Thanksgiving 404

404 years ago in Plymouth, the early Pilgrims and Native Americans shared a meal after an appallingly hard year. About half the settlers had died. Food was scarce. They weren’t celebrating abundance so much as survival.

Some of you may not remember this, but 404 was also an early internet message meaning “content not found.” You reached the site, asked for a page—and it simply wasn’t there.

Looking for turkey and stuffing? Pumpkin pie? Mashed potatoes? In 1621?

That request would have returned a 404 error. Or at least a very puzzled look.

If I Were King

If I were king ...

I would make being king illegal. Any day now. Very soon. Just after I do this one thing. And sit on this throne for a bit longer. And listen to the adulation and receive the gifts from the commoners - for just a another week or two. And let the best, brightest, most beautiful and rich come to me to curry favor because ... well, I am king, you know. And I would compare the gifts they offered, wonder aloud whether the gold bar could not have been just a bit larger. Or, rather, quite a bit larger. I would question the sincerity of their praise and affection and ask what more they might do to prove their sincerity. And I would luxuriously sigh during my back rub after time in the whirlpool while I sipped my favorite tea. But only for another day or two. And then all of this would have to end. Very soon.

If I were king for a day, that day would be tomorrow. Just as soon as I've tired of all this.

Tariffs Seem to Be Driving Layoffs

Nov 25, 2024, ADP "For the four weeks ending November 8, 2025, U.S. private employers shed an average of 13,500 jobs per week, according to the NER Pulse, a weekly update of the monthly ADP National Employment Report (NER)."

Related, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco reports:
"Our results suggest that, immediately following an increase in tariff rates, the unemployment rate tends to increase, and inflation tends to fall. This pattern suggests that, at first, the effects of tariffs more closely resemble a negative demand shock—that is, consumers and businesses pull back their spending, which slows economic activity and also slows down inflation. Over time, however, economic activity picks up and inflation increases to a higher rate than would have been the case without the tariff increase."

Put simply, study suggests that tariffs raise unemployment rates and consistent with that, in the last four weeks US private employers are laying off workers rather than hiring. The Fed in SF also note that the data they use does not include tariff shocks as large and sweeping as what Trump has put in place. (The good news being that the courts may yet reverse these, arguing as some do that this decision about tariffs - falling into the category of taxes - is one reserved for Congress.)

How California did - and perhaps the US will - Turned Blue

 Two U.S. presidents have come from California: Richard Nixon (born here) and Ronald Reagan (governor here). Both Republicans.

So how did California become one of the bluest states in the country?

A huge part of the answer is Proposition 187.

Prop 187—branded the “Save Our State” initiative—aimed to deny public education, non-emergency health care, and many other state services to undocumented immigrants. Republican Governor Pete Wilson made it the centerpiece of his 1994 re-election campaign, and he won. The measure passed with nearly 60% of the vote.

But it backfired—spectacularly.

The campaign energized conservative voters in the short term but was widely understood in Latino communities as an attack not just on undocumented immigrants, but on Latinos as a whole. Before 1994, California Republicans often split the Hispanic vote with Democrats. After Prop 187, the association between the GOP and anti-immigrant politics became durable and deeply felt. Latino support for Republicans collapsed and never recovered.

The measure also unintentionally activated a wave of civic participation: thousands of legal permanent residents chose to **naturalize and register to vote* specifically to oppose the direction the state GOP was heading. The long-term result: a larger, more Democratic electorate.

It’s worth asking whether something similar could happen nationally.
Trump has already sent troops into cities, and ICE has conducted aggressive roundups—sometimes detaining people who are American citizens or deporting people to countries they’ve never lived in. Policies like these reveal far more about a movement than its slogans do. Sometimes the moment a party finally gets what it has been demanding is the moment voters finally understand what that party stands for.

California has a long history of exporting its culture—blue jeans, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the modern internet. It’s not impossible that the political backlash pattern that reshaped California after Prop 187 could one day serve as a template for how the nation responds to the excesses of Trump-era politics.

History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes—and California has already written one version of this rhyme.

A Quarter of a Century to Recover - the 1929 Great Crash

The Dow reached a closing high of 381.17 on September 3 1929.
It wasn’t until November 23 1954 that the Dow finally closed above that 1929 level again.

A 1929-style crash and recovery starting from a 2025 peak would imply new highs in 2050.

Indecisive

"Would you say that you are decisive?"
"I'm not sure."
"Well think about what you were doing when I approached you."
"I'm looking at these shelves but I don't even understand the differences between body washes and shampoos much less the differences within them. I'll probably stare at them for a couple of minutes and then arbitrarily choose one of each."
Surveyor looks skeptically at my head, volunteers, "You might be able to save some money by just buying the body wash. You certainly have more body than hair."
"I can't decide whether that was advice or an insult."
"I'll just put you down as indecisive."

Trump's Department of Labor Fabricates 2 Million New Jobs - confusing a periodic correction with the real world

Correction: Why This Claim Is Misleading

The figures in this post from the Department of Labor are based on a technical statistical adjustment, not on real changes in employment for native-born or foreign-born workers.
Every January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics updates the population weights used in the household survey (CPS) to reflect new Census estimates. In January 2025, this adjustment added roughly 2 million people to the “employed” category and more than 2 million to the “labor force” — on paper — even though these individuals did not actually enter employment that month.
Because BLS does not revise earlier months of the household survey, this one-time update appears as a sudden spike between December and January. It is a statistical correction, not a labor-market event.
The post above incorrectly treats this one-month benchmarking adjustment as evidence of job gains for native-born Americans and job losses for foreign-born workers. In reality, the underlying economy did not add or subtract millions of workers in these categories. This was simply the result of updated Census population estimates being applied to the survey.
A more accurate interpretation is:
The January re-benchmarking raised employment and labor-force levels for statistical reasons,
but it did not represent genuine job creation or job loss,
and it should not be used to evaluate policy or economic performance.
It is not certain whether this distortion of the technical statistical adjustment is intentionally misleading or simply reflects confusion within the Department of Labor about how these periodic revisions work.

