any other American."

Regret in the UK - Post-BREXIT GDP Slowdown and the Case for Globalization

It was the British and Dutch who became the wealthiest communities in the world by pioneering globalization. BREXIT was a decisive vote to withdraw from the world as part of the retreat from globalization. Brits - whose economy has been in a slog since voting for BREXIT - now regret it.

How much of a slog? Look at the graph below. Real GDP growth in the UK in the 6 years before BREXIT was 13.0%. In the 6 years after it has been only 7.7% - a drop in growth rate of about 40%. (By contrast, US GDP grew by 12% in the 6 years before and by 13.1% in the 6 years after.)

This isn't complicated. Communities that become part of the larger world prosper.

Communities that cut themselves off - or are cut off - from the world languish.

Reversing globalization is fear-based politics that is bad for the economy. It's exciting to attack globalists but they're right about the benefits of being connected to the world outside your borders.

Communities that Least Understand the Economy Are Most Likely to Find Trump Persuasive

One of the most underreported facts of the modern world is simply this:

communities that know how to create great paying jobs overwhelmingly reject Trump's policies. Communities that can't create great paying jobs think he knows what he's talking about.

Nationwide, Trump got 47% of the vote.

In the communities that create the highest paying jobs, Trump got only 20% of the vote.

In the communities with the lowest-paying jobs, Trump got 58% of the vote.

Put differently, people who least understand the economy are most likely to find Trump persuasive.

In the 10 counties with the highest average wages, Biden got nearly 4X as many votes as Trump.
In the 10 counties with the lowest average wages, Biden got only 0.8 votes for each vote Trump got.
What is the difference in wages in the 10 highest and 10 lowest paid counties? The highest make 2.7X as much on average.

Here is the latest data (3Q 2023) on the 10 highest and 10 lowest paying counties.
Average Annual Wages
US: $69,368
Bottom Ten Counties: $46,160
Top Ten Counties: $123,415

The Land Battle for States Gives Way to the Cultural Battle for Nations - the Modern World as a Lava Lamp

Imagine a map with all its neat lines and borders, like a giant puzzle where each piece is a different country, clearly marked and separate. That's a state, like the one you live in, defined by those lines on the map.

Now, think about your favorite playlist, the sports you follow, the memes you share, and the beliefs you stand up for. That mix, the feeling it provokes, isn't tied to a line on any map. It's more like the shifting shapes in a lava lamp, always moving, coming together, and breaking apart. That's what a nation is all about - it's the music, the games, the drama and comedy, and the serious stuff that matter to you and yours.
In the 20th century, people fought with tanks and planes over those map lines, trying to say, "This land is mine." But now, the big battles are more about who we are and what we believe in, like sustainability, equality, rules, and investments. These fights aren't about grabbing a piece of land; they're about shaping the world with our ideas. And of course these battles don't end with a flag in the ground. They keep going, evolving, just like the ever-changing swirls in a lava lamp.

I've been staring at this lava lamp for decades. It's mesmerizing.

The Religious Right's Pyrrhic Victory (Or, The Cost of Using Trump As A Representative)

Trump began selling Bibles this week to raise money for his trial for using campaign funds to pay for sex with a porn star.

There is nothing else you need to know about the intersection of for-profit religion, crime and politics in these United States. The religious right got their ban on abortions by making Trump their partner. They have also lost another swath of active church members who've simply walked away from churches in the last few years. (According to a study by Faith Communities Today, the median congregation size dropped from 137 people in 2000 to 65 by 2020. There is evidence that it has fallen further since.)

The religious right may think they are selling bibles. Others may simply see it as selling out.

Kahneman On Substituting Easy Questions for Uesful Questions

Daniel Kahneman died this week. He won a Noble Prize in Economics made remarkable by the fact that not only did he not have a degree in economics, but he never even took an economics class.
Here is a blog post from 2011 that I wrote about one of his key ideas – our tendency to substitute trivial questions for hard questions.

One of the great mysteries of life is how we get sucked into political arguments of no consequence. Can you burn a flag? Can he wear a dress? Can she say that?

