David Bromwich's Claim that Totalitarianism Provides a Simplification of the World

David Bromwich of Yale argues that totalitarianism is partly about denying the inherent contradictions in the world, as much a quest for world that is simple as it is a quest for a world with a central control. A simplification of reality is one of the goals of a totalitarian government.

There is a desire for coherent narrative that is simpler than - and easier to digest than - reality and you can gain power by providing that. Maybe the ultimate in power is providing the narrative people want to – and easily can – believe.

Hannah Arendt on Loneliness and the Temptation of Totalitarianism

After World War II, Hannah Arendt set out to understand how totalitarianism could take root in modern societies. In *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951), she argued that mass loneliness - not just private sorrow, but a felt "non‑belonging to the shared world" - is both a precondition for, and an instrument of, totalitarian rule. As she put it, totalitarian government “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

Arendt distinguishes isolation (being cut off from political action) from loneliness (being deserted by others and by a common reality). Loneliness, she argues, dissolves the “common world” - the shared facts, institutions, and spaces that anchor public life - and thereby prepares people to accept ideological fictions in place of lived reality.

Contemporary life can intensify this dynamic. In today’s information economy, much of what we “know” arrives pre‑packaged - memes, snippets, and ready‑made takes - rather than ripening through experience and conversation. We consume processed information the way we once learned to consume processed food: easy, quick, and often denaturing. The result can be a thinner common world and a thicker sense of aloneness—exactly the soil Arendt warned can nourish the worst political temptations.

Why Social Change Slows When People Live Longer (and one possible way to change that)

Ronald Inglehart, one of the world’s most influential political scientists, spent decades compiling cross-national survey data that tracked shifting values across dozens of countries. His work revealed that social change often appears to be a matter of evolving public opinion—but in fact, it’s more often the result of generational replacement than individual transformation.

Inglehart's findings suggest that people rarely change their core values after age 20 or 25. So when a society moves from widespread rejection of immigration and LGBTQ rights to broad acceptance, it's not because individuals changed their minds en masse. It's because older voters with more traditional views passed away, and were replaced by younger generations with more liberal, secular, and self-expression–oriented values.

But what happens when life expectancy rises and birthrates fall? You get fewer new voters entering the system and more older voters staying in it longer. That slows the pace of change—not because beliefs are getting more rigid, but because the demographic shift that drives change is happening more slowly.

Inglehart once put it this way:

“The most important political change is not that people change their minds, but that people with different minds replace them.”

In short: Social progress depends not just on new ideas—but on new people. And in aging societies, even progress has to wait its turn.

But maybe it doesn’t have to.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing modern societies is to create for their older citizens what public education once did for the young: institutions and experiences that stretch, inform, and enlighten the mind—long after graduation. A democracy of lifelong development might not just slow decline. It could accelerate renewal.

What Monthly Job Numbers Actually Track

Here's a reminder of what is actually being counted each month with the jobs numbers.

Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks millions of job changes - hires, quits, layoffs, retirements, firings, and more. These gross flows are large: for example, around 6 million people are hired and 5.8 million leave their jobs in a typical month (according to the BLS's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS).

When the monthly Employment Situation Report announces net job gains or losses - say, +150,000 - that figure represents the net difference between hires and separations across the entire labor market. They are not just counting / estimating 150,000 new jobs; they are counting / estimating nearly 12 million changes in job status amongst a labor force of about 167 million.

It takes a wild imagination to think that the task of counting NET job gains or losses amongst a population of 335 million Americans each MONTH is trivial or not subject to revision as more data comes in. This is just one of the many reasons that data is harder than memes.

Asians Throwing Wonder Bread At Weddings

Here's something you probably don't know.
In the West, they throw rice at weddings.
In the East, they throw Wonder Bread.

["I did not know that!"
"Of course you didn't! He made that up!"
"Are you sure?"
"Positive!"
"Next you'll be saying that I can't believe everything I read on the internet."
"You can't!"
"Well why would they go through the trouble of posting things if they weren't true?"]

