Outlawing Comedy (And what that tells us about the last time America was great)

All of these late-night comedians getting cancelled makes me wonder if at least a portion of the MAGA crowd will decide they don't want to live in a country where comedy is outlawed.

At least those of us who were wondering when the MAGA crowd thought America was last great have our answer: back when the Puritans thought laughter was folly.

MAHA - make Americans humorless again!

Adams - No Reason to Believe That Our Founding Generation Was Better Than You Are

John Adams’s letter to Josiah Quincy III, February 9, 1811. Adams pushes back against “reverence” for the founding generation:

“I ought not to object to your Reverence for your Fathers … but to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the Merit of the different Periods, I have no reason to believe that We were better than you are. We had as many poor Creatures and selfish Beings, in proportion among us as you have among you: nor were there then more enlightened Men, or in greater Number in proportion than there are now.”
Context: Quincy had praised the [founding] “Fathers.” Adams - then in his mid-70s - downplayed any moral superiority of 1776-era leaders.

This seems to me enormously important. Every period has people who can navigate us into new territory and to pretend that we don't have such people today is really the equivalent to simply shirking responsibility.

Jim Moore's Poem Those Others

 Those Others, by Jim Moore

We lived at the end of an empire.

Sometimes we gathered in huge auditoriums
and tried to understand.
Our shame did not save us,
nor our sadness redeem us,
as we came to understand
how others, far into the future,
would look back at us,
shaking their heads: we hoped
in sorrow; more likely, anger.

The Development of Time Travel That Doesn't Disrupt the Development of Time Travel

Time travel’s problem isn’t engineering; it’s non-disruption. We’ve allegedly cracked it three times, but each visit into the past edited away the very path of causality that led to the development of the time machine, resetting its development back to zero.

At least that’s what he told the investors at Time Is Not a Machine, Inc. as a way to account for the few hundred billion he claimed had been spent developing prototypes and not - as his critics suggested - merely spent on having a good time.

Colbert, Kimmel, Trump and the Role of the Jester

Stephen Colbert has been cancelled.
Jimmy Kimmel has been pulled off the air because of something he supposedly said about Charlie Kirk.

Here's the deal, though. Kimmel didn't make a comment about Kirk: he made a comment about MAGA. Specifically, he said,
"The Maga Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it." His comment was directed at the living, not the dead.

Kings kept jesters for a reason: one person with a license to puncture bad ideas. The jokes were cover; the job was dissent.

King: “My people hate inflation. First, I’ll slap tariffs on foreign goods—”
Jester: “—which will raise prices.”

And the king doesn’t take his head, because that’s why the jester exists.

Trump? He doesn’t just want to be king. He wants no jesters. Anywhere in the land.

P.S. do you know who did not get cancelled? The Fox news host Brian Kilmeade who literally recommended involuntarily euthanizing homeless people. (I think the old-fashioned way one might say that is kill, as in, "We wouldn't have a homeless problem if we just killed anyone who was homeless.")
Trump's US in 2025. You get cancelled for making jokes about the president's policies but not for suggesting mass killings of our poorest people. You MAGA folks might want to do a little soul searching. If, you know, you haven't already sold it.

A Decoder Ring for MAGA Regarding School Shootings

It's not always easy to understand how someone else feels but here's something that might help those of you who lean off to the MAGA side of things. You know how upset you are now about Charlie Kirk's murder? How you feel like something should be done because this never should have happened and something like this shouldn't happen again? Even though you didn't personally know Charlie Kirk and he didn't know you?
That's how the rest of us feel very stinking time there is another gun death, another school shooting.
We're upset.
We think something should be done about it.
And we think we could / should / must do more.
To quote you, All lives matter. Not just the ones with lots of social media followers.

Last Words

They couldn't tell if his last words were

"Carpe diem," or
"Carpet demons."

 
And the question of which haunted them.

Curious Exaggerations in the Socio-Economic World

Wealth is curious.

To be in the top 1% for height, you need to be only 6'4". Median is 5'9".
To be in the top 1% for wealth, you need to have $11.2 million. Median is $193k.

The ratio of top 1% to median in
Height is 1.1 to 1
Wealth is 58 to 1

The social world seems to create larger disparities than the physical world.

Gordon S. Woods On American Chaos in the Generation After the Revolution

We have a tendency to romanticize the past, to gloss over its ridiculous problems. The historian Gordon Woods tells about life in the US in the generation or so after the American Revolution. (This is paraphrased from a talk of his.)

---

In the generation after the American Revolution, there was as much cause for despair as for celebration. Violence of all sorts surged. Rates of homicide rose above those in England. Even family murders - men killing their wives and children - spiked to levels unmatched in the nineteenth century. Urban rioting grew more common and destructive, leaving lives and property in ruins.

Drinking soared to an all-time high. Americans consumed about five gallons of pure alcohol per person each year - the highest rate ever recorded anywhere, before or since. Courts held dram breaks instead of coffee breaks, with judges and juries passing bottles around. Universities saw record riots and student defiance. It was a society both intoxicated and unsettled, leaving many to wonder what exactly they had unleashed.

Religion, too, was in ferment. The Anglican and Puritan dominance of the 1760s gave way to Methodists and Baptists, their horseback ministers carrying revival across the frontier. At Cane Ridge, Kentucky in 1801, tens of thousands gathered for what was hailed as “the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since the beginning of Christianity.” The scenes were wild - people rolling on the ground, laughing, moaning, crying. Critics joked that more souls were conceived than converted. Yet from these upheavals sprang new sects: Shakers, Universalists, evangelical movements that bloomed and vanished, and a decade later, the Mormons. Some were founded by women, many flared out quickly, but all testified to the volatility of belief.

By 1815, as the revolutionary generation passed from the scene, the founders looked on a nation they barely recognized. Instead of harmony, they saw disorder; instead of sober republican virtue, a society drinking, rioting, and praying itself into a bewildering array of directions. 