Which questions, by contrast, have real consequence? Questions like Will this economic policy make more people rich? Will that economic policy make fewer people poor? Will this political policy give more people rights? Will this policy extend or shorten life expectancies?

I think I found the answer to why we waste so much time trying to sound smart talking about such stupid issues in Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

One concept Kahneman shares has to do with our tendency to substitute easy questions for hard ones. For me, this explains why so much airtime in politics is taken up with questions of little consequence.
Kahneman gives an example of an analyst who bought stock in Ford. Asked why, the analyst replied that he'd just been to a car show and left convinced that Ford "sure can make great cars." As Kahneman points out, the real question when buying stock is whether or not the stock is undervalued. But the analyst substituted that difficult question for the simpler question of whether Ford was making good cars. All of us, when faced with a difficult question, tend to substitute a simpler - albeit irrelevant - one.
It seems to me that the big question in politics should be, How do we improve quality of life for more people? That’s a big question and answering it is one that isn’t easy. It is a challenge to feel confident about one's ability to answer it.

By contrast, the little and largely irrelevant questions – silly questions best characterized by whether or not we should be able to burn the flag or use a bathroom that says Woman or Man – are ones for which we have clear answers as long as we have strong opinions. We don't need data. We don't need studies. Answering these questions leaves us feeling confident in our own judgment. Answering the big questions, by contrast, makes us feel uncertain. For most of us, we prefer feeling confident to feeling ignorant. The result? We choose questions because of how they make us feel rather than what their answers will do to improve the world.

And that’s a pity. Just think what we could do with all the attention paid to politics if it were focused on real, albeit difficult, questions. Questions that have the potential to make us more humble and the world better - rather than make us more smug and make the world no better.

Benjamin Franklin's Power over Power

Benjamin Franklin was involved with two great shifts in power: the creation of the world's first modern democracy and experiments that demystified lightning, transforming it from divine judgment into something that could be mitigated by a lightning rod. It turns out that man, and not God, could control or divert the power of lightning or governments.

Money Saving Tip - Hacking into Advertising

Here's a money-saving tip. Next time you see an ad for an enticing product, just re-enact the ad. Skip the product altogether and go straight for the joy the product delivers.
"Should we go shopping?"
"No. Just smile more."

It Is No Coincidence - How the Loss of Aspiring Novelists Has Undermined the Power and Purpose of the Daily Newspaper

Once upon a time, the first draft of history - our newspaper articles that let us know each day about what was happening - was written by aspiring novelists. Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Gabriel García Márquez, George Orwell, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe were a few of the reporters who became famous novelists but the newsroom was full of journalists who aspired to be like them. A story rich with characters and taking its time to unfold was the standard. A world that would - after suspense and confusion - eventually make sense lay behind the daily reports.

One of the reasons that the world feels more chaotic now is that the folks reporting it to us don't understand fiction, don't understand stories. There's always been chaos. News - to make any sense at all - has to construct a narrative. The aspiring novelist - who saw daily events as part of a bigger narrative - were better at that important task.

It's no coincidence that steam-powered presses made daily newspapers popular in the mid-1800s, about the same time that the nation-state emerged. Newspapers gave communities a common narrative, a shared set of interests and issues. They were the source of the ideas from which nation-states were debated and built.
It's no coincidence that we're increasingly divided as newspapers drift into obsolescence and we lose the narrative glue that binds together imagined communities like nation-states.

And it's no coincidence that coincidence is not enough to hold our attention or hold us together. For that you need a story.

The Whimsy and Magic of Physico-theology

Physico-theology, an idea that gained prominence in the 17th and 18th centuries, refers to a theological doctrine that seeks to demonstrate the existence and attributes of God through the observation and study of nature.

This from Ritchie Robertson's book on the Enlightenment.

"In Germany, physico-theology gave rise to a large number of specialisms praising different aspects of creation, such as ichthyotheology (fish), petinotheology (birds), testaceotheology (snails), melittotheology (bees), chortotheology (grass), brontotheology (thunder) and sismotheology (earthquakes), each of which had at least one book devoted to it. The Netherlands produced also theologies of snow, lightning and grasshoppers."

How could anyone read this and not be left wanting to know more about the theologies of bees, snow or grasshoppers? What DO bees believe?