The Rate At Which the US is Creating New Millionaires and Billionaires

Over the last few years, every HOUR the U.S. economy has created roughly:

• 50 new millionaires
• 5 new decamillionaires (households with a net worth of $10 million or more).

And yes, the American economy is serving up millionaires like Denny’s serves up meals: 24 hours a day.

It takes the U.S. economy about three days to produce a new billionaire.

Now for the contrast. (Thank you for the suggestion, Allen Warren!)

Personal and business bankruptcies occur at a rate of roughly 69 per hour — more than one every minute.

So, every hour:

- 50 people cross the million-dollar wealth line.
- 69 bankruptcy filings occur.

At first glance, that sounds like bankruptcy is winning.

But the two numbers describe very different phenomena.

Roughly 20% of Americans will become millionaires at some point in their lives. Some will later fall below that threshold as they draw down retirement accounts, spend home equity, or simply experience a change in fortune.

Roughly 10% of Americans will file for bankruptcy at some point. And bankruptcy, too, is usually an episode in a life—not a permanent condition.

There’s another complication: bankruptcies are repeatable events. An estimated 36% to 46% of bankruptcy filings are made by repeat filers. So counting 69 bankruptcies every hour substantially overstates the number of different people who will ever file.

Crossing the million-dollar threshold, by contrast, is much closer to a one-time milestone.

The 50 millionaires per hour represent people slowly accumulating wealth until they cross a finish line that a surprisingly large share of Americans—perhaps one in five—will eventually cross.

So although more bankruptcy filings occur each hour than people becoming millionaires, the lifetime picture looks very different:

About 20% will become millionaires.
About 10% will experience bankruptcy.

The punchline?

Whether you think this is the greatest economy on Earth or the worst may depend quite a bit on which way the coin flips for you—and where it lands.

Sartre, Husserl, and Bakewell, If You Don't Mind

Sarah Bakewell, on Sartre reading Husserl, in At the Existentialist Café:

"All consciousness is consciousness of something."

Sartre pushed it: sealing yourself into a shuttered room doesn't preserve you, it erases you. There's no cozy interior to retreat to. Being out on the road is the thing we are.

A bookshelf without books is still a bookshelf. A mind without thought is not a mind.

Perhaps we dream in order to keep existing overnight. Or at least not to lose our mind.

Facing Less FDA Regulatory Hurdles, Dogs May Start Enjoying the Benefits of Longevity Treatments Before Humans Do

People love their pets. Also, given pets are animals, they are less protected by FDA norms for regulating new drugs. The result? Dogs are more likely to benefit sooner from age extension treatments than are humans.

https://loyal.com/

Baby Boomers Putting the Boom in Stock Market Gains and Are Now Ending Their Careers Early

The stock market boom is financing early retirement.

According to recent data from Bank of America, the labor force participation rate for Americans aged 55 and older dropped to 36.9%, a significant decline from the over 40% participation level maintained before the pandemic. Stock market gains that have driven a 40% rise in market indices over the last couple of years have increased wealth enough that workers can comfortably exit the labor market ahead of schedule.

What is Particularly Intoxicating About Trump

Trump is racist and xenophobic. Why is that an intoxicating blend for so many Americans?

He was born a white American and that not only makes him superior but ... it is something that his supporters can identify with. And what makes it intoxicating is that he did absolutely nothing to accomplish either of those great accomplishments (being white and being born in the US). By extension, if you, too, managed to live through birth in these United States and you discovered that you, too, were White, you, too, have accomplished something great. And all before you even put forth any concerted effort. No weird math problems to solve. No poems or historical facts to memorize. No track and field medals to train and strain for. No foreign language to learn.

Now Trump has pulled off one more accomplishment that only a minority of his supporters have managed. He was born rich. So, he's even better than them and thus a worthy leader.

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them," in the words of Shakespeare. Trump assures his supporters that they were born great. That's a hard idea to resist. 

So Many Broken Egg Shells - And Yet

Lenin - and others - had famously said that you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Many have since mocked the phrase, looking back at the massive death tolls and economic failures of the 20th century totalitarian states, pointing out that there were piles of broken egg shells and yet no one got to taste any omelets. "Lots of broken eggs, no omelets."

[Another insight shared by Yale historian Marci Shore]

How Decision Fatigue Makes Us More Susceptible to Strongmen

Decision fatigue in the modern world may be one reason people find strongmen appealing. Here, finally, is someone who will simply decide for you.

And you don’t have to decide whether this makes sense. I assure you that it does.
Just accept it.

The Economist Reports that Trump's Popularity Has Fallen to a Record Low

If you still like Donald, you might be the odd duck.

Profit Per Employee for the 5 Most Valuable Companies

The five most valuable publicly traded companies vary quite a bit in the measure of profit per employee.

Profit Per Employee 

• NVIDIA: ~$2.02M – $2.86M per employee
• Apple: ~$400K – $600K+ per employee
• Alphabet (Google): ~$300K – $500K per employee
• Microsoft: ~$270K – $400K per employee
• Amazon: ~$30K – $60K per employee

At Nvidia, assuming a 40 hour workweek (surely a low estimate for vested employees), employees generate about $1,200 an hour in profits. By contrast, at Amazon employees generate about $22 an hour in profits.

This profit doesn't impact wages but it can impact employee wealth. Of Nvidia's roughly 33,000 employees, more than 75% are now millionaires. Even more impressively, about half of them are worth $25 million or more. They must daydream about eventually turning their work over to AI-infused robots and wandering off into retirement to apply free time to their wealth.

Never Meta Conspiracy Theory He Could Resist

To be fair, Tom's conspiracy theory was not typical. It was, in fact, a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. Amelia hardly knew whether to flee or ask him to elaborate.

Freud and What the Child Soon Learns

From Marci Shore, Professor of History at Yale.

"The child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability"
- Freud

For Freud, everything is about repression.
For Marx, everything is about class struggle.
What property is for Marx, sexuality is for Freud.

Full disclosure from Deep Mind, Google AI: The quote "the child soon learns to exchange pleasure for social respectability" is not a direct quote by Sigmund Freud, but rather a famous summary of his ideas written by the historian and social critic Will Durant.

Professor Shore closes with this thought, speculating on the appeal of Trump who feels free to say things others might find shocking or uncensored.
"Feeling liberated to say something outrageous like, I want to rape that woman, is a kind of liberation, a free expression of the libido. It is a kind of liberation from repression for which, however, we pay the small price of the destruction of civilization."

Turning From Fiction to Conspiracy Theories

After spending years writing and failing to sell screenplays, he finally found his muse.

He began generating conspiracy theories.

They were more complicated to monetize, but much easier to find an audience for.

At this stage of the information economy, as it turned out, people were less interested in fiction labeled as fiction. They preferred their fiction smuggled in as breathless confession—presented not as invention, but as revelation: something they didn’t want you to know.

Traditional fiction merely asked you to suspend disbelief.

Conspiracy theory offered the more thrilling possibility that disbelief itself was proof you were onto something.

A successful screenplay got you money.
A successful conspiracy got you power.

Hofstadter's Law

Hofstadter's Law:

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Modernity as the Shift from Time as a Cycle of Seasons into Time as Forward Movement

"One definition of modernity is the notion of a shift from a cyclical notion of time, a kind of circular notion of time that was focused on the seasons, a focus on the holidays, of time moving in a cycle to linear notion of time, of time having a direction, of moving forward. And this dominance of the notion that time moves forward represents the break between pre-modernity and modernity."

