Jill Lepore, Changing the Constitution, and the Issues You'll Soon Be Engaged In

I love Jill Lepore. Here she talks about her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution and it is a conversation that at least a few of you will find fascinating. All of you will eventually (and probably soon) live its fascinating relevance.

We are at a point in history similar to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the New Deal when we need to update the code upon which our country runs. The process is going to be agonizing, stressful, alarming, exciting, and wildly uncertain.

Lepore touches on the history of changing (and trying to change) the constitution in these United States and - as she is prone to do - shares a series of profound insights in the process.

A couple of notes related to her book.

The U.S. Constitution has only 27 amendments in ~235 years.

States use lower bars. Most amendments are passed by a state legislature and then a simple popular vote; about 18 states also allow citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. Many states have held full constitutional conventions or replaced their constitutions outright.

Result: state charters change a lot. Collectively, they’ve been amended thousands of times; several states have hundreds of amendments (e.g., California, Texas, Alabama), and some - like Georgia and Louisiana - have adopted multiple entirely new constitutions over time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSgkt0E4dk

 

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!