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.

 

Nvidia Hits $4 Trillion Value and a Very Brief History of Economic Development in These United States

This morning, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach a $4 trillion market cap.

Our economy has evolved: from creating wealth through land and agriculture, to manufacturing goods, to generating knowledge that makes workers more productive, and now to creating wealth through entrepreneurship and intellectual property.

Because we manufacture fewer goods than countries like China, we run a trade deficit. But penny for penny, that deficit is offset by financial inflows – including foreign investments in our publicly traded companies.

We used to make and sell goods. Now, increasingly, we make and sell wealth.

Finally Giving Those Beleaguered Billionaires a Little Power

In the US, there are 735 billionaires and 535 federal legislators – about 200 more billionaires than lawmakers.

* Legislators earn roughly 2x the median household income.
* Billionaires hold about 50,000x the median household net worth.

Apparently, Americans have decided that the best way to check the power of elected representatives is to give billionaires even more political power.
It’s a curious experiment.

Deja nu

New term: Deja nu. 

The distinct feeling that this has never happened before.

How Pop Culture Has Come to Define Christianity

Just finished Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. It’s fascinating, important, and covers topics that influence politics far more than most realize.
One almost parenthetically profound point she makes – easy to miss amid everything else – is this: popular media now defines Christianity more than any typical church or even the Bible itself. Best-selling books, podcasts, and programs to which Christians subscribe shape faith more than sermons or scripture.

When Protestants broke from Catholicism, they declared the Bible as their ultimate authority, subordinating the church to it. Catholics warned that since the Bible could be interpreted in so many ways, Protestantism would fracture into thousands of denominations.

(Spoiler alert: they were right.) One credible 2020 estimate suggests there are ~45,000 Christian denominations globally. By some reasoning, that implies members of 44,999 denominations are in for a rude surprise on Judgment Day. Your odds are not great.

So the question remains: Who defines Christianity?
The Pope? Billy Graham? A televangelist? The Council of Nicaea?

What Du Mez’s research suggests is that it is the market itself. The books that sell best and the YouTube channels with the most subscribers now define what “Christianity” means for many believers. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the cultural references of John Wayne are more vivid and emotionally resonant than the lesser-known biblical stories – like Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives in Exodus 1 who defied Pharaoh’s order to kill Israelite babies.

Popularity – or more to the point, market success – has become the evidence of things unseen.

What gives religious claims authority today?
Apparently, pop culture references. Or - put more simply - just popularity itself.

The 4th of July as a Celebration of the Idea of Bold Experiments in the Pursuit of Happiness!

It is the anniversary of start of one of the more weird and wonderful experiments in human affairs.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln dated the founding of this country back to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, not to the Constitution of 1789.

Jefferson drafted the Declaration, though others edited it before it reached its final form. His draft included one of his three attempts to end slavery. Here’s an excerpt that was removed:

> “He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere… determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold…”

This condemnation of slavery was deleted by delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, along with northern delegates involved in the slave trade, who argued:

- It would be hypocritical, since many colonies practiced slavery.
- It might alienate southern support for independence.

(There were 26 British colonies in North America at the time, from Jamaica and Bermuda in the south to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in the north. Only 13 of the 26 rebelled, and the founders feared losing any of them – especially the southern ones.)

Jefferson’s phrase “All men are created equal” remained, though, later emboldening Lincoln to end slavery, but his more explicit denunciation was cut out.

(It is worth noting that Jefferson also accused the King of “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world,” a direct reference to mercantile restrictions and the Navigation Acts limiting colonial commerce. That's right. A big reason we rebelled against Britain was to have free trade.)
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It seems fair to say we still have yet to fully realize our potential. And yes, many of those former southern colonies still seem inclined to believe the past – rather than the future – is the better place to live.

Hooray for the founding fathers who dared to engage in such a high-stakes experiment.

Imagine if we continued to innovate in the public sector the way we do in the private. Judging from the success of their bold experiment, continued bold experiments in the pursuit of happiness could be astounding.

The reality is, we so highly value entrepreneurship in the private sector but 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.

Our founding fathers, Lincoln and the new Republicans, and FDR each represent people and times when Americans were bold enough to experiment their way into a new future and economy.

Imagine if we were that courageous and visionary now.

Now that would be the way to truly celebrate a nation’s birthday.

Trump's Isolationist, Anti-Innovative Economic Policies Mean That His Budget Cuts Still Won't be Enough

 

 This graph illustrates a crucial insight: government spending as a percentage of GDP depends not only on how fast spending grows but on how fast GDP grows alongside it.

Trump's cuts won't be enough simply because his policies will undermine economic growth.