- Marci Shore, Professor of History at Yale

The Dynamics of American Religion Over the Last 50 Years

It turns out American religion works rather like business: over the last fifty years, the churches that grew fastest were the ones that responded fastest to their members.

Curiously, the fastest-growing kind (nondenominational churches) share no national institution at all. What they share is a national market. They preach from the same best-selling books, sing the same praise songs (licensed like pop music, projected on screens that update weekly — the hymnal was a format built for centuries, the screen is a format built for this Sunday), attend the same conferences, buy from the same vendors. No denomination coordinates them. Demand coordinates them. And that's the first axis of the matrix: how fast a church can change.

The second axis is what a church says when you want to change it. Some churches say no — to your requests, and to the times. (The top row.) Others say yes. (The bottom row.) The first kind may tell you coffee is forbidden. The second kind sells you a latte in the lobby on your way in to worship. One church judges your desires; the other retails them.

Freed from coordinating anything through a national body, nondenominational churches pivot at the speed of their own congregations. As a result they've grown, even in a country where religion overall is shrinking. (The fastest-growing religious category in America isn't the responsive church. It's none at all.)

Your instinct may be that religion is the one domain that offers something unchanging. The market's verdict, fifty years running? Demand for the unchanging is falling. And in this country, our belief in markets seems to be even stronger than our belief in religion.

A Wave Isn't a Thing

A wave isn't a thing, it's a pattern passing through a medium. The water in a wave barely travels; it rises, circles, and settles nearly where it was. What crosses the ocean is the form — energy organizing water it borrows and returns. No molecule of a wave came with it from the storm that started it; the wave is the shape, not the substance. The water is moved by the wave but doesn't move with the wave. 

Gobemouche

Jones' campaign had won the support of the gobemouche, but Carl was skeptical that this support was enough to decide the election. Carl's wife, by contrast, thought Carl might actually be among the gobemouche if he believed this constituency was not enough to swing an election.

QI Word of the Day: GOBEMOUCHE - someone who believes anything they're told.

A Liminal State

I've just learned that I'm in a liminal state.

A liminal state is a psychological, physical, or social condition of being "betwixt and between" two distinct states of existence. Derived from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, it represents a period of transition where your old identity or environment has dissolved, but your new reality has not yet fully formed.

 

Business Card?

“Do you have a business card?” 

“No. That’s behind me. All I have now is a ‘None of Your Business’ card.”

Liberalism - a Definition

From Wikipedia:

"During the French Revolution, liberalism meant the fight to end absolute royal power, religious favoritism, and noble class privileges. It stood for individual freedom, equality before the law, a government based on the consent of the people, and the protection of basic human rights."

 You were born into a liberal democracy. You don't want that to change.

Job and Stock Market Performance During Trump's Second Term

156 million Americans are in the stock market.
169 million Americans are in the job market.
Every American is impacted by both markets.

Last month the US lost 23,000 jobs. The rate of job creation during Trump's second term is worse than any presidency except Dubya and - of course - Trump's first term.

The stock market during Trump's second term has outperformed every president since Carter except for Clinton.

The post FDR Democrats were invented to create full employment. The Republicans from Lincoln on were invented to enable industrial and financial capital to drive progress. It fascinates me to what extent these parties still define so many of their policy choices through those founding philosophies. It still shows up in the numbers generations later.

The Limits of Force

"It would be easier to subjugate the entire universe through force than the minds of a single village."

- Voltaire, sometime in the 1750s.

"It is easier to conquer than to administer. With enough leverage, a finger could overturn the world; but to support the world, one must have the shoulders of Hercules."
- Rousseau, in 1762

File these under Enlightenment ideas that were prelude to 1776.

Sexagenarians

Your 80s: octogenarian.
Your 70s: septuagenarian.
Your 60s: sexagenarian.

Say what you will about my generation, but we understand marketing realities better than, you know, actual reality.

A Future You Can Virtually Taste

Right now we can do what people a century ago could hardly imagine: see and hear scenes from thousands of miles away — or decades in the past — almost as if we were there.

In another decade? We'll taste food from another home or another continent. The word "feed" will finally mean what it says. Cooking shows will become wildly popular, and the cruelest hack will be flooding someone's feed with putrid flavors. Ransomware gives way to rancidware.

Centuries ago, only aristocrats heard music on demand or ate exquisite food on a whim. If you can read this post, you already command the world's finest music. Soon you'll eat like royalty too. And when everyone can eat like royalty, the difference between us won't be access to fine food. It will be taste. Once access becomes universal, the most discerning become the new aristocrats.

All of which may simply be one more way for AI to keep us pleasantly distracted while it builds the next layer of reality — one in which we're less the residents than the substrate. A happy, well-fed little substrate, but substrate nonetheless.

Speaking of which: have you tried these caramels?

Survivalist

"He's a survivalist." 

"Aren't we all."

Nvidia and Tesla May be Moving Towards More Reasonable Valuations

Over the last month, the price of Nvidia is up 12% and the price of Tesla is down 23%. Tesla's market cap is $1 trillion. Nvidia's market cap is $5.3 trillion. (All of this 5 August 2026, in the AM.)

That's a world that makes more sense to me. The P/E for Nvidia is 33.4 - which seems a tad high but not unreasonable given its prospects. And the P/E of Tesla is 299 - which still seems silly given how many self-driving cars will be coming on the market over the next 1 to 4 years (much of this driven, so to speak, by Nvidia technology).

Prediction? Nvidia will be priced higher in a year than it is now but the P/E may still be roughly the same, possibly even lower. Tesla will be priced lower in a year, as will its P/E. Tesla is an odd stock but at some point it - too - will have a P/E ratio similar to other stocks, but it'll take a lot of drop for that to happen.

Stay Tuned for a Country Music Song

I'm writing a country music song. So far, the only line I have is, "It's 2 AM and I'm texting to your landline again."

And given my band is low-budget, we'll be using the aluminum rather than steel guitar. It sounds even more forlorn.

Is the News Still Non-Fictional?

 

The Difference Between Tuition and Intuition

tuition: the price of knowledge

intuition: knowledge, free of charge

The First Amendment As Perpetual-Motion Machine for Progress

The first amendment is a production process: an assembly line for converting private belief into shared public reality.

It confers upon Americans the right to believe what they wish, freedom to speak about that, go to press with these ideas, thus amplifying them to a broader community. It then allows people to organize around these beliefs and to petition on their behalf, asking that legislation be changed as a result of these beliefs. This final step institutionalizes what was once a private belief into a law or legislation that affects us all.

And then repeat. For centuries.

The first amendment is a perpetual-motion machine for progress.

First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Zero-Year Presidential Curse - Presidencies for 120 Years Reminiscent of the Fate of Spinal Tap Drummers

What follows is Claude's answer, lightly trimmed, when I asked it to lay out the full roster of the zero-year presidential curse. I'm sharing it because I couldn't improve it, which is its own data point about the moment we're living in. And it adds a Spinal Tap drummer element to presidential history. This is an odd bit of history that over a 120 year period, presidents elected in a zero-year (e.g., 1840 or 1960) died in office. 