Weakly Job Creation Rate This Summer

This summer the economy is creating about as many jobs per month as it did last summer per week.

May through September:
Average for 2024: 136,000
Average for 2025: 39,000

data:
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001&output_view=net_1mth

Crypto Wealth Dissolved

As of 20 November 2025 ...

The price of bitcoin has dropped about $24k this month, representing about half a trillion dollars.
The much smaller by percentage drop in the three major indices this month equates to roughly 3X that, $1.5 trillion.

Job Creation Slows for 2025

We now have job and unemployment numbers through September. Unemployment is steadily ticking up, now the highest it has been in nearly 4 years. Average job creation over the last 5 months is 39,000. (To compare, in the same 5 months in 2024, the average was 136,000, nearly 100,000 more. Each month.)

Reasons?
1. Random changes. It's a wonder that the national economy is as steady as it is. Lots going on any given month.

2. Immigration. Fewer people coming into the country and more people going out. (These aren't just people at your local taco shop. Remember that Hyundai had people in an American factory who were training American workers who were arrested by ICE.)
3. Tariffs. Trump's policies have created uncertainty, which can cause businesses to hesitate before hiring. And tariffs themselves disrupt trade flows and existing business partnerships, triggering layoffs and hiring freezes.
4. Fed continuing with higher interest rates (in order to suppress inflation) which can depress hiring and investment.
5. AI. There are some reports that organizations' senior people are turning to AI rather than junior hires to complete certain kinds of tasks.

The good news is that the courts may yet scuttle Trump's tariffs and Powell and the Fed could be lowering interest rates within the next few months. The bad news? We have a president who likes a little chaos with his breakfast and there doesn't seem to be any serious policy discussions about what AI might mean for employment policies.

Miss Information

Tomorrow we finally get job numbers for .... September.

If this administration could generate data at even 1% the rate at which it generates nonsense we would be so well informed.

Wonder how long it'll be before Trump has a beauty contest for Miss Information.

BIG returns from TINY changes COMPOUNDING over time

A reminder of how little it takes when you are compounding returns ...

If the market went up about:

0.02% every day → you get 5% annually

0.04% every day → you get 10% annually

0.07% every day → you get 20% annually

So, not 7%. Not 7/10th of a percent. But 7/100th of a PERCENT every trading day would yield a 20% annual return.

What Global Consciousness Has Done to Local Politics

I’m curious about your perspective on something.

Over the last few decades, Americans have lived through a massive widening of horizons — the Cold War “free world,” globalization, the rise of the internet, and an everyday awareness of life far beyond our borders. It feels like our idea of who “we” are has stretched from 50 states to an audience of 8 billion.

I wonder whether that expanding global consciousness changed how we think about the general welfare at home.

LBJ’s Great Society was built on the idea of one national community taking care of its own. By the 1980s, Reagan talked in terms of a larger “free world” — a moral circle bigger than any single country. And now the internet places us in a global conversation every day.

My question is simple:

As our sense of “we” has expanded globally, did our willingness to support fellow citizens shrink?
Did the mental shift from 340 million Americans to 8 billion humans make domestic solidarity feel thinner or more complicated?

What do you think?

The Lack of Civility in the Trump Administration

For centuries in the West, a “community” meant the people who shared communion — literally. You lived near the same church, worshipped the same God in the same way, and believed that those outside your fold were in spiritual danger. Unity was enforced by ritual, habit, and - if needed - by force.

Then came the Protestant Reformation, and the unity shattered. The wars that followed were brutal, personal, and theological. Neighbors weren’t just “wrong”; they were heretics. Europe spent more than a century discovering how vicious a disagreement can become when people believe their salvation hangs in the balance.

Out of that exhaustion, something new emerged: civility. Not agreement. Not mutual admiration. Just the simple, radical practice of not attacking one another — verbally or physically — in the public square. To be a “civilian” was to be civil: to refrain from violence, to coexist with people whose beliefs you considered misguided, dangerous, or even damned.

It was a hell of a shift, but it made the modern world livable.
You no longer have to argue theology with your grocer. You don’t need to warn your insurance agent they’re going to hell. (Today that’s more of a heat-of-the-moment suggestion than a community service announcement.)

Civility didn’t eliminate disagreement; it allowed society to survive it.
It remains one of the great inventions of the post-religious-war West.

And now we have an administration of people whose salaries we're paying who are such true believers in their mission that they've abandoned civility.
This lack of civility, like the anti-vax movement, is medieval.

Trump's Presidency as Evidence of Poor Quality Civics Classes

I would love to see stats on what portion of Trump supporters were either home schooled or had gym teachers teach their civics class. 

There is such a profound ignorance of the cost of demolishing our institutions of justice and regulations among his supporters who apparently have always realized that Trump is a con man but felt that they'd be included as beneficiaries of his grift.

How to be Miserable

Two surefire ways to be miserable:

1. Live your life like you’re running for office—poll-tested, platform-safe, and passion-free without regard for any of what uniquely defines you.
2. Vote like you’re starring in a one-person democracy—gloriously authentic, utterly unelectable without regard for any of what so defines your community.

