Thomas Jefferson insisted that the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" be kept in the Declaration of Independence. "The Declara...

In the decades after World War I ended in 1918, more than 500 American companies established Research & Development Labs. R&D was to...

Patterns let you predict. The sun will come up tomorrow at 6:18. This spring it will get warmer. Because the drummer is predictably playing ...

Just look at her face. Mona Lisa - painted about 500 years ago - looks so contemporary, like any other face you might see on social media. W...

Among the many signs that the information economy is reaching its limit? The price we pay to those able to focus in the midst of its distrac...

New data at BLS on wages for 3Q of 2020. Average weekly wages in the US were up 7.4% from 3Q 2019. That's a big raise. Two reasons. The ...

The new Republican Party created a new national currency and national banking system. Before they took power, thousands of banknotes circula...

Technology – from humor to railroads to the internet - changes our definition of “us.” Germany became a nation-state in 1871, the same year ...

Exactly a year ago, the nation's first COVID death was reported. Since then, half a million Americans have died. Life expectancy in the ...

  The American revolution obviously transformed government. It less obviously transformed religion. One of the reasons Americans are still m...

William Deci made a distinction that has greatly influenced me. He argues that parents, managers and teachers have three options: control, a...

As Russell Ackoff points out, we began to treat understanding and analysis as synonymous as the West came out of the Dark Ages. To better un...

After its worst recession, the United States abolished debtors’ prison and created a more risk-taking society. James Wilson signed the Decla...

Women were reinvented after 1960 when their biological and social options changed. Edison tinkered in his lab, famously going through 3,000 ...

Democrats from Jefferson (1801 to 1809) to Buchanan (1857 to 1861) treated land as the limit and acquired a stunning amount - 2.1 million sq...

You probably know that Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world (worth $190 billion today).  Here are a couple of things you may not know....

In 1920, 31% of American teenagers were in school, triple what it had been a generation earlier. By 2020, 33% of Americans over 25 had a Bac...

In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidential election with 43% of the popular vote. George Wallace, a southern racist and segregationist, won...

The last time the US ran a trade surplus was in October of 1975. This after nearly a century of mostly running trade surpluses. What else wa...

Today, about one-third of Americans over 25 have a Bachelors degree.* In the mid-1950s, more than a third of the men in Palo Alto did (and -...