---

Far from settling into tranquility, the young republic revealed a pattern that would persist: there has never been a moment in American history when Americans turned to one another and said, *“At last, we have no troubles. Now we can live in peace and prosperity.”

Even Immortal Gods Die Once their Institutions Erode

The Greek and Roman gods animated the lives of Athens and Rome - visible in temples and statues, invoked in conversations, explanations, and hopes. As those institutions crumbled, so did the gods. The same fate befell Egyptian deities once sustained by pyramids and priesthoods, Norse gods once sustained by sagas and rituals, and countless others now remembered only as myths.Even immortal gods died without their institutions. Temples and priesthoods gave the gods life; when those institutions collapsed, the gods became myths.

It is not just the gods who are created, sustained, or forgotten by institutions. That is also the fate of us mortals.

Institutions separate us from the other animals. You’re no match for a gorilla, bear or tiger when you’re naked and alone. You can’t outrun a lion. You’re not stronger than an orangutan. You might – barehanded – catch a rabbit but the energy you’d consume finding it, catching it, preparing it and cooking it might be more than the calories it would give you, take more energy than it would return.

Most of us would quickly perish if left to survive in a world without institutional structures, norms and supply chains.

The degree to which we thrive or flounder is a function of our institutions. Yet weirdly, most of us most of the time treat our institutions with even less creative imagination than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians treated theirs. We take them as inherited or rail at them as if we were cursing the gods. We don’t have a tradition for calmly, rationally, collectively engaging in the task of defining and redefining the institutions that define us. Because who we are and who we will become is not something we will do on our own, naked and afraid; it is something we will only do through the institutions we create and change.

The Secret to Japan's 100,000 100 Year Olds

Japan has set a new record of nearly 100,000 people who are 100 years old.

The secret to their success seems to include

• diet (less sugar, salt and calories than those of us in the West),
• exercise (among other things, a national radio program guiding the elderly through 3-minutes of daily exercise has a wide audience), and
• fraud (family not reporting on the death of a deceased relative in order to continue collecting pension money).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd07nljlyv0o

Stochastic Terrorism and Social Media

One of the darker inventions of our gatekeeper-free media landscape is something now called stochastic terrorism. The phrase captures a dynamic in which individuals or groups use mass communication to vilify, dehumanize, or target opponents in ways that raise the probability of violence without ever directly calling for it. No explicit order is given; instead, the message circulates widely enough that the odds rise that someone, somewhere, will act on it. The speaker retains deniability, while the damage is all too real. The causality is not deterministic; the communication just raises the probability of violence. It's more like taking a life by drunk driving than shooting someone.

This tactic is not entirely new - fiery rhetoric has always carried the risk of inciting unstable listeners. What is new is the scale, speed, and algorithmic amplification of today’s social media. Where once editors, producers, or publishers acted as gatekeepers and might mitigate such messages, today’s platforms reward whatever drives engagement. Outrage, paranoia, and conspiracy spread with greater virality than moderation or nuance, and that makes stochastic terrorism a kind of emergent property of the digital environment.

In this sense, it is one of the most dangerous side effects of a communications system designed without responsibility or oversight. What looks like “just words” from one angle becomes, at scale, a statistical machine for nudging the probability of violence upward. And unlike older forms of incitement, it requires no coordination, no command, and no conspiracy - only a steady stream of inflammatory content.

Stochastic terrorism is a reminder that the rules of the information economy do not merely shape attention or markets; they change communities, levels of safety, the dynamics of democracy, and trust. Without gatekeepers, we gain openness and access. But we also inherit a new vulnerability: the ability of anyone, anywhere, to pull the rhetorical lever that increases the odds of someone else’s destruction.

Addendum ...
This seems to suggest that we might want to develop a counter-spell in the form of stochastic benevolence? Viral kindness? Random acts of kindness? It seems to call for the development and deployment of some kind of vaccine.

American Identity - and Acceptable Marriages - Now More Defined by Politics Than Religion

In the 1960s, acceptance of interfaith marriage (e.g., Catholic-Protestant, Christian-Jewish) was often in the teens or twenties. Today, more than a quarter of Americans are in interfaith marriages, and most parents say they would not be upset if their child married someone of another faith.
By contrast, partisan identity has hardened. In the mid-20th century, few cared much about marriages across party lines, but now about 35–40% of partisans say they would be upset if their child married someone from the opposite party. This suggests that identity today is more defined by politics than by religion - a reversal from roughly a half century ago.

I wonder to what extent that has to do with plurality. In American politics, if you want your vote to count, you have only two choices. In religion, you have dozens, not even including choices like atheist, agnostic or spiritual but not religious . In such a world, marrying across religious lines becomes increasingly probable given anyone you meet outside of church is probably of another faith. By contrast, meeting someone outside of a political rally still means you've got roughly a 33% chance of a political match: Dem, GOP, or no affiliation.

As institutions shape the categories available to us, they also shape our tolerance for crossing boundaries. Where institutions create many identities (as in religion), crossing them becomes ordinary. Where institutions collapse choices into two rival camps (as in American politics), crossing them becomes taboo.

It might also explain why politics is becoming more divisive. Politics is not - if it ever was - a matter of debating policy so much as a matter of identity. Stats from modern America suggest to me that you'd have an easier time persuading someone to change their faith than to change their politics.

Oracle, Ellison, $100 Billion and 40 Minutes

 Yesterday, Larry Ellison's net worth rose more than $100 billion within the first 40 minutes of the market opening as Oracle stock surged.

Maybe now Oracle will finally promote the poor guy from CTO to CEO.

NBC Poll on Fascinating Divide Between Gen Z Men and Women

Utterly fascinating divide among gen z men who voted for Trump and gen z women who voted for Harris in an NBC poll.