Tesla's Stock Seems Wildly Overpriced

Tesla closed today at nearly $333 a share but fell in after-hours trading.

Among the 10 most valuable companies in the world, nine have an average price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 37. Tesla’s P/E is 183. That’s more than 9 times higher than its peers - a valuation that implies soaring future profits.

But today, Tesla reported that its earnings were down 18% year over year — not exactly the trajectory you'd expect from a company priced for explosive growth.

If Tesla were valued like the rest of the top 10, its stock might trade closer to $70 than $333. At some point, it’s fair to ask whether Tesla should be priced like a transformative business - or a meme stock.

Why Epstein May Not Be Reason Enough for the MAGA Crowd to Turn From Trump

I think most people are overestimating the degree to which Trump will lose any support because his closest friend was a pedophile.

First a clarification. Epstein seems to have enjoyed underaged but not prepubescent girls. Remember that the age of consent in most states in 1900 was 12 to 14. That was a time when many of the Make America Great Again folks thought the country was better.

MAGA wants to return to an earlier time. Part of that - I would argue - is the allure of a time when women were expected to be physically mature before becoming a mate but not have time to become intellectually or emotionally mature. No time to form their own opinions. Humans are social creatures and as society becomes more complex it takes longer for any of us to "mature" to the degree that we define and pursue our own lives, careers, and potential. Women who have time to define their own lives have their own opinions and values and goals and won't so readily subordinate all that to a man who calls them beautiful. A 15 year-old who has passed through puberty but hasn't had time to define herself and her aspirations? That's clearly alluring to men who want "romances" that are more fantasy than reality, a woman more likely to smile nervously and nod when you say something stupid enough to provoke an eyeroll or even criticism from a grown women.

The notion that the MAGA crowd is going to turn on Trump because either he AND his best friend - or even just his best friend - regularly and illegally exploited the naivety of what we now call underaged girls but we once called marriageable women seems to me optimistic. Remember that Trump only won in the only American presidential elections in history in which a woman was the candidate from a leading party. The idea of mature women who have strong opinions is less alluring to the MAGA men than young women who might naively nod to - and even seem impressed by - whatever nonsense they spout.

It would be nice to think that Trump would lose some portion of his support because of his deep friendship with Epstein but this isn't exactly new news and it's not clear that any of his supporters find that kind of thing particularly disturbing. Certainly no Republican members of Congress or his Cabinet find it disqualifying and they're all still working hard to support him.

It seems naive to assume that Trump and his morals are much different from those of his supporters or the rest of the GOP. (And yes. I would love to be wrong on this but I'm too old to confuse hope and expectation.)

Inflation - Completely Unchanged Everywhere but in Trump's Mind

"We had inflation but it's gone now."- Trump this week

Inflation in ...
- November , the month of the election, when Trump claimed - and apparently many American voters and journalists believed - it was outrageous: 2.7%
- June (latest numbers: 2.7%.

For those of you not good with numbers, that is, indeed, the exact same number. And for context, through this entire 21st century average monthly inflation (measured from a year earlier) is 2.6%. And of course no one talks about inflation now because it is memes and not facts that drive political discourse nowadays.

Next generation historians:
"We were going to continue to freely trade with other countries - which kept prices low and stock prices high, prosecute presidents and other politicians who sued journalists for unflattering coverage, respect the rights of everyday Americans even if they had brownskin and were standing near a Home Depot, invest in research and education that continues to transform the lives of everyday Americans, fund aid that kept millions of children across the globe alive, and attract the best and brightest from across the globe but ... inflation was 2.7% when everyone knew it should have been 2.6%."

The MAGA boys: their cover story might be nearly as bad as their policies.

The Twin Engines of Alarm and Hope

I feel like I’m more alarmed than most people by what’s happening in American politics right now - and more hopeful about what might come after.

Trump is taking a wrecking ball to international trade and the global economy built around it. That’s alarming. (MAGA types spend a remarkable amount of time decrying globalism on the world wide web - a feat of irony they seem blissfully unaware of.) And of course he's also going after national institutions and norms in ways that are alarming.