Here's the full roster of the so-called "Curse of Tippecanoe" (also called the zero-year curse, and in its most embroidered version, "Tecumseh's Curse," supposedly laid by the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa after Harrison's 1811 battle). The list genuinely reads like something a novelist would reject as too tidy:

**Elected 1840 — William Henry Harrison (Whig).** Served 31 days. Died April 4, 1841, of what was long called pneumonia from his marathon inaugural address in the cold; modern analysis suggests enteric (typhoid) fever from Washington's sewage-contaminated water supply. Either way: the shortest presidency in American history, and patient zero of the curse.

**Elected 1860 — Abraham Lincoln (Republican).** Served 4 years, 1 month into his second term. Assassinated April 14–15, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, five days after Appomattox.

**Elected 1880 — James A. Garfield (Republican).** Served 6 months. Shot July 2, 1881, by Charles Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker; died September 19 after eleven weeks — killed as much by his doctors' unsterilized probing of the wound as by the bullet itself. (Alexander Graham Bell tried to locate the bullet with a metal detector he invented for the occasion; the metal bed frame confounded it.)

**Elected 1900 — William McKinley (Republican).** Served 6 months into his second term. Shot September 6, 1901, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo; died September 14 of gangrene. The newly invented X-ray machine was on display *at the same exposition*, but doctors declined to use it to find the bullet.

**Elected 1920 — Warren G. Harding (Republican).** Served 2 years, 5 months. Died August 2, 1923, in a San Francisco hotel, of a heart attack (long misattributed to food poisoning and swirling with baseless poisoning rumors), just as the Teapot Dome scandals were beginning to surface.

**Elected 1940 — Franklin D. Roosevelt (Democrat).** The technicality entry: elected in 1940 to his *third* term, then again in 1944; died April 12, 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, 82 days into term four — but squarely inside the tenure the 1940 election conferred, so the curse claims him.

**Elected 1960 — John F. Kennedy (Democrat).** Served 2 years, 10 months. Assassinated November 22, 1963, in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. The curse's final kill.

**Elected 1980 — Ronald Reagan (Republican).** The pattern-breaker — barely. Shot March 30, 1981, by John Hinckley Jr., 69 days into office; the bullet stopped roughly an inch from his heart, and he survived largely because the Secret Service made a split-second decision to drive to the hospital rather than the White House. The curse, in other words, wasn't repealed so much as *missed by an inch*. Nancy Reagan took it seriously enough to consult an astrologer about the president's schedule thereafter — arguably the curse's strangest institutional legacy.

**Elected 2000 — George W. Bush.** Survived two terms, definitively retiring the streak (a shoe was thrown; the curse had clearly lost its fastball).

**Elected 2020 — Joe Biden.** Served his full term.

Seven consecutive zero-year presidents dead in office across 120 years, then a one-inch miss.

Legislative Foolishness

"If you took all the fools out of the legislature, it would not be a representative body anymore."

- Texas State Senator Carl Parker

Post Impressionist

She had moved on from her post impressionist stage to her not that impressed with the post stage of social media.

Somewhere along the line there was a mix-up. Someone observed that "nobody uses faxes anymore," and further down the chain of transmission it arrived as "nobody uses facts anymore."

No one has been able to confirm the original wording, though. There's no paper trail.

Slowdown in Rate of Immigration Means a Raise in Average Age of Americans and a Drop in the Percentage Employed

When you combine the odds of an individual being employed and parenting a newborn, a random native-born person has roughly a 5% chance of fulfilling both criteria over the decade. A newly arrived immigrant has roughly a 20% chance.

A crackdown on the rate of immigration means lower birthrates and job creation. That is, this puts additional strain on the social security system. And that cost - as significant as it is - may pale in comparison to the cost of generally lower level of dynamism, a slow down in the rate at which new ideas and perspectives tend to come in through the doors of immigration and youth.

For Profit Presidency - Day 557

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times has reported that Trump is seeking to monetize his Truth Social media posts. The idea is that people will pay $100,000 for advance notice of a post that - given his complete power over the GOP and role as president - can move markets.

Product Idea: Batting Cage with Authentic Crowd Chatter

Product idea: batting cages that include heckling. Every pitch comes with authentic crowd chatter:

“Hey batter, hey batter!”
“It's not just that your mother hits better than that! Even her mother hits better than that!”
“You call that a swing? It looks like you're swatting flies!”
"If they were hurling eggs at you and not balls, you couldn't break enough to make an omelet!"
"Worst dance moves ever!"

A way to simultaneously work on your swing and your emotional resilience, you bum.

Is Nvidia Inflating Sales With Its Investments in Other Companies?

The short answer to the question of whether Nvidia is inflating its own sales by investing in its own customers is "No."

Nvidia has invested roughly $43 billion in other companies who also buy chips from Nvidia.

Nvidia's market cap as of July 31 is nearly $4.9 trillion.

What does that mean? Nvidia's investments in companies that also purchase from it is less than one percent of its value.

Jensen Huang has a clear vision of how to build out the AI economy and where limits to expansion exist. He's making strategic investments to break those limits to his larger goals and thus far, those investments are a rounding error in his company's valuation.

Is that inflating demand for its own products in order to drive up their own stock price? That seems like a tough claim to make when the magnitude of his investments and the value of his company are so very different.

The Industry Behind the Attack on Fauci

There is an old quip: the alternative medicine that's proven to work gets renamed: medicine. (Willow bark to aspirin is the classic journey; several chemotherapy agents made the same trip.)
There is a huge industry - somewhere between $50 to $100 billion - of alternative medicine that is behind the attack on Fauci. It's an odd world. Ivermectin for river blindness earned a Nobel Prize; ivermectin for COVID failed its large randomized trials. Chiropractic for lower back pain has decent evidence; chiropractic for allergies doesn't. This is why "alternative medicine" resists being a category of things: it's a category of claims relative to evidence. Alternative medicines are claiming UNPROVEN effects.

And of course this is something consistent with the brand of MAHA and MAGA . Claims are made without the tiresome burden of evidence. You might classify Trump's promise to lower inflation by imposing tariffs as alternative politics.

One of the ways that I know pharmaceuticals approved by the FDA are real and alternative medicine is not? Real drugs that make real changes to your body have a variety of side effects. They are changing your body and that always includes unexpected outcomes. How do we know that alternative medicine is not real? It doesn't make enough change in your body to trigger side effects, much less make one healthier.

What do we see in the attacks on Fauci? An attack on the burden of proof as a bar alternative medicine has to clear before it can be sold. There is big money that comes from getting people to disregard the - yawn - tiresome burden of evidence that can make your brain hurt and lower your expectations of magical outcomes. Real changes - in pharma or politics - carries with it uncertainty that promised changes do not. For millions of Americans, honesty about the fact we live in a world filled with probabilities and if-then outcomes is too large a burden and they embrace the snake-oil salesmen who make promises that defy reason or facts.

Seize the Memes of Production

This evening we took our two-year-old granddaughter to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, her first visit. At one point she said "meow" several times. I looked around for a porcelain cat. Nothing. That's when I realized she was saying "Mao."

I had not planned to explain communism this early, but the literature is clear: one must follow the child's questions wherever they lead. Still, when I heard myself say "Seize the memes of production," I concede I may have drifted from her core interests, which at that moment were noodles.

She's two. The material conditions can wait.

Fauci and RFK Jr.

Republicans hammering Fauci for recommending masks and vaccines during the most deadly virus of the last half century.  Meanwhile, they've made RFK Jr. health secretary. Kennedy, the guy who has reminisced about snorting cocaine off of toilet seats.