Prayer, Politicians, and Lies

The Western tradition of believing in a God who answers prayers has shaped an odd expectation in our politics: that we can elect leaders who will grant us prosperity, safety, and comfort as if by divine intervention.

We pray for lower prices, higher wages, less crime, and better parks—and expect politicians to deliver them without cost, effort, trade-offs or effort on our part. This mindset rewards those who promise miracles over those who explain realities.

Why do politicians lie to us?
Because when they tell the truth—that fixing one problem usually means accepting another, that “more of this” (healthcare, for instance) requires “more of that” (taxes)—we punish them at the polls. We tell prospective candidates, If you don't lie to us, we won't vote for you and then act surprised when we find that they've been lying to us. 

The Scale of Tragedy in WWII

The war between Germany and Russia lasted about 1,400 days. Each day, on average, 17,800 people were killed. At that pace, the United States would have equaled its entire Vietnam War death toll in less than four days.

Amplified Intelligence

For the longest time they thought that AI stood for artificial intelligence. It did not. It stood for amplified intelligence. So it was not just insight, analysis and calm perspective that was amplified, but so was paranoia and madness.

Let Us Pretend We Are Orchestrating Them

“Since we don’t understand these events, let us pretend that we are orchestrating them.”

- Jean Cocteau, the French poet, playwright, and filmmaker, commenting in the wake of the upheavals of the early 20th century in Europe.

Inflation Reporting Has Lost the Plot

Economic reporting has devolved into the worst kind of inflation coverage — one that sets impossible expectations.

First: Prices are always rising on some things. Out of hundreds of tracked items, you can always find a handful up 5%, 10%, or 15%. That’s not inflation; that’s how markets send signals. When rice price goes up and potatoes go down, consumers buy fewer of one and more of the other, while farmers shift what they plant. Those shifting prices are how markets adapt — not signs of crisis.

Second: You don’t want prices to fall overall. Deflation — a general drop in prices — sounds pleasant but is economically toxic. When people expect prices to keep falling, they delay purchases, businesses lose sales, production slows, and jobs disappear. The goal isn’t falling prices; it’s stable prices — low inflation, around 2%.

So when people complain that prices today are higher than in 2020 or 2015, they’re missing how the economy works. Prices don’t — and shouldn’t — roll back to earlier years. If they did, we’d be in a recession.

Two reminders:

Some prices will always rise — that’s not inflation.

Price levels will never return to the past — that’s stability, not failure

The Importance of Miscalculating How Long a Project Will Take

People often overlook the importance of miscalculation in any worthwhile project.

“We should be able to complete this within a year.”
Four years later:
“We should be able to complete this within a few months.”

When I used to start with new product development teams, I’d sometimes ask, “How long did it take to build the Great Pyramids?”
No one ever knew.

Then I’d tell them, “Exactly. Nobody knows. And it doesn’t matter how long it took. They’re great.”

The point is simple: if you’re doing something that matters, there will come a time when how long it took—two months or two decades—will matter far less than whether it mattered … whether it’s great.

Or, as Shigeru Miyamoto - game director at Nintendo - put it, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

During the Shutdown Only 40% of Federal Employees - Including the President and Vice President - Are Getting Paid

Who is still getting paid during the government shutdown

• Members of Congress: 535
• 
  
• President and Vice President: 2
• 
  
• Article III judges (including the 9 Supreme Court Justices): about 870 nationwide

Their pay is constitutionally protected and continues during a shutdown.

Who is not getting paid

• Civilian federal workforce: about 2.29 million total
• 
  
• ~670,000 are furloughed (not working)
• 
  
• ~730,000 are excepted (still working but unpaid until funding returns)
• 
  
• ~890,000 are exempt (their agencies have existing funding, so they continue to be paid)
• 
  
• Military: about 1.3 million active-duty personnel (plus Guard and Reserves).
• Some early paychecks were covered through special measures, but future pay is uncertain if the shutdown continues.

The imbalance

Roughly 1,400 top officials—members of Congress, the President, Vice President, and federal judges—are still getting paid.

Among the civilian workforce, more than 60%—about 1.4 million people—are not.

The remaining ~40% (those in already-funded programs) continue to receive paychecks.

What this means

You’ll see calls for donations to help military families, park rangers, or weather forecasters. But remember: we already pay their wages through taxes. They don’t need charity—they need a government that honors its commitments.

You can’t afford to pay their wages twice—once in taxes and again through donations.
But you can vote for leaders who respect public servants—civilian and military alike—and ensure their work is met with stable paychecks, not political brinkmanship.

I love you too

“I love you too,” she said. Or at least that’s what he thought she said.
Only later did he realize she’d said, “I love you 2.”
And by then, he didn’t even want to know the scale.

LA Dodgers Become First American Team to Clinch World Series on Foreign Soil (The Past is Still Probable )

This World Series was like a coin flipping in slow motion—odds recalculated by the universe after every pitch, every at bat, every inning. For seven games and extra innings the outcome was a shifting probability cloud, collapsing only in the final swing.

Now that it’s over, it will be reported as a certainty.

And that’s one of the problems we have with understanding history: we turn probabilities into fate, forgetting how narrowly could have been might have been a different history.

Tonight the LA Dodgers become the world champs, the first time ever that an American team clinched the World Series on foreign soil.

21st Century Fortunes - Give Away Now, Later, Or Plow Into Foundations?

In her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott received about 25% of the couple’s Amazon stake—roughly 4% of Amazon at the time. Since then she’s given away about $16 billion to nonprofits and today is worth ~$36 billion. Had she simply held the original stake and not donated or sold, she'd be worth on the order of $95 billion today.