On a list of 12 important measures of success,

• gen z men who voted for Trump rated "having children" #1 - the top measure of the 12,
• gen z women who voted for Harris rated "having children" as #12 - the bottom measure of the 12.

Also, emotional stability was #12 in ranked values for the men and #3 for the women.

More data here:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-gen-zs-gender-divide-reaches-politics-views-marriage-children-suc-rcna229255

Two Ways to Learn From History: Study It or Repeat It

I love history because it plays out so quickly, dynamics that define a generation or a century in a form that can be read in hours. Reality takes so long to turn the page to the next plot twist or consequence. History accelerates consequences but reality always plays out in real time.

You can learn from history one of two ways. The first is to study it and change what you're thinking and doing in order to avoid its mistakes. The second is to ignore history and simply repeat its mistakes. In either case you learn but ...

Initial Jobless Claims at 4 Year High (wondering how long it'll take for people to see a pattern)

Last week initial jobless claims rose to 263,000.

This is the highest they have been since October of 2021, nearly four years ago.
I'm an old guy wondering how many times we have to go through the cycle of Republicans breaking the economy and then Democrats repairing it before it dawns on the 5% of the Americans who swing every election that there is a pattern here.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICSA

Charlie Kirk Shooting a Reminder of How Warped is the NRA's Interpretation of the 2nd Amendment

The killing of Charlie Kirk is first and foremost a tragedy - another life lost to gun violence, another family left grieving. Kirk, weirdly, argued that gun deaths were a necessary price to pay for the right to bear arms but the NRA's vision of gun rights has little to do with the constitution and is definitely at odds with safety.

The Second Amendment was written to provide for a citizen militia in a young republic wary of standing armies. It was never a blank check for individuals to amass arsenals. Chief Justice Warren Burger once called the NRA’s reinterpretation of it “one of the greatest pieces of fraud on the American public.”

And the practical case is just as weak as the historical one. Private gun ownership does not make us safer; our rates of gun death are proof enough. Nor does it check government power. In an age when the state commands drones, armored vehicles, and cyberweapons, the idea that a handful of armed citizens could deter tyranny is pure fantasy.  (We have yet to see NRA members come out to protect the American cities into which Trump has sent armies.) Guns in private hands don’t restrain government firepower - they mainly multiply tragedy at home.

The right to bear arms, as originally written, was about citizens taking turns in a militia to avoid the costs and risks of a permanent army. Today, the unregulated right to own arms undermines the very rights the 2nd amendment meant to regulate and subordinate to the aims of the broader community and not to the weird fantasies and hatred of lone shooters.

$100 Billion Dollars a Day Seems Like a Lot

TODAY Larry Ellison's net worth rose more than $100 billion.

He's now worth nearly $400 billion, which makes him the second richest man in the world.
In the last month, the wealth of the 10 richest Americans rose more than $250 billion, their combined wealth now worth more than $2.3 trillion.

California is 175 Today!

It’s California’s 175th birthday today!

No state has drawn more Americans to make it home. California has given us shared dreams and stories through Hollywood, a place where people reinvented themselves — Marion Morrison becoming John Wayne, Norma Jeane Mortenson becoming Marilyn Monroe. It’s where we’ve created shared knowledge, wealth (and yes, more than a few shared hallucinations) through Silicon Valley.

It’s home to Yosemite and the Redwoods, Olympic ski slopes and world-class surf breaks, deserts and rainforests. It was the first state to offer free education from kindergarten through graduate school. It’s been the birthplace of flower power and computing power. It holds some of America’s most conservative communities and some of its most liberal. Above all, it’s long been the place where people came to try on new lives that felt impossible back home.

Or, as we call it: home.

Happy birthday, California!

The Astonishing Century of New Things

Incomes don’t just grow by percentages; they compound across generations. In the 20th century, wages in the United States grew nearly eightfold. But the real miracle wasn’t just bigger paychecks. It was what those paychecks allowed people to buy, do, and experience -  things that their grandparents couldn’t even imagine.

Consider just a few of the products that were unavailable in 1900 but commonplace by 2000:

Transport & Communication

• Affordable automobiles
• Airplane tickets - to anywhere in the world in a single day
• Helicopters, rockets, even space travel
• Global Positioning System (GPS)
• Video conferencing with anyone, anywhere

Consumer Goods & Daily Life

• Plastic
• Refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners
• Credit cards
• Teabags, bubble gum, nylon stockings
• Safety razors, bras, Velcro

Entertainment & Media

• Radio, movies, television
• Photocopiers, videotapes, video games
• Personal computers, email, websites, smartphones

Medicine & Biology

• Penicillin and antibiotics
• Insulin
• Polio and Hepatitis-B vaccines
• The birth control pill
• Pacemakers, Prozac, Valium, Viagra

And since 2000, the list has only accelerated: CRISPR gene editing, AI assistants, mRNA vaccines, reusable rockets, 3D printing, solar and wind at scale, drone delivery, streaming media.

This is what progress feels like to the ordinary person. It’s not an abstract rise in GDP. It’s the astonishment of standing in a grocery aisle with choices your great-grandparents couldn’t have named, let alone afforded.

Mike the Chimp & Trump's Rise to Power in the Information Economy

Here’s Jane Goodall’s vivid account from My Life with the Chimpanzees, describing Mike’s breakthrough display with kerosene cans:

“Mike’s rise to the number one or top-ranking position in the chimpanzee community was both interesting and spectacular. … At one time he even had appeared almost bald from losing so many handfuls of hair during aggressive incidents with his fellow apes. One day at camp, all at once Mike calmly walked over to our tent and took hold of an empty kerosene can by the handle. Then he picked up a second can and, walking upright, returned to the place where he had been sitting. Armed with his two cans Mike stared toward the other males… Gradually, he rocked more vigorously, his hair slowly began to stand erect, and then, softly at first, he started a series of pant-hoots… The cans… made the most appalling racket: no wonder the erstwhile peaceful males rushed out of the way… Mike’s use of the cans that made an unfamiliar and very loud, intimidating sound in his display was nothing short of brilliant.”