It is clear that Republicans are brilliant at getting attention. It's less clear what their values are .. besides, you know, getting attention. It's an administration driven by a quest for higher ratings - no matter what weirdness they need to engage in to do that.

Would You Rather Have Hundreds of Competitors—or Hundreds of Partners?

For nearly three years, I taught seminars for the Covey Leadership Center (Franklin Covey by the end of my time there). I loved the work, and my respect for Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has only grown over time.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, offers a powerful illustration of the progression Covey described from private victory to public victory.

The first three habits—Be Proactive, Begin with the End in Mind, and Put First Things First—are about learning to lead yourself, about private victory. Public victory begins with Habit 4: Think Win-Win.

Huang has said that he doesn’t talk about taking market share. Instead, he talks with others about creating markets.

Think about the power of that distinction.

If your goal is to take market share, you may find yourself competing with dozens—or hundreds—of companies for a larger portion of something that already exists.

But when your goal is to create a market, many of those potential competitors can become partners. Instead of asking how to take business from one another, you can ask what new products, services and industries you all might create together. You are collaborating rather than competing. 

Imagine the difference between having dozens of competitors or having hundreds of partners.

Habit 4: Think win-win leads to Covey’s next two habits:

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.

And then:

Habit 6: Synergize.

Synergy means jointly creating something that neither party could have created alone—a new solution that produces value for customers, employees, shareholders and partners in a way that did not exist before.

You can think win-lose and compete harder for a share of the existing market.

Or you can think win-win and ask: What could we create together that none of us could create alone?

Again, it is the difference between having dozens of competitors or hundreds of collaborators. 

Huang has helped build one of the most consequential companies of our time by pursuing that second path, working now to create not just a new market but a new economy, one powered by AI.

It might be worth thinking about.

Thinking win-win, that is.

Trump's Approval Rating and Other Strange Stats

Trump's approval rating is at its lowest to date and yet he still has the approval of one third of Americans.

Related, about 33% of Americans believe that extraterrestrials walk among us and that same portion of Americans think that they would outlast everyone else as a lone survivor of an apocalypse.

Which is to say, his approval rating may never go any lower.

Approval rating from the The Economist. Weird stats about aliens and the apocalypse from Reader's Digest.

An Echo-System

"What you have is an echo-system."

"-Wait! Did you say echo-system?"
"Yes."
"Do you mean ecosystem?"
"Have you noticed how a few messages get repeated again and again there?"
"Uh, yeah."
"Like an echo."
....
"Exactly."

Apple Once Again the World's Most Valuable Company

Apple — the one giant refusing to bet its balance sheet on AI infrastructure — is today once again the world's most valuable company.

Also of note: the three most valuable companies in the world sit within a 10 mile radius of each other - this on a earth with a circumference of nearly 25,000 miles.

Table from https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Bear, Bull, and Minotaur - How Little We Understand Markets

One of the many things that makes the stock market fascinating is that the exact same facts can reasonably support reasoning behind, say, P/E of 19 or 39 ... depending on a variety of other forces at play, some as curious as "mood."

Clothing and music go in and out of fashion and so, in a sense, do stocks or particular sectors of stocks or even the stock market itself.

If stock price were purely a function of variation in sales and profits there would be variability enough. But then you add to that animal spirits and the variability varies even more. The amount by which variability varies varies over time depending on various factors.

There are bull markets (stocks are up!) and bear markets (stocks are down!) and even that can be misleading.

"Is that a bull or a bear," asks the investor.
"Oh, Clive. That looks like a minotaur. No bull here, friend. You may have been taken in by a mythological creature."
"Mythological?"
"Well, not completely. The minotaur has built this maze of gains and losses that you're now navigating. The stock market is a labyrinth and you never quite know which way it'll turn next or whether you'll ever find your way out."

Attention and Institutional Design

Anxiety-and-boredom institutions versus skill-meets-challenge institutions is precisely the difference between attention strip-mined and attention cultivated.

The Rapid Emergence of National AIs

The president of South Korea was recently in San Francisco and shook hands with Nvidia's Jensen Huang over an agreement to develop a large language model for South Korea, something they are simply calling Korea AI.

[photo from The Korea Herald https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10819850 ]

This is a fascinating development that you may have missed.

250 years ago, hundreds of governments were creating constitutions. This was a new kind of technology that answered the question, If we are not our sovereign's country - if we are not simply Catherine the Great - Queen of Russia's - domain but are instead a nation that is defined as something that transcends a monarch - what are we? A constitution is an attempt to answer that question.

And of course constitutions evolve over time - most clearly with amendments but more subtly with hundreds of court rulings, laws, and emergent norms. But Korea AI represents something new: an emergent tool that has the capacity to synthesize polls, precedents, budgets, scientific and research discoveries, the evolution of culture and so much more into something we might call Korean.
This is not unique to Korea. How many countries are engaged in creating their own national AI?

If the bar is "formal national commitment to AI sovereignty," the figure is startling: at the AI for Developing Countries Forum in Bangkok in February 2026, delegates from over 100 countries adopted a declaration to pursue AI sovereignty — control over AI data, computing resources, and the models operating within their borders — explicitly so that models reflect each nation's "languages, cultures, and values." If the bar is "actually building or funding a national model," the realistic count is somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 countries with concrete programs, and it's now a budget line in most of the G20 — a stated strategic priority of essentially every government with the fiscal capacity to fund one.

Korea's announcement, in other words, isn't an outlier — it's one of the last major economies to formalize what has become, in about thirty months, a near-universal ambition.

In a sense, this is an attempt to formalize a national culture: its mix of capabilities and knowledge and its values and goals.
An American AI suggests the possibility of synthesizing culture into laws and budgets. The cultural debates about what we mean by British or German or even European give way to an elaborate scorecard that has the potential to synthesize debates from talk shows, public opinion, research from universities and - of course - legislation debated and passed into laws and budgets. The emergent property of a nation can become intellectual engine to an American AI or Colombian AI.

Among the many questions this raises is simply this: is this more or less democratic? A consciousness that emerges out of the various sometimes harmonious sometimes clashing impulses, thoughts and goals in the same way that a sense of self emerges out of target weight and the allure of chocolate, goals and priorities expressed versus goals and priorities lived, etc. Is this sense of Korea AI or America AI something transcendent of the old media and legislature or does it represent something too opaque to qualify as democratic?

This Blog Author's Philosophy in a Sentence

Progress is the transformation of “there is only so much” into “there is so much”- by enabling people, ideas, and institutions to combine in ways that create possibilities none could create alone.

Elon Musk's Cultural Dissonance Regarding Religion and AI - His Interview with the Economist

The Economist's Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes interviewed the world's richest man. So much could be said about it, but I'll limit myself to one observation about its beginning and its end.

At the start, Elon Musk calmly acknowledges that AI could mean an apocalyptic future for mankind — but says he's fairly confident the more probable outcome is that AI and robotics deliver unprecedented, widespread prosperity. Risk acknowledged, reward embraced.

At the end, he's defending his prediction that Britain — a place he admits he hasn't visited in years — is headed for civil war because it lets in people from other cultures, primarily Muslims, whose beliefs will create a rupture. Risk acknowledged, reward forgotten.

Notice the accounting. For his own disruptive creation, Musk holds danger and promise in the same hand and bets on promise. For the disruption of unfamiliar beliefs, he can no longer find the promise at all.