Here’s the paradox: if she had waited and then decided, right now, to keep $36B, she could in theory give away $60B—far more than the $16B already given. That’s the power of compounding on a large fortune.

So that's an argument for holding onto wealth.

The rebuttal? Good works also compound, just less visibly. Teenagers who got help in 2019 are healthier adults this year; communities strengthened early create more opportunity later. Like private capital, social returns also accumulate.

There is another fascinating question about the incredible fortunes that have been created this century. Will these fortunes simply be passed along to children or will they become financing for great public works through charities?

If more billionaires emulate John D. Rockefeller—who channeled vast wealth into institutions that underwrote breakthroughs like the agricultural research that helped catalyze the Green Revolution—we could see a wave of big-budget nonprofits transforming the world over the next 10–30 years. (When Rockefeller died in 1937, the world population was about 2.3 billion; today it’s about 8 billion—~3.5× —with higher crop yields a key part of how we’ve fed more people. Those higher crop yields were at least partly attributable to research sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.) 

Bill Gates seems to be emulating Rockefeller in a fascinating way: he's essentially become an entrepreneur of social causes, measuring success not by gains in financial capital but by gains in human and social capital. 

The future will in no small part be defined by how these great fortunes of the 21st century are used.

The choice isn’t simply now versus later. It’s how to balance the compounding of capital with the compounding of impact—and how to design philanthropy so that both work in the world’s favor. This feels like a conversation we're not having but that could be so consequential. 

Yesavage's Inexperience Beats Dodgers' Great Experience

The Blue Jays’ starting pitcher, Trey Yesavage, faced an L.A. Dodgers lineup with roughly 11,000 career major-league games of experience between them. Yesavage had pitched in only seven big-league games before—two of them in the postseason.

Yesavage came away with the win tonight, putting the Blue Jays up 3 to 2 games in this 2025 World Series. 

Jefferson's List of Grievances in the Declaration of Independence Sound Like Trump's To Do List

Here, updated to contemporary English, are some of the grievances that Thomas Jefferson wrote against King George III in the Declaration of Independence. It almost sounds like Trump's to do list.

*******  
The current ruler’s record is one of repeated abuses of power, all clearly intended to establish absolute control over us. To make this clear, we present the facts to the world:

He has repeatedly shut down representative governments whenever they challenged his violations of citizens’ rights.

He has tried to block immigration to this country—refusing to allow people to become citizens, preventing newcomers from arriving, and making it harder for ordinary people to settle and build lives here.

He has stationed military forces among us during times of peace without the consent of our elected representatives.

He has attempted to make the military power independent from, and superior to, civilian government.

He has conspired with others to impose laws and authorities on us that violate our constitution and lack our consent—rubber-stamping their fake “laws” to enforce them.

He has allowed armed forces to occupy our communities.

He has cut off trade between us and the rest of the world.

He has ordered people to be taken far away for trial, denying them fair treatment and accusing them of fake crimes.

He has suspended our own legislative bodies, blocking them from meeting and stripping them of their authority.

The Declaration can be found here:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

Trump's Ballroom Sends a Simple Message

"The 90,000-square-foot ballroom will dwarf the main White House itself, at nearly double the size."
The White House is for governing. The ballroom is for entertaining.

The simple message of Trump's bizarre for so many reasons ballroom? I'm just here to entertain.

Some Americans think we have a wanna be king. I think we have a jester on the throne.

Canadians Take Game One of the World Series

Tonight, Canadians won their first World Series game since 1993—an 11–4 takedown of the Dodgers.

To justify calling it a “World” Series, we allow exactly one foreign country to play. One. That’s the deal.

And what do they do? Win Game 1. Immediately.

Unbelievable. Foreigners.

Rule of Law - Even Presidents Are Subject to the Law

One of the key things advanced (but not invented) by the American Revolution was this notion of rule of law. Francis Fukuyama defines this as “a set of rules of behavior, reflecting a broad consensus within the society, that is binding on even the most powerful political actors in the society, whether kings, presidents, or prime ministers. If rulers can change the law to suit themselves, the rule of law does not exist, even if those laws are applied uniformly to the rest of society.” The founding fathers did invent the position of president and unlike kings from earlier times, even a president could be arrested in this new democracy.

No Kings Personal Protest

Monday I may wander the streets of San Diego with a "Procrastinators Against Trump!" sign, pioneering the asynchronous protest march.

Immigration OLD, NEW & NEO

OLD 

Leviticus 19:34 "treat the stranger... as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself." 

NEW 

Matt 25:35 "I was a stranger and you welcomed me."

NEO 

Your skin looks brown. Let me put a little ICE on it.

The Way Shohei Ohtani Plays

A post from 2018 that is still true - only more so.

Shohei Ohtani plays baseball as if he's a character in the daydream of some 9 year old who doesn't actually understand what's realistic in baseball.

A Summary of New Politics for the Next Economy

 Five Factors of Production and the Evolution of the American Economy

All economic value comes from some combination of land, capital, labor, culture, and entrepreneurship.