Mike became the alpha male by making more noise – and more threatening noise - than the other chimps.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff repeatedly and insightfully points to the fact that no one in this advanced stage information economy is more effective at getting and holding attention than Trump. And – Wolff argues – that really is the sum of his political theory: get and hold attention. What Trump has intuited is that attention is zero-sum and if he can grab attention, others don’t. The amount of information available has increased exponentially over the last half century but our attention has not, no matter how thinly we spread it.

Trump, like Mike the chimp, knows how to make the noises that most unsettle us, most get and keep our attention. And in an information economy, seizing attention is like seizing land in an agricultural economy: it gives you wealth, power and status.

Meme Pools as Identity Kits

Waiting for the day someone markets a memetic testing kit. Forget DNA - this one would map your meme pool, the cultural quirks that shaped your philosophy, politics, and humor. The family tree could be delightfully preposterous: “Turns out we’re related - through Monty Python, Keynes, and Van Morrison. And apparently I’m cousins with a TikTok I’ve never even seen.”

The Tragedy of Retreating from the Global Economy

It is worth pausing to consider the price humanity paid to build the global economy - a world where it is easier for two strangers to trade goods or ideas than to trade gunfire. The 20th century was not just markets unfolding on their own; as Keynes would remind us, it was Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and institutions carefully constructed to channel the energies of nations into commerce rather than conquest. It took two world wars and a Great Depression to transform humanity from empires and colonies into independent states with citizens who could exercise not only political rights but the economic right to buy and sell across borders.

No previous generations have had the globe as their canvas. We do.

The results were staggering. Global life expectancy more than doubled, rising from about 32 years in 1900 to over 73 today. Incomes grew eightfold. In the U.S., average life expectancy rose from 47 to nearly 80, while per capita income leapt more than tenfold. Never before had so many lived so long, so well. But, as Durkheim might caution, the very integration that reduced wars between nations also frayed bonds within them. A global market can deliver growth and alienation in the same breath, individuals within the same country feeling as though they have less to connect them with fellow citizens.

Still, the alternative is far worse. Poverty is the certainty of a village too small to specialize, where resources are fixed and choices narrow. Prosperity is the possibility of a world where your village spans continents. Montesquieu would remind us that interdependence also breeds fragility — shocks travel faster when we are connected — but fragility in abundance is better than security in scarcity. The decision to avoid relationships does buffer you from heartbreak but it also “protects” you from love.

Today, in response to Trump’s tariffs, more nations are exploring self-sufficiency. Jefferson prized that idea because it guarded liberty from foreign whims. But in a modern world, self-sufficiency is a booby prize. It ensures independence at the cost of affluence, protecting us from the world while also cutting us off from its possibilities. Jefferson’s farmers were self-sufficient but they were also really, really poor.

And there is something else at stake. Csikszentmihalyi would remind us that fortune is not just measured in dollars but in flow — in meaningful work, engagement, and creativity. A global economy multiplies not only customers but also careers, paths of purpose that exist only when the market is large enough to support them. To shrink that space is not only to shrink wealth but to shrink meaning.

Nations clutching at tariffs and trade barriers resemble old men reaching again for the teddy bear they clung to in their infancy. The great comedy of our time is that after sacrificing millions of lives to build a world of exchange, we may throw it away for the illusion of safety. If we do, the future will not only be poorer; it will be duller, smaller, and more predictable. And that, in the end, is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.

University Focus Shifting From Students to Sports?

College sports has become a massive business, and for the first time student-athletes are sharing directly in the revenues they generate. The sums are staggering.

This year, Texas Tech will spend about $114 million on its student-athletes - nearly as much as the $139 million it spends on faculty salaries. But the distribution tells the real story: that money goes to just 573 athletes, while more than 2,100 faculty share the academic payroll. On average, each faculty member earns about $66,000, while each athlete receives the equivalent of nearly $199,000.

At least in budgetary terms, Texas Tech now looks less like a university with a sports program and more like a sports complex with a teaching program.

Trump's Tariffs Terrible for Job Creation

On April 2, 2025, President Trump unveiled sweeping "reciprocal tariffs" during a televised event he dubbed “Liberation Day.” The announcement included a baseline 10% tariff on nearly all imports, plus country-specific tariffs ranging from 11% to 50%, based on trade imbalances

April was also the last strong month for job creation, a month in which the economy created 158,000 jobs.

Since then, the economy has created an average of 27,000 jobs per month, well below the average of 168,000 jobs per month the economy created last year. How stark is the difference? Last year the economy was creating more jobs per day than it has created each week since Trump's big tariff announcement.

And of course manufacturing - supposedly the catalyst for tariffs - has suffered this year. This from bls.gov:
"Manufacturing employment changed little in August (-12,000) but is down by 78,000 over the year."

Where on - or beyond - the Spectrum from FDR to Reagan Do We Want Our Grandkids to Live?

 

This chart is one more sign of the world Reagan helped shape. Boomers began their careers in an America still defined by FDR’s systems: higher taxes on the wealthy, stronger labor protections, greater public investment, and thicker safety nets. The extremes of the market were softened, so the average Boomer built more wealth relative to the richest Boomer.

Millennials, by contrast, entered adulthood after Reagan’s market individualism had become the norm: lower taxes, weaker unions, thinner safety nets, and less public investment. For example, when Reagan became governor of California, tuition at the state’s world-class universities was still free; today, one of the few guarantees of a college education is student debt. The result was a more polarized America. The richest Millennials at age 35 are wealthier than the richest Boomers at the same age, but the average Millennial is 30% poorer than the average Boomer. Reagan’s world gave individuals more exposure to the raw consequences of markets — more opportunity for the fortunate, more hardship for the unlucky.

