A Century Later: Two Family Trees and Two Vastly Different Family Fortunes

This contrast between college-educated and non-college educated women is stark and oddly fascinating. 

Four forces at play here.

1. Women with a college degree have fewer children.

2. Women who get a college degree are older when they have their first child.

3. Women with a college degree have more wealth.

4. The difference in levels of wealth compounds over time, as does the difference in the number of heirs, or descendants. 

Assumptions:

• Initial Wealth: $1,000,000 (college) vs. $200,000 (non-college) (based on current data contrasting households with and without a college education)

• Children per woman: 1.28 (college) vs. 2.8 (non-college) (these are the current rates)

• Generations: every 30 years (college) vs. 24 years (non-college) (again, these are the current average ages for a first child for women with and without a degree) 

• Annual wealth growth: 4% (real, after inflation, applied to both the initial $1,000,000 and the initial $200,000)

• Time horizon: 100 years

---

Results after 100 years:

Metric	College Degree Lineage	Non-College Lineage
Total Compounded Wealth	$50.5 million	$10.1 million
Total Number of Descendants	~2.1 people	~61.5 people
Wealth Per Descendant (on average)	~$24.1 million	~$164,300

---

In simple language, the one million dollars the college-educated household starts with compounded at 4% a year over a century will result in about $50 million. The $200,000 the non-college educated household starts with compounded at 4% a year over a century will result in $10 million. But given the big difference in the number of descendants, the $10 million will be divided over 61 people, whereas the $50 million is divided among only 2 people. So, the heirs of the college educated are vastly outnumbered but have vastly more resources. 

Summary Insight:
College-educated women have fewer descendants who will potentially inherit more wealth. Compounding over time results in her descendants ending up vastly wealthier—about 146× richer per person after 100 years. This curious dynamic is just one more way that differences in wealth can compound over time. 

Proust on Love as an Illusion We Create

(loosely adapted from various parts of Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove)

We are not in love with the person themselves, but with the idea we have formed of them.
And this idea, born of our solitude, is shaped by longing, carved by absence, and burnished by fantasy.
She became, in my mind, a figure of such subtle perfection that no reality could match her.
When we spoke, I listened more to the echo of what I wanted her to say than to her words.
We imagine love as discovery. But it is more often invention.
And what we discover, much later, is how much of ourselves we had projected onto someone else’s shadow.

Pure Civilizations Are Sterile - extinction as the ultimate cost of nationalism, xenophobia and racism

Xenophobia is fear or hostility toward people from other cultures or nations. Racism is fear or hostility toward people based on visible genetic differences.

Communities shaped by racism or xenophobia often behave like closed gene pools - isolated, self-reinforcing, and ultimately fragile. Like an inbred family tree, they may maintain an illusion of purity but at the cost of vitality, creativity, and resilience.

By contrast, the most dynamic, prosperous, and inventive communities throughout history have been cultural crossroads - places where trade brought new goods, new ideas, and new people. From ancient Alexandria and Baghdad to Renaissance Florence and modern New York, thriving societies have always drawn strength from diversity.

Purity and extinction tend to go hand in hand. Thriving communities mix, adapt, and evolve.

When They Outlaw Driving

Those people angry about vaccines and masks? Imagine how furious they will be when driving is illegal.

Birth of the US Army (the by one measure, birth of the US itself)

The first protest march probably involved some poor soldier in ill-fitting boots. The American revolutionaries didn’t have enough money for uniforms. At the beginning of what many at the time called the Civil War or the War of Rebellion, only about one in five soldiers had anything resembling a formal army uniform. The rest fought in homespun clothing, buckskins, or whatever they had.

Sociologist Max Weber famously defined government as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - a clean, powerful idea that gets at the heart of why armies matter.

Jefferson and Madison, both brilliant and idealistic, believed that in a democracy, the military should consist of militias - ordinary citizens who would return to their farms and shops after the danger had passed. This thinking is echoed in the Second Amendment, which speaks not of a standing army but of a “well-regulated militia.”

George Washington, by contrast, had no patience for that theory. He had to win a war against the greatest professional army on Earth - and came to deeply distrust militias. He thought they were undisciplined, undertrained, and unreliable. While Madison and Jefferson saw the citizen-soldier as a bulwark of liberty, Washington saw him as someone who might fire once, then leave early to check on the harvest.

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the Continental Army, formally created by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775. You could also argue the country’s birth came July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, or 1789, when the U.S. Constitution went into effect.