Let’s break it down with a simple example:

• Land: You find, claim, or buy a forest filled with timber. The forest itself, in its raw and natural state, is an example of land, of natural resources.
• Capital: You need tools to harvest the timber. You invest in saws and axes, which don’t directly produce lumber but are essential for the process. This is capital - an investment to enable production.
• Labor: You hire lumberjacks to use the saws and axes to fell the trees and transport the timber out of the forest. Their effort is labor.
• Culture: information and knowledge that drives the actions and interactions of the people in this endeavor. Here, it is less about the information and knowledge that defines a career or a piece of capital than it is the emergent processes that arise from the interaction of the pieces in the endeavor. This is not generally included in the list of factors of production, but the information economy has made this more obvious and its influence more important. It would include everything from techniques the lumberjacks know for felling trees and coordinating their work through agreed upon processes to knowledge about which supplier offers the best saws for the best price.
• Entrepreneurship: You define and manage the process. You buy the land, hire the workers, acquire the tools, shape the culture with a flow of information, skills, and leadership, and you negotiate with sawmills to turn timber into lumber. You take the risks and coordinate all the elements, turning an idea into a viable business. You may make a huge profit. You may take a huge loss. The difference between what society will pay you for lumber and what it costs you to produce it is your profit (or loss).

Entrepreneurs, as distinct from managers, are the initiators. They create new businesses, while managers sustain and optimize them. While the line between the two often blurs, entrepreneurship is typically about creating new systems and companies, and management is about maintaining and improving existing ones.

These elements - land, capital, labor, culture, and entrepreneurship - define all economies. However, different periods of American history – and American politics - have emphasized one factor more than the others. An agricultural economy is most defined by land, an industrial economy most defined by capital, and so on.

As economies become more complex and advanced, so does the factor of production that defines them, the factor that limits progress. These very different economies require very different governments and policies, which gets to the heart of New Politics for the Next Economy. The differences in an economy limited by land vs. one limited by labor is at least as stark as the difference between parenting an infant and a teenager. The policies and politics of these very different economies are so different that we’ve essentially created four separate Americas since Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, each defined to address and overcome the limit of its time.

 

Summary of Five Americas (Four Past and One Future)

 

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1801 - 1861	Agricultural	Land	Jefferson

Jefferson and the Limit of Land
Jefferson’s America was an agricultural economy, and its constraint was land. Ninety percent of Americans lived on farms when he took office. His policies and philosophy focused squarely on securing territory so that a growing population of Yeoman farmers could remain independent, virtuous, and free. The Louisiana Purchase alone doubled the nation’s landmass, removing the most obvious bottleneck to expanding the economy and giving Jefferson’s contemporaries a vision of an “empire for liberty.” It is no stretch to say that Jefferson was the president who most clearly defined and pursued policies to overcome the limit of land.

From Jefferson to Lincoln (Land → Capital)
Jefferson’s agrarian republic thrived so long as fertile land could absorb restless ambition. But by the mid-19th century, the frontier was not enough. Or more specifically, the frontier had reached the Pacific Ocean. Railroads, factories, and finance required new ways to mobilize capital, not just settle acreage. Lincoln’s task was to channel private investment and public authority into an industrial system that could unite farms, factories, and markets into a single national economy, transitioning the economy from the zero-sum dynamics of land to the abundance of capital.

---

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1861 - 1933	Industrial	Capital	Lincoln

 

Lincoln and the Limit of Capital
Lincoln inherited a divided nation and an economy still largely local, fragmented, and cash-poor. The Civil War forced him to tackle the problem of capital head-on: how to finance a war, unify markets, and build a modern industrial nation. His administration created national banks and a uniform currency, issued bonds to mobilize savings, and authorized the first income tax. The Pacific Railway Acts and land-grant colleges tied capital formation to expansion and innovation. In doing so, Lincoln confronted the limit to progress of his era: capital. By making money, credit, and investment more abundant and more reliable, he unleashed a wave of industrial growth that transformed America, shifting the focus of economic growth from more farms to more factories.

 

From Lincoln to FDR (Capital → Labor)
Lincoln’s industrial America unleashed unprecedented growth, but also new dangers: monopolies, financial crashes, regular recessions, and a workforce treated as disposable tools. By the 1930s, the problem was no longer how to build capital, but how to fully employ labor in ways that spread dignity and security. FDR’s New Deal recast government as guarantor of full employment and wages, building institutions to balance the raw power of capital with the needs of millions of workers.

---

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1933 - 1981	Balanced	Labor	FDR

 

FDR and the Limit of Labor
When Franklin Roosevelt took office, the most pressing problem was not land or capital but labor. One in four workers was unemployed; millions more were underpaid, under protected, or excluded from opportunity. FDR’s genius was pragmatic experimentation: public works programs to create jobs, Social Security to provide security in old age, labor laws to guarantee rights and safety, and public investment to raise productivity. The result was not just a recovery from the Great Depression but the creation of a balanced economy in which labor was fully employed and broadly empowered. By treating labor as the central constraint - and investing in its development, protection, and dignity - Roosevelt helped to create the broad middle class that defined mid-20th-century America and economic growth even more stunning than the transformation following from Lincoln’s capitalism.

From FDR to Reagan (Labor → Culture)
FDR’s balanced economy created the broadest middle class in history, but once mass employment was secured, the next questions became cultural: what to do with rising prosperity, and how to live amid accelerating possibilities. By the late 20th century, knowledge workers and new technologies defined economic winners and losers, while debates over family, sexuality, faith, and freedom defined politics. Reagan embodied this shift, liberating markets on the how to frontier while rallying tradition on the what to frontier — setting the stage for an America divided not just by wealth, but by culture itself.