And note the etymology: fortune and fortunate share the same root. Looking across history, the biggest determinant of how well you live is when and where you live. Sixteenth-century Bulgaria or twenty-first-century Palo Alto? People born in times and places that allow them to create a fortune are, quite literally, the most fortunate — not just because of their own beliefs, actions and choices but because of something they did not choose: the systems, circumstances and culture they are born into. Fortune and fortunate is hard to disentangle.

That leaves us with a persistent political question: to what extent do we want to mitigate the extremes of the market or simply embrace them? Reagan’s philosophy trusted the market to mete out justice through reward and punishment. The alternative, largely defined by Roosevelt, had been to design systems that checked those extremes and gave more people a chance at dignity, stability, and progress while also asking the best, brightest and most fortunate to pay more in taxes to support those less fortunate. In FDR’s world it was harder to become extremely rich or extremely poor. By the end of FDR’s presidency, the highest marginal income tax rate was 94%. (This was not all social engineering; the US was engaged in World War 2, the costliest war – in lives and dollars –in the history of the world.) During Reagan’s presidency, the top marginal tax rate dropped from 70% to 28%.

Nearly everyone agrees that rewards should vary with results. The unresolved debate, from FDR through Reagan to today, is how much we should moderate the market’s extreme feedback. Boomers and Millennials have lived on opposite sides of that pendulum — one in a world of thicker safety nets, the other in a world of thinner ones. The question now is what balance they want to design for their children and grandchildren — the Alpha Generation, born since 2013 — who will inherit both the risks and the returns of the system we choose to build. Because these systems? It is easy to blame or credit an FDR or Reagan but really, we're the ones who build the world our grandkids live in.

Eisenhower on Documentation

During his 1945 visit to liberated concentration camps - such as Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald - Eisenhower insisted on documenting what he saw. He famously urged:

“Get it all on record now - get the films, get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Montaigne as Prelude to the Enlightenment

Montaigne lived before the Enlightenment proper (he died in 1592, more late Renaissance than Enlightenment), but he is often treated as a precursor: the first great essayist, probing the human condition in everyday, bodily, and personal terms rather than in scholastic or theological abstractions. That human-centered curiosity fed directly into Enlightenment writers, and Jefferson owned and drew on Montaigne’s writings.

Montaigne’s subject was the mundane — literally, “this world.” In medieval thought the mundane was dismissed as inconsequential, a short passage on the way to eternity. Montaigne instead explored and celebrated it, turning daily life into a worthy subject of reflection. In doing so, he helped set the stage for the Enlightenment’s insistence that this world is where mysteries must be investigated, laws discovered, forces harnessed — from Franklin grounding lightning to ships riding the wind across oceans, to the even harder task of understanding and realizing the potential of our own selves.

The mundane, of course, included the bluntly ordinary. “Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies,” he wrote — a reminder that all humans share the same impulses and realities regardless of title or rank. And Montaigne shifted his focus away from speculation about the divine to the observable self: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.” This was the foundation of Enlightenment method — study what can be seen, tested, corrected, and improved, not what can only be speculated.

Finally, Montaigne noted the power of habit: “Custom is the best master of all things. What we are used to we find natural.” Here he glimpsed something radical: the world we inherit feels inevitable, but it is not destiny. Life could be different. In that seemingly small insight lay the seed of revolution.

Labor Day, Women and Frances Perkins

"Even the simple act of a woman standing up and speaking to a crowd is relatively new. Think about it: we know of only a handful of speeches by women before the latter half of the twentieth century, and those tend to be by women in extreme and desperate situations. Joan of Arc said a lot of interesting things before they burned her at the stake."

- Hillary Clinton

In related news, on this Labor Day, tell your kids about Frances Perkins, the first woman in American history to serve in a presidential cabinet. She was the U.S. Department of Labor Secretary and instrumental in defining and implementing so many of FDR's policies. How effective were their policies? When FDR and Frances Perkins came into office, the unemployment rate was 24.9%. By the time FDR died, the unemployment rate had fallen to 1.9%.

She really was remarkable - the kind of figure who quietly but profoundly shaped the country. From Social Security to minimum wage laws to workplace safety, so much of what we take for granted in the American social contract has her fingerprints on it. And she carried all that while navigating a cabinet full of men who often dismissed or resisted her.

You might think that with that kind of success, presidents would have been smart enough to make all their cabinet members women but after FDR died, Perkins' role as Labor Secretary ended and it was 8 years before the next woman was appointed to a presidential cabinet.

Happy Labor Day!

Perhaps the Biggest Disparity Between High School Dropouts and College Graduates

High school dropouts generally die about nine years earlier than high school graduates. College graduates, in turn, live roughly eleven years longer than those with only a high school diploma. Some studies find more modest gaps - closer to half these figures - but even then, the difference between dropping out of high school and completing college adds up to one to two decades of life expectancy.

That’s a stunning disparity in a world where living to 80 is considered normal.

Friends with Beneficence

Word of the day:
Beneficence is the ethical principle and practice of doing good and actively promoting the well-being of others by preventing harm, removing harm, and maximizing benefits.

Use in a sentence:
She’d reached a stage in life in which she much preferred friends with beneficence over friends with benefits.

Rural White Rage

The reason you don’t hear more about “rural white rage” is that it’s nearly impossible to say without slurring your words - you either sound drunk or like you’re mid-stroke. Which is probably just one more reason to be angry.

"What's wrong with you?"
"I've been seized by rurrow why tage."
"What?"
"Ruror why age!"
"What are you saying? And why are you so angry?"

1969 and Global Consciousness

Within 3 months, we had a change in consciousness from local to global, a change in what we were conscious of and acted on, like a thirsty hiker who sees a river in the distance and alters course to move towards it, acting on what she's now conscious of.