Which is odd, because the promise is the modern world's founding wager. The First Amendment may be the most brilliant social invention in history. (Yes, that's the US, not Britain — but Musk claims it as his creed; free speech absolutism was his stated reason for buying Twitter.) Put simply, it commits a nation to welcoming ideas that others find offensive — on the bet that the collision of beliefs produces more progress than protection from them ever could.

Musk is clear-eyed that welcoming AI means welcoming an intelligence that may reject us, oppose us, or synthesize with our own to create unprecedented progress. He seems unable to see that welcoming foreign religions, philosophies, and perspectives is the same wager — one that may applaud us, boo us, or synthesize with our own beliefs to create unprecedented progress. It's a wager the West has been winning for centuries.

In this sense, AI isn't a break from history. It's the newest entrant in a long series of disruptive arrivals — democracy, thousands of religions including atheism, philosophies, lifestyles, ideas — that collided to create the modern world.

The modern world is nothing if not a belief in the benefit of welcoming — of making ourselves vulnerable to — what is foreign, new, and possibly disruptive. The entanglement of risk and reward is something intrinsic to progress. 

https://www.economist.com/insider/the-insider/an-interview-with-elon-musk

Elon Drops from 4X Wealthier Than Second Richest Person to Just 3X

As of 24 July 2026 ... Elon Musk has lost as much as the second richest man in the world and still has roughly $750 billion.
He's dropped from more than one trillion dollars in net worth to $725 billion. Larry Page - cofounder of Google / Alphabet and second richest man in the world - is now worth $262 billion. Per Forbes.

data:
https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#38ff1823d788

Nvidia vs. Tesla - A Striking Contrast Between Two Stocks

This is a stunning contrast between a meme stock that remains disconnected from underlying reality and one of the most remarkable companies of this century that is positioned in a way that investors don't quite yet believe. One a stock that credulous investors are buying at a premium and another that skeptical investors are hesitant to buy at an remarkably reasonable price.

Tesla:
Margin Deterioration: Operating margin plummeted to 1.4% from 4.1%.
Valuation Disconnect: Trailing P/E sits at an extreme 345x multiplier.
Capital Strain: Free cash flow reversed into a $1.09 billion burn.
Market Headwinds: Facing intense EV price wars and autonomous competition.

Nvidia:
Profit Powerhouse: Operating margins actually exceed 65%.
Cheaper Valuation: Forward P/E is highly reasonable at 22.7x.
Insatiable Demand: Customers are immediately purchasing all available AI chips.

Just focus on the margins alone.
Tesla profit margins of 1.4%.
Nvidia profit margins of 65%.

Irrational exuberance contrasted with rational skepticism.

*******

And the morning after I posted this on 22 July, Tesla is down more than 13%, its P/E ratio closer to 300.

And to be fair, Nvidia stock price is down 2.5% this morning as well. 

Fainting Spells

She seems entirely too perky. 

How do you suggest that we slow her down?

Do you know any good fainting spells?

You Think

It is not just that you think differently from other people. You think differently from everyone. And as if that is not enough, you think differently WITH each person.

Think about that.

Band Evolution

They started out as a punk band but then the guitarist learned 3 new chords so now they're a pop rock band. If he does that two more times, though, they'll have to bill themselves as prog rock.

(I know. I know. Maybe only 4 people will get this and only two of them who will find it entertaining. Kind of like the audience for a prog rock band.)

Donald Trump Paid $6 Million in Damages Today to E. Jean Carroll

Somehow this fact and the fact that Trump is the only president in the 250 years of this country to have never beat another man in the general election seem related.

Per Mother Jones, if only women had voted in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would have won 45 states (plus Washington, D.C.) for a total of 458 electoral votes. If only men had voted, Donald Trump would have won 35 states for a total of 350 electoral votes.

You American voting boys. You really need to up your game.

AI Representation

Lindsay Graham dead.
Mitch McConnell brain dead.

Makes you wonder how long before districts will be perpetually represented by the AI avatar of a politician who once was an actual human. Like Disney's Hall of Presidents but avatars actually sitting in congress.

The Limit of Institutional Imagination

What invention is to products and technology, entrepreneurship is to institutions. 

One of the limits to an entrepreneurial economy will be our institutional imagination. By definition, institutions can do what no individual can. This suggests that the imagination of an individual is not enough. We need something that - like the capability of institutions - emerges out of the interaction of individuals rather than is a story told by or curated by some charismatic leader.

Hacking Consciousness Is Easier Than Hacking Voting Machines

Our perceptions are more subject to manipulation than our votes.

Voting machines are physically protected by strict security protocols and lack internet connection. By contrast, human minds are constantly connected to open information streams.

The Fifth of July!

Happy Fifth of July!
The first day of the next 250 years.

It Was Indeed

It was the least we could do, he said.

And, indeed, it was, the very least they could do.

New Politics for the Next Economy - What Comes After the First 250 Years of America?

America has reinvented itself four times. I think we're on the fifth. Two hundred and fifty years in, that seemed like the right thing to consider today.

Since 1776, Americans have reinvented our country four times. Jefferson's generation transformed a collection of colonies into a constitutional democracy. Lincoln's generation built a national industrial economy. FDR's generation made labor as important as capital and created global institutions. Reagan’s generation created an information economy.

Each transformation was stressful. Each required Americans to rethink old assumptions. And each created radically new possibilities, very different economies.

I believe we're at the cusp of a fifth transformation.

New Politics for the Next Economy asks the question: How do we adopt a politics that allows us to change our institutions into tools that allow us to realize our potential, to become our better selves?

The central question? How did America become the country it is today? It traces America’s evolution and asks what it could become next.

The book is intentionally optimistic. Rather than dwelling on what's broken, it explores what might come next—and how ordinary citizens can help build it.

This is a book about renewal — a fitting thing to think about on the day we mark 250 years of being American. I'd be honored if you'd take a look.

New Politics for the Next Economy is available now in paperback and Kindle.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Politics-Next-Economy-Critical/dp/B0H6P5MZ6Z/

A Gerontocracy If You Can Keep It, Er, Keep Them Alive

The country is 250 years old. How old is that?

Well, not that old. The three oldest members of congress have a combined age of 267 years, so the country is only about three lifetimes old.

Oldest members of congress:

• Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): 92 years old
• Hal Rogers (R-Ky.): 88 years old
• Maxine Waters (D-CA): 87 years old

And of course President Trump is now 80.

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): 83 years old, is the second oldest Republican in the House. He leads the Senate Republican Conference. Mitch is currently lying in a coma in a hospital bed but still "serving" in the House.

The word you are looking for is gerontocracy. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin who quipped that we had a Republic if we could keep it, we have a gerontocracy if we can, you know, keep them alive.

The Democratic - or Post-Hero - Mindset

"The democratic mindset is one that is post-adolescent and properly recognizes the impossibility of heroes. There are no heroes. There are merely humans like you and me who are finding their way, are prone to error, and who are not omnipotent."

- Alain de Botton

Lab Partner

It was the most curious thing that had happened to him in months. Out of the blue, he had been assigned a lab partner. This, in his sixties, and outside the walls of any institution.

Cults, Culture and How They Cut or Connect

Culture generally connects you to other people, makes your world bigger.
Cults cut you off from other people, make your world smaller.

The Bad News and Good News

The bad news?
The San Diego Padres trail the Chicago Cubs 23 to 3.

The good news?
It's the top of the 9th and they can still make a comeback.