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
1981 - 2029	Information	Culture	Reagan

 

Reagan and the Limit of Culture
By the late 20th century, America was no longer constrained by land, capital, or even labor. What had become decisive was culture: knowledge and norms, the twin questions of how to and what to. Christian Smith articulates this definition of culture. “Culture provides descriptive ‘models of’ reality and prescriptive ‘models for’ living in that reality. Culture’s ‘models of’ supply representations of the way things are. Culture’s ‘models for’ prescribe how one should act within those realities. In short, ‘culture’ is learned knowledge about reality and how to live in it.”[1]

The information economy elevated a new meritocracy of engineers, scientists, managers, and lawyers - people whose highly specialized “how to” knowledge commanded soaring incomes and reshaped markets. Knowledge workers. But alongside this economic transformation came a political one, as Americans clashed over the “what to” of life: family structure, gender roles, sexuality, religion, and lifestyle. Reagan embodied this hinge moment. He championed deregulation and tax cuts to liberate individuals and businesses in their pursuit of wealth - a vote of confidence in the how to power of markets. At the same time, he drew on the rising religious right to reinforce traditional answers to the what to of morality and identity.

In this way, Reagan presided over a double divide: an emerging economic split between those who thrived in the new knowledge economy and those left behind, and a cultural split between urban and rural, secular and religious, those with or without a college degree, blue and red, those focused on the how to of culture and those focused on the what to of culture. Politics increasingly became a culture war, fought not only over material interests but over the very definition of the good life. The result was the emergence of two Americas - not born of geography alone, but of diverging models of reality and prescriptions for how one should live within it.

From Reagan to the Entrepreneurial Economy (Culture → Institutions)
Reagan’s market individualism and the culture wars it fueled left America wealthier, but also more fractured. Information multiplied, lifestyles diversified, and politics hardened into battles over identity and values. Amid this abundance of choice and conflict, trust in institutions collapsed. The information economy had shown us how to do more and what we might do, but not how to live together. That breakdown is the real limit we face now.

This information economy made two things possible: the generation, storage and dispersal of more valuable knowledge and information than ever before and the generation and dispersal of more damaging mis- and disinformation than ever before. In an agricultural economy, communities fought land wars; in this information economy, communities fight information wars.
The next economy will turn on entrepreneurship not just in markets, but in the public sphere - the invention and reinvention of institutions that deserve trust, enable belonging, and translate possibility into progress. We’re currently amid an institutional recession, trust in our major institutions having fallen from about half of Americans having a good or great deal of trust in our most defining institutions about the time Reagan came into office to just one quarter of Americans now. Just as Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR reshaped America to overcome the limits of land, capital, and labor, our task is to overcome the limit of exhausted institutions and polarized culture by creating new frameworks for cooperation and flourishing.

Period	Economy	Limit to Progress	Transitional President
2029 – ?	Entrepreneurial	Entrepreneurship	You?

 

You and the Limit of Entrepreneurship

By 2025, cultural war had escalated to the point that the US president who had been put into power by votes from red states was sending military troops into the major cities of blue states. The same president who – in his last weeks in office in 2021 – instigated a literal attack on democracy, the storming of the capitol even as the 2020 election was being finalized by Congress. During that attack, for the first time in history, the confederate flag was carried in the halls of Congress. As Trump’s biographer Michael Wolff points out, Donald Trump’s superpower in a world of limitless information is his ability to seize and hold attention. In our world of abundance, attention is still zero-sum.  Trump has contempt for democratic leaders within the US and around the globe and great admiration for dictators like Putin, Kim, Xi, and Mohammed bin Salman (to whom Trump professed love on a state visit early in his second term).  A vote for a man like Trump who has such strong affection for dictators and so little tolerance for democratic norms is a vote against institutions and two things have happened to put the US into such a precarious position. One, the information economy has made it easier than ever to generate and spread misinformation and disinformation, eroding trust in our institutions. Two, private sector entrepreneurship is rewarded more than it has been at any time in history while public sector entrepreneurship is largely prohibited. Public sector institutions have not kept pace with the private sector. An entrepreneur is to institutions what an inventor is to products or technologies: creating or improving the institutions that define a business or school, government agency or nonprofit. Distrust in our institutions is not all the product of misinformation; public sector institutions are not as responsive to public opinion and desires as are private businesses. We have no tradition of public sector entrepreneurship. What is now needed are public sector leaders who undertake the project of reviving and creating public sector institutions that restore trust in democracy and markets and update Smith and Jefferson’s world defined by ordinary people through market transactions and the ballot box. Progress now is not nearly as much about more resources, more capital, a more educated workforce or more information. It is about more of us developing more ability to create, revive and update institutions so that they become better, evolving tools for us to create value for others and to realize our potential, to find flow and create meaning in a way that revives Jefferson’s promise of this as a country with politics designed for the pursuit of happiness rather than the provocation of anger.

We already know how to turn public science into private products - the iPhone rides on layers of DARPA, NSF, and NIH research. The next economy asks a harder question: can we create public-sector institutions that solve problems or realize potential with the same dynamic venture capital brings to startups? Imagine government as a first customer, small teams funded in stages, real outcome metrics, and the judgement to scale what works and sunset what doesn’t. This book argues we can - and shows how.

The constant through the history of these United States is each generation and community finding their own balance between the interplay of Jefferson’s democracy and Smith’s markets. The point of disruption, the element that changes with each economy and ripples into so much about us, is the factor of production that limits progress. That change has triggered revolution, civil war, and a great depression and now a threat to democratic institutions.

 

---

[1] Smith, Christian. Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (pp. 7-8). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Jensen Huang on Bringing Other Companies Along

"When you look at the computers we make, they are thousands of acres large .... These industries manufacture numbers that when reformulated becomes intelligence. Intelligence manufacturing factories! This new industry manufactures the most valuable thing ever known: intelligence."
"If you have an imagination about the future, it is possible to bring other people along. ... The way we see the world is inclusive and brings other people along."
- Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company at $4.6 trillion (Microsoft at $3.9T and Apple at $3.8T are #2 and #3)

Is the Internet Shrinking Your Brain?