If federal spending grows at 3% annually but GDP also grows at 3%, then spending remains stable and sustainable as a share of the economy. But if GDP growth lags behind spending growth, the share rises, creating pressure for cuts or higher taxes.

Trump’s policies will slow economic growth, making any cuts to programs like Medicaid insufficient. If we were to adopt more creative policies – like FDR did – any reasonable growth in Medicaid or Social Security will be incidental. GDP growth determines the healthy and sustainable levels of government spending for our kids and elderly.

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Given America’s aging population, baseline projections show spending (especially on Social Security and Medicare) rising as a share of GDP in the coming decades. On current trends, this would necessitate painful cuts.

However, GDP growth is not simply a given. Policy affects growth. For example, note the dramatic rise in GDP growth in the 1940s. During this period, FDR’s administration massively expanded R&D, capital investment, and education spending, fueling not just wartime production but laying foundations for postwar prosperity.

FDR’s strategic brilliance included:

• Empowering Vannevar Bush, who orchestrated vast WWII research initiatives including the Manhattan Project.
• Asking Bush after the war to redirect R&D toward peacetime quality-of-life breakthroughs, resulting in the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
• Funding university-based research that built national capabilities while training new generations of scientists and engineers and creating R&D infrastructure within our universities.

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The real question isn’t merely how much we spend on entitlement programs. It’s whether we make investments in productivity – R&D, education, infrastructure – that raise GDP growth.

AI and genetic engineering, for example, have the potential to boost growth as dramatically as WWII-era R&D once did. And history shows that many of the most transformative breakthroughs – from electricity to the internet – were not predicted in advance. Future possibilities such as fusion energy could again lower the marginal cost of energy to near zero, driving explosive growth across industries.

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To offer a budget plan focused only on cuts or static spending is to react to current trends rather than reshape them. The most egregious omission in current budget debates is policy to accelerate growth:

• Cuts to NSF funding, proposed under Trump, undercut basic research that fuels private innovation.
• Restrictions on foreign students and immigrants threaten the flow of global talent that has historically driven US dynamism.
• Disdain for trade and global idea exchange risks isolating the US from emergent technologies and markets.

Given Trump’s policies, his cuts won’t be enough. By contrast, if he were to embrace the proven policies for enhancing growth that have been proven by presidents from FDR to Clinton – and looked for creative ways to build on and extend that – cuts could be unnecessary.

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Bottom line

Policies that increase GDP growth determine whether entitlement spending becomes:

Easily affordable (with robust growth), or
Unsustainable (with tepid growth).

The debate should focus less on how to cut and more on how to grow, ensuring a future where spending choices reflect opportunity and abundance rather than isolationism, resistance to change and zero-sum thinking. Trump's cuts won't be enough as long as his policies are so destructive of economic growth. If he were to adopt policies that were to make us more innovative and open, cuts like he is proposing would be completely unnecessary. 

 

Rather Than Ask Democrats and Republicans - Ask These Two Groups Poll Questions Instead

We often see polls that show self-proclaimed Democrats or Republicans or Independents' mood about the economy. Positive? Negative?

It seems like it would be far more informative if you had a poll that first asked some factual questions such as,

Tax cuts have
A Always paid for themselves,
B. Never paid for themselves.

Over the last century, job creation rates are
A. Much higher during Democratic Presidencies,
B. Much higher during Republican Presidencies.

During the last half century, stock market returns are
A. Higher during Republican presidencies,
B. Higher during Democratic presidencies.

And then, when we know who actually has real data - not even necessarily people who have coherent theories, just people grounded in reality - THEN ask questions like, "Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the economy?" To see a gap between the feelings of people who knew the past and people who imagined it would - it seems to me - be far more informative than asking people who their favorite team is.

Related, starting with Carter's presidency ...

The average annual stock market return (average of S&P 500, Dow, and NASDAQ):
Under Republican presidents: 8.0%
Under Democratic presidents: 12.6%

Monthly Job Creation Rates:
Under Republican presidents: 75.6k per month
Under Democratic presidents: 175.6k per month
(Yes. As of last month, exactly 100k difference between the two)

Oh, and tax cuts have never paid for themselves.

Trump Rules by Fear and Intimidation

In April ....

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Republican Senator from Alaska) said a fear of retaliation under President Donald Trump’s administration is rising to levels she’s not seen before, acknowledging this week that it is so pervasive that even the outspoken senator is “oftentimes very anxious” to speak up out of fear of recrimination.

Today ....
Murkowski cast the deciding vote for Trump's bill that will radically increase the deficit and tax cuts to our richest and cut benefits to our poorest and create a police state, giving more money to ICE than many nations give to their army.

How does she look to you?