The hopeful part? Just within the domain of international progress? After Trump, it seems likely the global economy will restructure itself to be more robust - less dependent on US leadership and more resilient to shifts in the political mood of any single leader or even the majorities of a half dozen countries. We see this, for instance, in the EU's support for Ukraine, something that has always been present but seems stronger now that they realize they cannot depend on the US. Hopefully in the future the US will again take a strong role in the defense and development of Western Europe but all the better when Western Europe's fate is less reliant on the US. (Or any one country, for that matter.) I'm not saying that the US won't always have an influence over other regions during the next generation or so; I am saying that the more resilient are the pro-development policies of any one region with or without the US or the EU or China, the more resilient will be progress.

Alarm and hope both matter. Without them, people tend to settle for inaction. That is not a good option right now.

RFK Jr.'s Healthcare Policy as Placebo

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our Secretary of Health and Human Services, has declared that “being healthy is a patriotic duty.”

If you hear that casually, it might sound either innocuous or wildly sensible. But it isn’t a policy - it’s a slogan - and not even a catchy one.

Keep in mind, he also oversees welfare programs. Imagine if he said, “Being wealthy is a patriotic duty.” Imagine that you thought that this statement actually tied to anything in the real world.

“What are your plans for tackling disease?”
“Ask people to be healthier.”
“What about poverty?”
“Ask them to be wealthier.”
"Violent crime?"
"Ask Americans to be kinder."

That’s not policy. It's not even interesting enough to be propaganda.

A tax on sugar, like the tax on cigarettes? That’s policy.

Investing in vaccine development and equitable deployment? Policy. (And by the way, RFK and Trump have cut funding for the development and rollout of important vaccines.)

A sovereign wealth fund and / or a wealth tax to narrow inequality? Policy.

Simply telling people it’s their patriotic duty to be healthy - or wealthy - isn’t leadership or policy. It has no efficacy. I think the word you're searching for is placebo.

Mission Preternatural

File under: Well, it amused me …A spinoff from the Mission Impossible franchise:

Mission Preternatural.

Two priests, three nuns, and an incredulous indigenous population. They’ve crossed an ocean to bring a new god to people who already have dozens.

Hamilton, a Bank, a VP and a President, Duels and the Country's First Great Recession

Alexander Hamilton – the genius killed in a duel on this day (11 July) in 1804 – created the US Bank to stabilize currency and capital markets for the new republic.
Aaron Burr, Hamilton's killer, didn’t go to jail for murdering this extraordinary Founding Father. Instead, he finished his term as Jefferson’s Vice President.

Andrew Jackson – the only president known to have killed a man in a duel – killed Hamilton’s Bank, which he saw as an instrument of elites, setting up the nation for its worst recession to that point. (Jackson was one of those populists who didn’t let a lack of understanding about how the economy worked get in the way of his conviction that something dramatic must be done.)

Vice President Aaron Burr killed Hamilton.
President Andrew Jackson killed his great institution.

Hamilton, the orphaned 14-year-old who bravely came alone from the Caribbean to this new place and helped turn it into the world’s first modern democracy.

A Huge Problem for the US: We're Serious About Private Sector Leadership and Entrepreneurship and Absurd About Public Sector Leadership and Entrepreneurship

Here is a huge problem that rarely gets discussed.

Private sector CEOS make 100X what members of congress make.

Related, we so highly value entrepreneurship in the private sector but value it so little - if at all - in the public sector. That disconnect has created our current political dilemma. We’re asking voters to choose between institutions they don’t trust and a strongman they shouldn’t trust. Meanwhile, as a society, we making billionaires out of successful private sector entrepreneurs and largely ignoring or squelching public sector entrepreneurs who might create new institutions to deal with new or different problems.

As recently as the 1960s, we took the public sector about as seriously as we did the private sector. Rather than paying private sector CEOS 100X what we paid members of congress, we paid them roughly 3X.