Unhappy Voters in the UK and US

Keir Starmer served 23 months as the UK's Prime Minister and next month it seems almost certain that former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham will become the UK's new PM.

In the last 20 years, the UK has had 7 Prime Ministers (Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, and Starmer) who have served 2.7 years on average. (One is tempted to predict that in the future, every Brit will be PM for a day.) By contrast, the US has had 3 presidents (Obama, Trump, and Biden) who have served 5.7 years on average. 

Recent US presidents saw their approval ratings plummet well below 40% midway through their terms. In a parliamentary system, ratings that low almost always trigger an internal party coup or a formal vote of no confidence. That is to say, if we had a similar electoral system, we in the US would likely have a similar rate of turnover.

At least since the time of Thatcher and Reagan, and then Blair and Clinton, and then the UK's vote for BREXIT at the same time that the US elected Trump, the UK and the US have had similar politics. What that means in this 21st century is that voters are unhappy and unafraid to quickly withdraw their approval. In the UK, that also means sending their PM off to the next chapter of their lives. Here in the US we have to simply endure as the calendar runs out. 

My Schadenfreuden Therapist

"You dropped your therapist because he was Freudian?"
"No. More like schadenfreuden. He seemed too happy to hear about my unhappiness."

Supreme Court Upholds Fourteenth Amendment

The thirteenth amendment ended slavery. The fourteenth amendment gave the children of slaves citizenship. Today the Supreme Court ruled - 6 to 3 - that children born in these United States are American citizens regardless of whether their parents were slaves or millionaires, Finnish tourists or 9th generation Americans. That is, most of the Supreme Court ruled that the constitution is still more important than the opinion of a former Reality TV star.

Trump was transformed from a Reality TV star into a presidential candidate by claiming that President Barack Obama - whose father was African - was not born in these United States. Or at the very least did not qualify as a citizen given who his father was. It is absurd that his attack on the fourteenth amendment - his claim that only certain people born here qualified as citizens - was taken this seriously.

Trump's Republican Party has very little in common with Lincoln's Republican Party.

It's All Made Up - Inventing Modern Products and Institutions

There seems to be a dawning realization that our social inventions - institutions, norms, culture, processes - are invented just as our products are. At that point of realization, some people become a nihilist, believing that because it is all made up, none of it matters. I feel very differently.
777s are just made up. I was at Boeing in one of the rooms that had file cabinets with various designs for this jet that could carry 400 people 7,000 miles. The complexity is mind boggling. And they have to get it all right to make it successful. A jet is just made up, just invented, but it matters a great deal that designers, builders and operators get it right.

Churches, states, banks, schools, and corporations, even marriage is just made up. But it takes a lot to get them right. And they really do make us different people.

Polygamy and monogamy are completely made up. At different times and in different places, communities embrace one or the other. But the consequences are very real. The 10 most violent nations in the world practice polygamy. When swaths of young men can't get a partner, the community is more violent.

Theocracy and democracy are completely made up. Voice of God or voice of the people? It's all social invention. But the consequences are very real. The 10 most prosperous countries in the world are democracies. Better truths come out of debate and multiple perspectives than from dictates from a religious elite.

About 100, 150 years ago we got much better at product invention. (Edison may have "invented" the first R&D lab. He died with over 1,000 patents in his name partly because he was an inventive genius but more so because he was one of the first to hire people to turn out inventions the way that others hired people to turn out products.)

We are learning more about social invention. One of the things we are learning is that most progress is incremental. A gain of 2% a year in income will double incomes every 35 years. The American revolution that gave religious freedom went much better than the French revolution that outlawed religion. We experiment our way into the future and while we challenge everything we pause before we blow up institutions. (We blew up the monarchy. We did not blow up the nation-state.)

The most important thing we are learning about social invention is that social constructs are like products, like other tools. They make our lives better but they are our tools, we are not theirs. You can love the creative genius of Karl Benz and Henry Ford without wondering whether they would approve of cup holders in a car or marvel at the genius of Jefferson and Hamilton without wondering whether they'd approve of a law banning child labor.

Social invention is at least as hard as designing, building and operating a 777 and it is even more important. If you mess up on a 777, only 400 people die. Errors in social invention kill millions.

So yes, it's all made up. And that should make you take it all more seriously rather than be more flippant, more nihilistic about it.

My new book, New Politics for the Next Economy, is now available at Amazon

New Politics for the Next Economy available here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6P5MZ6Z/

At our country's 250th anniversary, I've described four past Americas and a fifth, new America that is ours to make. The good news is that this suggests so much promise. The bad news is that transitions into a new America have always been a mess. It seems as though Americans have to make things so much worse before they act to make things so much better.
The first America - most clearly defined by Jefferson - focused on land, on creating a nation of farmers. From the Louisiana Purchase to the war with Mexico that resulted in the top half of Mexico becoming the bottom third of America, the US grew by nearly two Indias.

Lincoln and the New Republicans transformed America into an industrial power that focused on creating new capital rather than acquiring more land. Between 1861 and 1933, we ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, and began to transform reality through the spread of inventions like trains, telegraph, electricity, cars and planes and the creation of unprecedented levels of wealth and products.

FDR then added a focus on full employment, the creation of labor as a factor of production that was not incidental, but central to progress, to realizing the potential of this great country. Between 1900 and 2000 we went from a world in which roughly 10 percent of teenagers were in high school or university to a world in which less than 10 percent were not. The creation of a world in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines about 800 distinct careers and in which the returns to meritocracy have created a new kind of intellectual capitalist.

Reagan was asked if he thought he could be president after a career as an actor and quipped that he didn't know how one could do the job without having been an actor. Once we'd accomplished incredible feats like landing on the moon, splitting the atom, and editing the human genome two things became apparent: creating new knowledge of HOW to do things and then deciding WHAT we should allow or prohibit, fund or discourage would define politics and the economy in this information age. That is, culture - questions of HOW and WHAT - became central to this new information economy.

You - lucky reader - are now living through another one of the historic moments in which we're reaching the limits of one America and a new America is struggling to be born. These transitions are messy, dramatic, and can give birth to a new America that is so much better than the last.

The next America will focus on the institutions that define us and our potential, taking us beyond our current institutional recession into a entrepreneurial economy in which we get more adept at creating the institutions that do so much to define us and our potential.

New Politics for the Next Economy narrates past history and future history that is yours to make. Get yourself a copy. And perhaps buy one for that politician you think has so much potential. We've got a new America to make and it might just wow your kids and grandkids. Let me know how it changes your mind. And then let's see how we can change our country.

New Politics for the Next Economy Published Week Before Country's 250th Anniversary!

New Politics for the Next Economy now available, published 25 June 2026 ....

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6P5MZ6Z/

New Politics for the Next Economy: 

The Critical Chain of Progress

by

Ron Davison

My new book that gives pattern to - and hope for - the political turmoil of America. 

Buy two copies: one for you and one for the politician you have the most hope for.

From Google to Gargle - Cleanse Your Mind Rather than Fill It

Introducing Gargle, not Google. Every other app fills your head. This one empties it. Swish, spit, repeat.

Gargle: the anti-search engine. Zero results - that's the feature. Empty your mind rather than fill it with clutter.

A Level Beyond Conventional Bobbleheads

 His collection began conventionally enough: baseball bobbleheads. Years later, however, it had evolved into the far more obscure field of bobble-bellied sumo wrestlers.