I wonder what evolutionary changes will be caused by our growing connection to the internets.
In Kensy Cooperrider's podcast episode “Why did our brains shrink 3000 years ago?” — Many Minds, Feb 2, 2022 - he spoke with guest Jeremy DeSilva from Dartmouth. The episode discusses the late, post-growth shrinkage of ~“a lemon’s” worth of brain volume, and explores possible explanations. (Hold a lemon beside your skull. That's a lot of volume.)

A brain is both incredibly useful and very expensive. Brain cells use more calories than other cells. And the larger the brain, the higher the risk that birth will kill the mother or child. So if it were possible to get by with smaller brains, evolutionary pressures would choose that direction.

DeSilva says there are various theories about why the brain shrunk just 3,000 years ago. One is that society had evolved to the point that one could outsource collective cognition. For me an even more interesting possibility - and in a way related - is that this brain shrinkage coincided with the emergence of reading and writing. One didn't have to hold as much in her head if she could hold it instead in her library.

How will our growing ease of connecting with so much data, so many people, and so many virtual experiences online change our brains? Could it shrink them even further?

Here's the episode:https://disi.org/why-did-our-brains-shrink-3000-years-ago/

Reality TV and Surreal Policies

"So that orange man who played such a powerful executive on TV? What was his catch-phrase?""'You're fired!'"
"Yes! Him. How is job growth under his leadership?"
"The economy has lost jobs in two of the last three months. He may not be creating jobs but he is creating drama."
"Well who could have seen that coming?"
"Umm .... if you watched his show, you literally saw that. Every single week the number of working people went down and the drama increased. Now he's just doing that on a larger stage."
"Wouldn't you have thought that he would have changed the script to something like, 'You're hired!'?"
"Well, he thought about it but decided that would be too boring - bad for ratings. So he's shut down the government but he is building a ballroom."
"Well that seems like a weird priority. What does he need that for?"
"When asked, he just danced around the question."
"Presumably once the ballroom is built ..."
"We will just see more of that. Yes."

Power Over and Power To - The Distinction Between Great and Awful Institutions

I watched a sharp Johnny Harris piece on the LDS Church, and one almost throwaway moment stuck with me: losing temple privileges for a few weeks after “going too far” with his fiancée—embarrassing not because people knew why, but because they could see he’d lost access.

As I get older, I get more sensitive to how institutions at their best give us power to ... amazon lets you quickly get about any product to your door within a day or two (even better, download an entire book within seconds) ... a great university provides you with testable theories about how the world works and how to create a life within it. A great religion simultaneously humbles you by reminding you of how inconsequential you are among 8 billion now and generations before and after while also giving you hope that your life matters.

But institutions can also exercise power over us. Sometimes they use us. The laborers building the Egyptian pyramids. The hopeful housewives trying to build a business through a pyramid scheme. The church member feeling guilty about desire.

Which brings me back to confessions. Expecting young men to confess lust to old men makes about as much sense as old men confessing joint pain to young men - that’s just what bodies do at those stages of life. But of course that arrangement also clearly gives old men more power over young men.

The trick of progress, it seems to me, is to reverse ancient injustices in which individuals were tools of institutions and instead do all that we can to make those institutions tools of individuals.

Interplanetary System - A New Information-scape

Soon I'll be launching something even bigger than www - the worldwide web.

Stay tuned for the ips. - interplanetary system - the information-scape too big for a single planet.

Patch notes: added moons, rings, and meteors.

Falling Off a Cliff with a Blindfold - Job Loss Blackout During Trump's Government Shutdown

The economy is losing jobs but we don't know how many.

Each month the BLS reports the number of jobs lost or gained. ADP is the private sector equivalent - a less accurate number that comes from a smaller sample size generated by a private company. Wednesday they reported that the private sector lost jobs in September.

With the government shutdown, two things have happened. Millions of federal workers are furloughed, have effectively lost their jobs. And the federal government will not be reporting job numbers until the shutdown ends.

The bad news is that Trump and the Republican's policies are already costing us jobs. The worse news is that we are flying blind and that we don't even know how many jobs, how much damage Trump's chaotic policies are doing.

In Trump's final month in office, 3,000 Americans a day were dying from COVID - a 9-11 every day. He ignored this and was focused on overturning the election that he lost.

Now he has regained office and in his first months increased his personal net worth by $3 billion. In every single month of Biden's presidency, the economy created jobs. Within months of taking office, Trump's economy was losing jobs. And now, as it continues to lose jobs while he gains billions, he shuts down the government so that no one can see the official tally of jobs he's losing.

Or as the MAGA boys call it: winning.

Jane Goodall on Making a Difference

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
- Jane Goodall

Donald Trump as the Last Resort

Did you know that Donald Trump is the only president in history to have never won a general election against another man? 

Donald. The last resort of American misogynists.

Bill Gates The Trillionaire

MSFT closed today at a market cap of $3.84 trillion.

At Microsoft’s IPO (1986), Bill Gates ’ stake is commonly reported in the ~45–49% range (the peak of his post-IPO ownership; it only fell afterward).

If he had maintained that same percentage, his hypothetical net worth today would be somewhere between $1.73 to $1.88 trillion.

Even as late as 1999, Gates held more than 15% of Microsoft; if he still had that share today, it would be ~$587 billion.