1969, July: Apollo 11 astronauts send back the “Earthrise”-style photos, showing our fragile blue planet against the black void. It’s often called the birth of the modern environmental and global consciousness movements.

1969, October 29: ARPANET’s first message sent between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute — the seed of the internet. The first word transmitted was “LO” (they meant to type “LOGIN,” but the system crashed).

So: same year. Within three months, humanity looked back at Earth from the Moon and began to wire Earth together with digital connections. That coincidence is almost poetic: the same season, we both saw the whole and began to connect the parts. A shift in consciousness that triggered a change in how we communicated and worked and what we thought of as valuable.
And just now you have used this worldwide web to see a picture of the earth from space, something no generation of humans could do before 1969, a picture so familiar now that you might take it for granted, might forget how perfectly it represents something we might call global consciousness. This is reality. The divisions we create on this beautiful orb are just tools we use to make something so vast seem navigable, feel like home, make this manageable. Globalization is real; the demarcations across this globe are just made up. (Well, except for coastlines.)

Millennials have faced more career stress than any generation alive - and it is not over yet

Baby Boomers were born into postwar abundance. Wartime technological advances translated into peacetime prosperity; wages rose, jobs were plentiful, and education was heavily subsidized. One didn’t need a college degree to buy a house, but if you pursued one, tuition was often free or nearly so. That generation became better educated, better paid, and longer-lived than any before them.

Millennials came of age in the shadow of the Great Recession — the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression — and carried staggering student debt thanks to neoliberal policies that shifted the cost of higher education from governments to students. They were told that a degree was essential to succeed, then forced to finance it with debt no generation before them had been asked to shoulder.

Just as they were finding their footing, COVID struck. Overnight, millions were sent home to makeshift offices, often in houses or apartments that cost more than any prior generation had ever paid. Their parents could walk into subsidized universities and affordable homes; Millennials were expected to build their own educations and their own workspaces, at the highest costs on record.

Now, as Baby Boomers retire in record numbers and Trump clamps down on immigration, Millennials face another paradox. In theory, fewer workers should mean greater demand for their labor. In practice, it could also mean slower job creation and a stagnant economy. And hanging over it all is the great unknown: artificial intelligence. Will it become their partner, making them the most wildly productive workforce in history? Or will it make their hard-won degrees obsolete — leaving them priced out of the very jobs they trained for?

The traumas keep piling up: 9/11 in childhood, the Great Recession in early adulthood, student debt, COVID, housing inflation, political instability, climate disruption, and now AI disruption. They’ve never had a decade of “normal.”

Bless the Millennials. They’ve been asked to pay more, risk more, and endure more uncertainty than the generations before them. One hope is that as we self-absorbed Boomers finally leave the stage, policymakers will give more attention to the needs, potential, and stresses of the generation that will actually inherit the 21st century. In the meantime, they’ll have to endure yet another Boomer in the White House — one who may be the most self-obsessed of all.

The Evolution of Immigration and the American Economy

 Here's an excerpt from New Politics for the Next Economy - a work in progress.

Immigration Through the Lens of the Five Economies

The United States is huge. Only Russia, Canada and China have more land. So, the question of immigration has never been about how many people the land can hold. It has always been about what the economy most needs at a given time. Immigration policy has consistently mirrored the limiting factor of progress in each era, reflecting the nation’s evolving economy and the politics of who is welcomed as a contributor and who is rejected as a threat. At each stage, immigration policy and practice has largely addressed the economic bottleneck of its time.

The Land Economy: Immigrants as Settlers
In the 19th century, when land was the limiting factor, immigration was largely a matter of numbers. More people meant more farms, more fields, more production. The Homestead Act of 1862 practically begged Europeans to claim 160 acres and make it productive. The Norwegians who tried farming in North Dakota before fleeing the winters for California (my great grandparents) were part of this wave: immigrants as settlers, not yet screened for skill, but for willingness to work, to develop land.

America in this period did not so much regulate immigration as simply count it. At Ellis Island, officials recorded names, looked for visible disease, and waved people through. Immigrants did not meet a bureaucracy; they met opportunity. Land was abundant, labor was scarce, and farming families were the raw material of progress, turning empty land into productive farms.

The Industrial Economy: Immigrants as Threats
By the early 20th century, the economy’s limit had shifted from land to capital. Factories, railroads, and mines needed labor — and immigrants provided it in abundance. But the dynamic had changed: immigrants were no longer needed to settle empty land. They were crowding into cities, competing for wages on the factory floor. The politics of immigration shifted accordingly. (And in imagining that we can again create millions of jobs in factories as a return to this time, Trump has echoed the politics of this time, a strange ode to the America of one century earlier.)

The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson–Reed Act, imposed national origin quotas designed to preserve the ethnic balance of the country as it had been in 1890. It heavily favored immigrants from northern and western Europe, sharply restricted southern and eastern Europeans, and barred almost all Asians. The underlying anxiety was not hard to trace. Industrial labor markets were glutted, and waves of immigrants were seen not as settlers expanding America’s frontier but as rivals depressing factory wages and challenging cultural norms.

The backlash was not confined to legislation. In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan staged what the Washington Post called the largest political demonstration in the city’s history. Tens of thousands of hooded marchers paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue to protest immigrants and imports alike. Just a year earlier, Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed strict quotas favoring northern Europeans and sharply limiting arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The message was clear: in an industrial economy, where labor was plentiful, immigrants could be recast as a threat rather than an asset.

Mixed economy: The Great Depression revealed a different bottleneck: employment itself. With unemployment at 25%, the focus shifted inward. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed less at drawing new workers from abroad and more at putting existing ones back to work. Immigration slowed dramatically. The government built institutions to stabilize labor: Social Security, unemployment insurance, child labor laws, and education that moved children off farms and out of factories. Progress was measured by whether the nation could keep its own citizens employed and secure and then increasingly shifted towards policies that would drive wage growth, which led to the emergence of a new, defining sector.