$10 Trillion Market Cap

Bold prediction: it will be the first company to reach $10 trillion in market cap.
In June 2023 it reached $1 trillion. Recently, it reached $5.5 trillion.
It'll reach $10 trillion is less than 3 years - probably a couple.

The American Dr. Who

Doctor Who is delightfully inventive and madcap. The American remake, by contrast, just feels off. Even the title seems pretentious: Doctor Whom.

The Emergence of American Values After 1980

Wonk that I am, I find this fascinating. Jefferson spoke of liberty. Lincoln spoke of union. FDR spoke of jobs and security. Yet presidents rarely spoke of "American values" as an explicit concept until the 1980s. Since then, references have exploded. One possible explanation is that as politics moved from farms and factories to television and media, debates over culture and identity became increasingly central. And maybe, just maybe, you can get more agreement about the importance of American values if you don't specify which values.

Data from the University of California, Santa Barbara's presidential communications database.

Culture Wars - Performers for Obama and Trump This Week

The grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago's South Side featured Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Christina Aguilera, Common, U2’s Bono and The Edge, Marc Anthony, Eddie Vedder, Tems, and The Roots.

Trump's birthday party included performances by Zac Brown Band, Luke Bryan, Kid Rock, and Cage Fighters.

Which "Pay Iran for Trump's War" Payment Plan Have You Signed Up For?

Apparently Trump is giving Iran $300 billion to settle the war he started. That works out to $1,000 per American. Have you signed up for the one-time payment or are you going for the $100 a month plan for the next year? And are you covering your kids' share or are you just going to pass that along to them as something to roll into their college debt?

Will Car Sales Stall For the Next Couple of Years as Car Capability Hits an Inflection Point?

I'm an old man. I feel convinced that we're in the middle of about a five year period of transition in which cars will change more than they have at any time in my life.

I wonder if this will translate into a period in which new car sales drop off for the next year or two as people wait for self-driving, efficiency, in car entertainment centers, etc. to hit an inflection point.

Trump's Narcoleptocracy

Trump's governance? A narcoleptocracy. He gets to sleep through it but its a waking nightmare for the rest of us.

Pope Leo XIII and Pope Leo XIV - Writing About Industrial and AI Revolutions 135 Years Apart

Pope Leo XIV has done something fascinating. 135 years ago, Pope Leo XIII - the last Pope Leo - wrote a piece about industrial capitalism and the importance of protecting industrial workers. Titled Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), it saw the mechanization of labor as the core threat - physical machines replacing human muscle power, reducing workers to mere cogs.

On the anniversary of that piece, Pope Leo XIV wrote a very similar piece about workers and AI.
Leo the XIV's document is Magnifica humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), subtitled "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence." It sees the core threat as the automation of cognition - algorithmic systems replacing human judgment, relationships, and intellect. Leo XIV's first encyclical, was signed on 15 May 2026 — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum — and published on 25 May. The link reaches back to the first act of his papacy: he chose the name Leo in reference to Leo XIII, and has described AI as ushering in a "new industrial revolution."

Both Pope Leos diagnose the signature danger of their era as the same inversion — the human person slipping from end to instrument while the system or the machine becomes the thing served. The question is which is the tool: the new industrial technology 135 years ago or the new AI technology now vs. the humans interacting with these and at turns using and being used by them.

The first American pope. He's an interesting guy.

Baby Boomer Demand for Sources of Retirement Financing

America is experiencing the largest wave of retirements in history. Roughly 4.1 million Americans per year are reaching retirement age. That's about:

11,300 per day
470 per hour
8 per minute

What is one reason stock prices going up? People are buying equity to finance their retirement.

It is easy to say that this surely would have shown up in purchases BEFORE Americans hit this point of 65 but it is worth remembering that, on average, a 65-year-old American has roughly 20 more years to live, 20 more years to finance; they are not done buying equities once they hit 65.
 

Trump Apparently Wants a Parade After The Cage Match

 Trump started a war and then he ended the war?  Huh.

Converging P/E Ratios for Tesla and Nvidia

Bold Prediction: 
The P/E for Tesla and Nvidia will converge within 3 years. 

Currently P/E for, 

Tesla is 371

Nvidia is 31

First Trillionaire Got There With N/A P/E

Tesla's P/E is 371, more than 10X normal P/E, on profits of $477 million. (For instance, Nvidia's price to earnings ratio is 31.) SpaceX? It doesn't have earnings, posting a massive quarterly net loss of $4.3 billion for Q1 2026.

Combined, the most recent profits of Tesla and SpaceX are negative. Meaning, our world's first trillionaire's two most valuable companies combined have a P/E ratio of ... N/A.

Musk a trillionaire makes as much sense as Trump a president. Maybe that is inevitable in a world in which people get more exposure to memes than reality.

Hugh Laurie's Protest Song

"For evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to spout cliches."
- Hugh Laurie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8chs2ncYIw

Donald Trump's Birthday Party Cage Match

So many people complaining that Trump is spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for his birthday party tomorrow at the White House, at a time when the country is literally borrowing money just to make interest payments on the debt. I don't know, though. If Donald ends up in a cage match with the right guy, all the money spent could be worth it.

Masculine Themes at Trump's $60 Million Birthday Party

Don John Trump's birthday party this weekend will cost you $60 million. I hope you like cage fighting because that's what he got you. (And if you want to pay more to view it, you can!)

And Sunday we get our second 80 year old president in a row. Add up the ages of our last two presidents, subtract it from 2026 and we get back to 1864, the year Abraham Lincoln was re-elected.

And of course the reason we have such old men in power is because American men aren't secure enough in their own masculinity to vote for women. But they can, of course, pretend that they are so manly as they cheer for the cage fighters.

The Fifth America and Fifth Transitional President .... Coming Soon to a White House Near You

This summer I'll be releasing the book New Politics for the Next Economy. I argue that we've had four Americas with four distinctly different economies and sets of policies. And then prescribe / predict a fifth America. Here is an image of the four past transitional presidents welcoming the fifth and future transitional president.

Apparent Confusion Around Elon Musk's Plans

Global investors have colluded to make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, today buying shares of his Space-X company.

It is unclear how much of that came from people under the impression that they were donating to a collection someone was taking up to send Elon to Mars.

Three Facts About the US National Debt

Three facts:
The US now borrows money to pay the INTEREST on the national debt.
The US National debt is now greater than current year GDP.
Republicans who contribute the most to the debt regularly get elected by promising to go after the debt.

More on the size, cost and unsustainability of the federal government debt here:
https://www.gao.gov/blog/federal-governments-debt-growing-faster-than-economy-what-means-for-you

Why AI Is Likely to Surpass Us

AI pioneer, Nobel Prize and Turing Award winner, Geoffrey Hinton makes the point that AI is billions of times better than us humans at sharing information.

My own take of history is that the more people you can share with - goods, markets, ideas, services, information - the more affluent you will be, the more agency you'll have. This simple fact of their superiority in sharing may become the simplest explanation for why they surpass us.

In a decade or two when people ask about why they surpassed us, we will say "They share billions of times better than us."

We will be the first species to be surpassed by another who is able to discuss the fact of our inferiority and possible obsolescence.

[Hinton asks the question, Do you know of any example of a more intelligent being controlled by a less intelligent being (suggesting that as it gains intelligence, AI may not submit to us). And he offers only one example: a mother controlled by a baby.]