Why did he end up with a lower percentage? Divorce settlement. Gifts to the Gates Foundation and other charities. Share dilution from new issuance for things like employee options. And sale of stock for diversification into other assets.

His reported net worth today is $106 billion. Had he kept his peak post-IPO stake, his net worth would put him comfortably into 13-digit territory.

Trump Deploying Troops Into American Cities As Further Evidence He Doesn't Understand Specialization

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

- Trump to his top military leaders today.

Put aside the absurdity of a man elected by red states sending military troops into the cities of blue states as one of his first acts of office. That's dictatorship 101 right there and unprecedented.

This also gets to the heart of MAGA confusion about the world. The chief reason that global trade has allowed for such unprecedented prosperity is that it has allowed for unprecedented levels of specialization. I worked with product development teams for decades and many were making incredibly complex products, like nanotechnology, computer chips, medical devices and drugs. In the nearly 30 years I did that I saw a fascinating thing play out: the portion of a project plan that was to be worked by an outside company rather than an inside department rose from roughly 10 to 20% to closer to 33 to 50%. Specialization hit a level that fewer and fewer companies could sustain affordable expertise in most of their processes and skills. The specialization that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 - "one man draws out the wire, another sharpens it ..." was interpersonal. People along the same factory line each specializing on one step in production. The specialization today is literally different companies making different parts and doing different steps. Adam Smith's specialization played out on one factory line; today's specialization plays out across the globe with hundreds of companies coordinating to make a single product.

Why mention specialization in reference to sending troops into cities? Only people as clueless as Trump and his head of DoD, former Fox commentator Pete Hegseth would think that how you would deploy guys with guns for war has anything to do with how you would deploy guys with guns for policing. Police and military are specialists. They have very different objectives. Very different goals and constraints. And the tactics that might make you a great police officer could get you killed in war; the tactics that might make you a great soldier might get civilians killed in policing.

Then of course, I could be completely wrong. Trump may indeed be aiming for something akin to military occupation in the blue cities that tend to vote 4 to 1 against him. And if so, further evidence that the man cares little about the safety of American people or the economy and his presidency has everything to do with how he feels.

In either case, this is not normal governance for a democracy. This is the kind of thing his buddies Xi, Putin, MBS, and Kim do.

Trump's Nobel Peace Prize

Next month the Nobel Prizes will be announced. Trump has already warned the committee that if he doesn't get a Peace prize he will send troops to occupy their buildings.

The Colonization of Mars and America and Travel Times

For my fellow nerds.

Atlantic, 1776: British colonies were ~5,000–6,000 km from Britain. Crossings typically took 6 to 8 weeks (fast packets ~4 weeks; bad weather 10 to 12).

Earth to Mars (near-term tech): Distance varies from ~55 million km (close opposition) to ~400 million km (solar conjunction).

Launch windows open about every 26 months. Transit is about 6 to 9 months. Miss a window and the door-to-door delay (wait + flight) can be about 32 to 35 months; catch it and it’s only 6 to 9 months.

And that time gap assumes the Mars spacecraft is cruising about 20,000× faster than an 18th-century sailing ship when you compare end-to-end distance covered per day.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

From Will Storr’s Selfie - Pruning Down the Brain's Possible Paths

Excerpt from Will Storr's Selfie ...

The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked, in a startling form, in the brain of a growing baby. Despite the fact we’re born with almost as many neurons as we’ll ever need, the weight of a child’s brain increases by more than 30 percent during its first fifteen months. If this rapid gain isn’t due to the generation of brain cells, then what is it? Most of it is the weight of new connections, or synapses, that are forming between these cells. By the age of two, a human will have generated over a hundred trillion synapses, double that of an adult. So great is this extra brain functionality that youngsters even develop cognitive powers the rest of us lack. Six-month-olds can recognize the faces of individuals from other races with an ease that would have the rest of us worrying quietly whether we are racist. They can even readily identify monkey faces. Babies can hear tones in foreign languages that their parents are deaf to. They’re also thought to experience synaesthesia, the eerie blending of the senses that enables people to taste colors, and so on.

But then begins the cull. These connections start dying off at a rate of up to 100,000 per second. It’s believed that this is one of the ways the brain shapes itself to its environment. Huge connectivity means it’s prepared to deal with a wide range of potential possibilities. Then, when connections between neurons are not activated, they’re killed. They call this “neural pruning,” and it works a little like a sculptor carving a face out of a block of marble: it’s what’s taken away, as much as what is added, that makes us who we are.

When we’re born, then, our brain is ready for the world – or at least a world. It rushes out to greet it, gets to know it, then prunes itself down, specializing itself for the particular cultures in which it finds itself. …

In a major study, researchers in Queensland collated the results of 2,748 papers and concluded the average variation across all human traits and diseases is caused by 49 percent genetic factors and 51 percent environmental factors. ….

“…. We’ve come to realize that it’s much more complex than just being a dollop of genetics and a squirt of environment.” The relationship is symbiotic. Nature and nurture are not in competition, but in conspiracy.

from pp. 55-6 of Will Storr’s Selfie: How we became so self-obsessed and what it’s doing to us

A Trumped Up Charge

"A trumped-up charge is a deliberately false or fraudulent accusation made with the intention of punishing someone unfairly or making them appear guilty. The term implies that the charge has been fabricated, invented, or concocted to deceive and incriminate someone, rather than being a legitimate legal accusation."

It seems fitting that in 20 years when kids as yet unborn are learning vocabulary they will encounter this word and "know" that its origin traces back to President Trump who lied about everything and made wild accusations against anyone who irritated or offended him.

It is as if the gods of vocabulary were trying to warn us.

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.