The Information Economy: Immigrants as Knowledge Workers
The bottleneck shifted again in the mid-20th century. After World War II, the U.S. economy leaned increasingly on education, science, and information, on knowledge workers.

By the 1960s, the constraint was no longer land or factories but knowledge. Immigration was increasingly framed as a way to expand the nation’s intellectual capital.

The turning point was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act. Signed by Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, the law abolished national origin quotas and replaced them with a preference system. Family reunification remained important, but skills were now explicitly prioritized. The legislation marked a quiet revolution: the bottleneck was no longer land or even labor, but brains.

The families who entered under this system helped shape the America we know today. Kamala Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, emigrated from India to study endocrinology at Berkeley. Her father, Donald Harris, came from Jamaica to study economics. Their paths were made possible by Johnson’s reforms — a direct reflection of an economy that needed researchers and professionals more than it needed field hands or assembly-line labor.

The visa system evolved to support this reality. The H-1B visa, created in 1990, became a channel for employers to sponsor highly skilled workers in technology, finance, medicine, and academia. If the Homestead Act represented immigration for the land economy, and Ellis Island represented immigration for the industrial economy, the H-1B visa became the gateway for the information economy.

 

Immigration as a Mirror of Economic Limits
The evolution is striking when viewed as a sequence:

·        Agricultural economy: immigrants as settlers; open borders and homesteads.

• Industrial economy: immigrants as wage competitors, emergence of quotas and restrictions by early 1900s.
• Mixed economy: focus less on bringing in new workers than on developing labor within the nation, shifting more children from farms, factories and mines into school, and giving unions greater political power.
• Information economy: immigrants as knowledge workers; preference for education and expertise.

At each stage, the politics of immigration followed the economics. When more people meant more production, immigration was welcomed. When more people meant lower wages, immigration was restricted. When more people meant more brains, immigration was re-engineered to favor scientists, doctors, and engineers.

Beyond the Information Economy
Immigration policy has not only reflected economic limits; it has also shaped national identity. In the land economy, immigrants were folded into the myth of the frontier. In the industrial economy, they were cast as cultural outsiders. In the information economy, they became symbols of global talent and competitiveness.

The United States and Canada became unusual in world history because they pioneered a national identity based not on common ancestry but on shared ideals. Rome had conquered peoples and given them citizenship, but citizenship came to you with the empire’s expansion. In North America, people came voluntarily to become Americans or Canadians. “Becoming American” was not about bloodline but about shared allegiance to institutions and aspirations.

That model has had its tensions. Racism and xenophobia have repeatedly pushed the nation back toward a more genetic reading of identity. But the long arc of American immigration law reveals a deeper truth: who counts as “us” has always been tied to what the economy needs.

Toward the Entrepreneurial Economy
If the next economy is entrepreneurial, immigration will again shift. The bottleneck will not be knowledge alone but the capacity to create institutions and enterprises that solve problems. In that world, the most valuable immigrants will not just be skilled workers but entrepreneurial builders: people who create schools, startups, community organizations, and technologies that expand collective capacity. More creatively, people who shown potential for public sector entrepreneurship, a domain we’ve largely ignored in spite of the fact that private-sector entrepreneurship has never been more highly valued or valuable. Immigration policy could evolve to favor not only diplomas but demonstrated creativity and institution-building.

The throughline is simple but profound: immigration has always been economic policy in disguise. From homesteaders to factory hands to graduate students, the criteria for admission have tracked the bottleneck of production. And as those bottlenecks shifted, so too did the nation’s story about who belongs, and who we need now to make us great anew.

What Americans Spend Each Year on Faith, Hope and Charity

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:13, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

What do Americans spend each year on faith, hope, and charity? If we assume that gambling is like buying hope and religious donations are like a purchase of faith?

Hope - 0.6% of GDP
Faith - 0.6% of GDP
Charity - 2.2% of GDP.

So, the numbers seem to support Paul's claim.

Trump's Impulsive Push for a Fed Chair Who Will Aggressively Lower Rates Threatens to Re-Ignite Inflation

Trump is signaling he wants a Fed chair who will cut rates much faster - he’s said policy should be “two or three points lower,” which would be a big swing from today’s 4.25% - 4.50% range. That kind of drop might boost equity prices in the short run - and might boost prices more generally, re-accelerating inflation.

This is the core tradeoff the Fed manages: ease policy to juice growth and hiring, or keep policy tight to pin inflation near target. Right now the macro mix is actually close to “goldilocks”: unemployment is roughly 4.1% - 4.3% and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge (core PCE) is running about 2.8% year-over-year - above 2%, but not far off. Slashing rates aggressively from here could stimulate demand and prices.

A recent real-world cautionary tale: Hungary, led by Orban, a favorite of the MAGA crowd. After a period of very loose policies and energy price interventions, inflation surged above 20% in 2023 (peaking around 25%) before tough medicine and subsequent rate moves brought it down. When you're too greedy for economic stimulus, you will get inflation. (And, of course, Trump's tariffs alone will increase inflation.)

The U.S. has lived this before. Volcker’s disinflation drive in the early 1980s wrung out high inflation - but only with a painful recession. The point of an independent Fed is to resist short-term political incentives and steer toward the low-inflation/low-unemployment mix over time, even when patience is unpopular. With core inflation still a bit sticky and new tariff pressures in the pipeline, racing to 1–2% rates would be a gamble with a high probability of having to reverse course later - expensively.

Bottom line: quick cuts might cause stock prices to pop; they’d also raise the odds we re-learn the hard lesson that bringing inflation back down takes longer, hurts more, and ultimately costs more than avoiding the flare-up in the first place. It's kind of a classically impulsive Trump move though: maximize for now and worry about later ... well, later.