Full conversation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7t1Q_p2gZs

The World's First Trillionaire

And we now have the world's first trillionaire. On the day SpaceX went public, Elon Musk passed the trillion dollar mark 12 June 2026.

Possibly related? On 12 June 1987 - 39 years ago - U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!"

The Illusion of Stability and the Reality That Organisms and Organizations Continually Move Toward Extinction or Evolution

Organisms and organizations are being continuously nudged toward either extinction or evolution. Stasis is unstable as a long-term condition. The appearance of stability is usually the surface signature of dynamic processes that happen to be in temporary balance. And the practical implication is that the right response to this condition is not to try to preserve current arrangements unchanged but to engage actively in the adaptation that current conditions require. The choice is not between change and stasis. The choice is between deliberate adaptation and unintended decay, and the second is what happens when the first does not.

It is a fantasy to think that our founding fathers - or even Lincoln's new Republicans or FDR's active reformers or - most shocking of all - Reagan's advisors from just the 1980s - would step into our current world and recognize it as their own. We do not have the alternative to preserve our union as it was or is. We have only the alternative to intentionally adapt to changing conditions, people and imaginations or to watch it decay.

The choice between stagnation and change is mostly illusory. There is no genuine option to keep things as they are. The option to keep things as they are is actually the option to let them decay, because everything around them is changing and a system that does not adapt to a changing context is being increasingly mismatched with its conditions. The visible alternatives are usually adaptation toward continued function or accumulation of mismatch toward eventual failure. The third option, true stability, exists only as an artifact of short time horizons or selective attention.

This is uncomfortable to sit with because human psychology is heavily biased toward preferring the appearance of stability. We like the idea that things can stay as they are. We organize our lives around the assumption that what is reliable today will remain reliable. We resist changes to institutions, customs, and arrangements that have been working, on the grounds that they are working and should not be disturbed. The instinct is reasonable as far as it goes, because changes have costs and unintended consequences, and not every proposed change is an improvement. But the instinct can become pathological when it leads to the assumption that the current arrangement will persist without the ongoing work that has been keeping it in place. The institutions that look most permanent are usually the ones that have been most actively maintained, and when the maintenance stops, the apparent permanence begins to dissolve.

The deepest version of this comes from thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics says that closed systems tend toward maximum entropy, which is to say they tend toward disorder, equilibrium, the dissolution of structure. Any ordered system that persists is doing so by importing energy from outside its boundaries and using that energy to maintain its order against the entropic gradient. This is true of stars, of cells, of organisms, of ecosystems, of organizations, of civilizations. None of them are stable in the sense of self-sustaining without input. All of them are, in physical terms, nonequilibrium structures that persist only as long as they can keep importing energy and exporting waste fast enough to maintain themselves against the universe's general tendency toward dissolution.

Organizations are nonequilibrium structures sustained by ongoing inputs of resources, attention, talent, legitimacy, and institutional energy. When these inputs decline, the organization decays. When they grow, the organization can either expand or stagnate, depending on what it does with them. There is no neutral state in which an organization simply persists without development. Every organization is either developing in some direction or decaying, and the appearance of stability is usually the signature of dynamic processes that happen to be roughly balanced for a period.

There are a variety of theories that offer explanations of the balance between stasis and change.

Evolutionary biology gives us the version most people are familiar with. Species that fail to adapt to changing conditions go extinct. Species that do adapt continue, but as something different from what they were. The rates of evolutionary change vary enormously across species and conditions, but the underlying principle is that genetic stability without occasional revision is incompatible with long-term survival.

Systems theory and complexity science give us the version that applies most directly to organizations. Stuart Kauffman, Per Bak, Ilya Prigogine, and others have argued that complex adaptive systems exist on what is sometimes called the edge of chaos, a regime in which the system is dynamic enough to respond to its environment but stable enough to maintain coherent identity. Systems that drift too far toward order become rigid and brittle. Systems that drift too far toward chaos disintegrate. The sustainable position is somewhere in between, and maintaining that position requires continuous adjustment as conditions change. This is sometimes called dynamic equilibrium, but the word equilibrium is misleading because the position is not static. It is a moving balance maintained through continuous effort.

Schumpeter gave us the version that applies to economic and institutional life. Creative destruction is not a periodic event but a continuous condition. Industries, firms, and economic arrangements that fail to adapt are continuously being replaced by ones that do. The appearance of economic stability is the surface signature of constant turnover at deeper levels. The companies in the Dow Jones in 1900 are mostly not the companies in the Dow Jones today. The industries that dominated employment in 1950 are not the industries that dominate employment in 2026. The continuous renewal is what allows the larger economy to persist.

Buddhist philosophy, in a different idiom, has been making essentially the same point for 2,500 years. The doctrine of impermanence, anicca, holds that all conditioned phenomena are in continuous flux, that nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, and that the appearance of stable selves and stable objects is a cognitive overlay we project onto a reality that is fundamentally a process rather than a collection of things. This framing is not identical to the thermodynamic or evolutionary versions, but it points at the same underlying observation: stasis is not a feature of the world we actually live in. The world is constant change, and what we call stable things are local patterns of change that happen to maintain coherence for a while.

Institutional recession is exactly what an institution looks like when its capacity for genuine adaptation has weakened but it has not yet collapsed. The institutions are not extinct. They are also not evolving in directions that match the conditions they are operating in. They are persisting in a state of partial function, doing some of what they used to do, failing at increasing portions of their original purpose, and gradually losing legitimacy as the gap between their performance and the changing demands of their environment widens. This is the phase before either renewal or extinction, and it can last for a long time before resolving in either direction.

The prescription of public sector entrepreneurship as the practice of citizens working to renew their institutions is essentially an argument for active engagement with the adaptation process rather than passive observation of its failure. Institutions cannot adapt by themselves, they require deliberate human effort to undertake the changes that will let them continue to function, and without that effort the trajectory bends toward extinction rather than toward evolution. Complex systems do not maintain themselves automatically. They require continuous infusion of attention, energy, and adjustment, and when that infusion declines, the system declines.

The choice between stagnation and change is mostly illusory. There is no genuine option to keep things as they are. The option to keep things as they are is actually the option to let them decay, because everything around them is changing and a system that does not adapt to a changing context is being increasingly mismatched with its conditions. The visible alternatives are usually adaptation toward continued function or accumulation of mismatch toward eventual failure. The third option, true stability, exists only as an artifact of short time horizons or selective attention.

This is uncomfortable to sit with because human psychology is heavily biased toward preferring the appearance of stability. We like the idea that things can stay as they are. We organize our lives around the assumption that what is reliable today will remain reliable. We resist changes to institutions, customs, and arrangements that have been working, on the grounds that they are working and should not be disturbed. The instinct is reasonable as far as it goes, because changes have costs and unintended consequences, and not every proposed change is an improvement. But the instinct can become pathological when it leads to the assumption that the current arrangement will persist without the ongoing work that has been keeping it in place. The institutions that look most permanent are usually the ones that have been most actively maintained, and when the maintenance stops, the apparent permanence begins to dissolve.

Organisms and organizations really are being continuously nudged toward either extinction or evolution. Stasis really is unstable as a long-term condition. The appearance of stability really is usually the surface signature of dynamic processes that happen to be in temporary balance. And the practical implication is that the right response to this condition is not to try to preserve current arrangements unchanged but to engage actively in the adaptation that current conditions require. The choice is not between change and stasis. The choice is between deliberate adaptation and unintended decay, and the second is what happens when the first does not.