You all know that I'm fascinated by economic progress and development. Medieval serfs had very few rights, on average died in their earl...

"Well, comorbidities explain a lot about who is dying of COVID," say the same folks who have - at various times - dismissed COVID ...

Inflation after a year of sharp contraction followed by a year of record growth is about as shocking as squealing tires on a car that goes f...

From John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. "... there has been a chronic tendency throughout human...

“A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.” ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi One of my heroes died yesterday. Mi...

Curiously, poverty and wealth alike seem to lower employment rate for the children of the poor and wealthy. This first graph shows that as p...

The doorbell rings this morning and I open it to an 8-year-old in costume. “Trick or treat!” he hollers at me. “What is this,” I ask. “It’s ...

The Dutch have interest rate records that go back 500 years. Interest rates never once went negative in that entire period ... until just a ...

We've gone from making Columbus out to be a brave hero who sailed over the horizon to discover our home to making Columbus an amoral opp...

Last month (Sep-2021) the economy created less than 200k jobs, which is far short of what's needed. The good news is that monthly variat...

Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly was published in the mid-1980s. She wrote about how Renaissance popes lost northern Europe to the Prote...

Silicon Valley got its name because of employee law that California inherited from Spain. In states back east, if you worked for a shoe cobb...

  I post all the time about politics, policy and stats that seem to describe our world because I have to live with the consequence of your v...

Abraham Lincoln rather famously grew a beard just before he was elected president, apparently inspired by an 11-year-old girl who suggested ...

Excuse the language but this is simply too good not to share. In 1980, Apple had gone public. This meant that Steve Jobs had more money but ...

Like many churches, the Castle Church of Wittenberg where Luther would nail his 95 theses had relics. More than 19,000 of them. The collecti...

The 15th amendment was ratified in February of 1870. It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied...

The United States was founded at the expense of two great empires. Each paid dearly to address the debt America left them. After the 7-year ...

1% of household net worth is $1.3 trillion. Household net worth rose $19 trillion from 1Q to 4Q 2020. In the Spring of 2021, Biden is propos...

There was an American pediatrician named Dr. Walter J. Sackett Jr. who suggested that you ignore crying babies. He wrote a bestseller in 196...