Household Chores Are More Dangerous Than You Might Think

Amerigo Dumini was Mussolini’s thug-in-chief - he helped murder a socialist who spoke out against the Duce, later fought through the chaos of WWII, and then even survived a firing squad that pumped 17 bullets into him. He walked away from all that violence, only to be killed nearly a quarter of a century later while changing a lightbulb, taken out by a simple household chore.

If I were a handyman, this story and tagline might just be my ad. "You might think you'll be fine if you do that household chore yourself, but why risk it? Be safe. Be smart. Call us instead."

The Steady Degradation of Trump's Mind

Donald Trump is the oldest person in the history of the US to have ever been sworn in as president.
Yesterday, after his absurdly and predictably ineffectual meeting with the international war criminal Vladimir Putin, as he stood on Alaskan soil, Trump announced that - meeting over - he was returning to the US.
There was no art.
There was no deal.
He didn't even know where he was.

Average Wages in Silicon Valley Are Not Just 2 to 3X the National Average - They Understate Actual Compensation

Silicon Valley isn’t just paying the highest wages in the country - it’s doing it at a pace only two other places can match: King County (home to Amazon and Microsoft) and Manhattan. The numbers are eye-popping on their own, but here’s the twist: they still leave out a huge part of the story.
The wage data counts salaries and the value of stock options exercised during that quarter. That’s it. If you exercised options before or after the reporting window, or you’re sitting on unexercised options that have skyrocketed in value, none of that shows up in “income.”

So imagine an Nvidia employee in Santa Clara. The county average wage is $220K, but at a company like NVDA, pay could easily be two or three times that. Now layer on this: in the last year, Nvidia’s stock jumped about 50%. For someone holding a lot of shares or unexercised options, that wealth increase could equal - or exceed -their annual wage.

(Recent reporting suggests that about 80% of NVDA employees are now millionaires and about 50% are worth $25 million or more.)*

Which means the headline story (“Silicon Valley workers make 2–3x the national average”) actually understates their total compensation. For many, the real number - their salary plus stock wealth - makes the income gap between tech hubs and the rest of America even wider than most people realize.

raw data:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewqtr.t01.htm

source for portion of NVDA employees worth $25 million or more 
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/nvidia-employees-net-worth-wealth-created-inside-nvidia-reach-stunning-levels-nearly-80-of-employees-are-millionaires/articleshow/123143042.cms

Hamlet for Current Times

“This blustering revel of tariffs and travel bans makes us mocked by other nations; they call us boors and bullies, and the good we once stood for is eclipsed by our vices.”

- Hamlet (only slightly modified), Act 1 Scene 4

Situationships

Ran across this term in a chapter on the third sexual revolution in Christian Smith's fascinating Why Religion Went Obsolete: the Demise of Traditional Faith in America:

“situationships” (casual intimate relationships lacking definition, expectations, and norms due in part to the fear that clarity might make things awkward).

And yet this seems to me precisely a condition that would make things awkward.

Democracy by Langston Hughes

Democracy

[1949]

by Langston Hughes

Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom Is a strong seed Planted In a great need.

I live here, too. I want freedom Just as you.

Reagan, Fox, MSNBC, and Simplifying the Mess of Reality

In the Industrial Economy, value was created in steel mills and assembly lines. In the Information Economy, it is often created in studios and newsrooms. The raw material is not ore or oil but culture - packaged into stories, symbols, and narratives that resonate with our emotions as much as, or more than, our rational faculties. The world is far too messy and complicated to fit neatly into a single theory, so we rely on simple narratives. Specialists wrestle with complexity; to win 51% of the vote, you need a story most people can follow. Politics in the Information Economy became a kind of cultural production.

Ronald Reagan grasped this before most. The only president to master radio, television, and movies before entering politics, he understood the power of affirming rather than informing. His speeches bypassed the fact-checker in your head and spoke directly to the emotional truth you recognized from your own memories, hopes, and sense of identity. He could make the policies he championed feel like episodes in your hero’s journey. You weren’t just living in America—you were starring in a distinctly American story, one where a government that got out of your way left you free to live it.

This was a sharp break from the media climate in which Reagan emerged. In the 1960s and early ’70s, the three major networks delivered a nightly reality check: Vietnam body counts, civil rights marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses, polluted rivers catching fire, women demanding more than secretarial roles, long-haired neo-bohemians rejecting middle-class norms. These images forced Americans to confront contradictions and complexity. They unsettled worldviews across the spectrum and left the nation wrestling, in real time, with disruptive change. (Rivers on fire might be the simplest illustration of cognitive dissonance that this unmediated reality forced on its audience.)

Reagan’s storytelling offered relief from that fatigue. He gave Americans a coherent, reassuring frame—a sense that the story of America still had a clear arc and a starring role for the individual. Where the 1960s media posed open-ended questions, Reagan delivered emotionally satisfying answers. The times were turbulent; his voice was calm.
Roger Ailes, who worked with Reagan on his 1984 campaign, would later industrialize this approach as the founding CEO of Fox News. The nightly newscast became a continuous narrative stream—curated facts and frames reinforcing a specific worldview. MSNBC followed with a similar strategy for a different audience. Both evolved into identity factories: manufacturing stories that make their viewers feel not just informed, but confirmed.
This was a profound shift. The network news of the 1960s might unsettle you; Fox and MSNBC aim to reassure you. The old model treated discomfort as the price of being informed. The new model treats discomfort as a defect in the product.

In the Information Economy, news is no longer just a public service - it’s a manufactured good. The raw material is events; the finished product is cultural identity. Reagan’s genius was offering coherence and assurance after a turbulent era. Fox and MSNBC turned that coherence into a subscription service, delivering a world where your side is always right, the other side is always wrong, and reality rarely demands any changes of you.

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.