Creating a new country is a complicated process - and it’s not finished yet.

So: happy birthday to us. And here’s to the hard, still unfinished work of building a more perfect union. You might not feel properly dressed or prepared for this work but it is yours nonetheless.

The Two Big Reasons Trump is Going After California With Such Intensity (and one is to distract from Epstein)

Here are 2 of the big reasons that Trump is going so hard after California.

His Secretary of Homeland Security announced, “We are staying here to liberate the city [of LA] from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.” This just before California's Senator Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from the room, knocked to the ground and handcuffed for having the audacity to ask her a question. Trump wants to overturn the will of Californians because they make him look bad. (And one of the ways he dismisses this egregious act? Trump says of Padilla, "He looks like an illegal!" As with so many old guys, his racism becomes less shameless as he ages.)

Trump has decisively lost California in each of his 3 elections. In the 3 counties at the heart of Silicon Valley (San Jose, San Mateo and San Francisco), his opponent (Clinton, Biden, and Harris) has won 4 votes for every 1 he has won. 4 to 1 is a pretty big margin. And Silicon Valley has created more wealth than any place in the history of humanity, a place where median wages are nearly 3X what they are in the rest of the US. Silicon Valley - and California more broadly - is a reminder that one of the most prosperous and progressive places in the history of the world completely rejects his politics and policies.

California, of course, is everything Trump is fighting against. And yet it is arguably the most successful state in the Union. California makes a liar out of Trump when it comes to the xenophobic policies he advocates. If Californians are right, he's wrong. He can't have that.
And even more importantly, his sending troops to LA to deal with 100 protesters at a Home Depot and setting up the cosplay arrest of California's senator does something even more important: it distracts from the fact that just one week ago his billionaire buddy Elon Musk had reminded everyone that Trump is in the Epstein files.

Trump and Epstein were best friends for about 15 years. Trump biographer Michael Wolff describes their joint tactics of "hunting girls," has seen a picture of Donald and Jeffrey posing with what he thought were underage girls who were topless and another picture of Donald with a visible stain in the front of his pants and topless girls pointing at it and laughing.
Just one week later, no one is talking about Musk's reminder that Trump is in the Epstein files. (That alone is such a stunning tale, isn't it? 2 best friends. One dies of apparent suicide in prison and another now lives in the White House.)

Trump's attack on the Golden State comes from attempt to manufacture two results. One, he's desperately trying to make California look like a failed state when - in fact - it is the most successful place in history and mostly because it pursues policies that are 180 degrees off from Trump's policies. And because he needed a distraction from his own tawdry past that Elon Musk had the audacity to remind us of. And of course, given that attention is zero-sum and no one more brilliantly captures attention than Trump, you've already been distracted from the fact that Trump's economic policies are the opposite of what leads to prosperity and that Trump's morality is the opposite of what all but his most MAGA of supporters admire.

The master of distraction has managed to distract the country from the fact that his economic policies and morals are atrocious. And it doesn't matter to him that he has to do it by violating constitutional norms and common decency.

Trump Seizes Your Attention and Then Power

A reminder of what Trump is doing. He's sending troops into American cities to provoke unrest and protests so that he can cosplay a revolution and a brave return to order.
Why?
Because less than a week ago, Elon Musk reminded the world that Donald's best friend for more than a decade was Jeffrey Epstein and that there are pictures of Donald with what appear to be half naked, underage girls.
Donald is literally breaking constitutional norms to distract you and the media you follow from the depravity of his lifestyle.
And of course the media and Americans are falling for it. Because in this information economy, everything is a battle for your attention and Donald - who is a complete idiot about issues like international trade - knows better than any president in history how to distract you, get your attention, and suck all the air out of the room with regards to other topics.

Advanced Superintelligence as the next level of reliance on systems the lie at the fringe of our understanding

One of the more curious concepts to emerge from the world of AI is the idea of artificial superintelligence (ASI): a system capable of generating powerful insights that may lie beyond our understanding - like a five-year-old trying to follow Einstein explaining relativity. At that point, humanity will face a fascinating dilemma: Do we trust the recommendations of an intelligence we don’t fully understand and potentially benefit enormously - or do we dismiss it and risk missing out on a better life?

In a way, this isn’t a new problem. Humanity has long depended on systems we didn’t fully comprehend. We awoke to a world of natural forces - weather, seasons, disease, the movement of game - too complex to explain, yet essential for survival. We built myths, rituals, and early sciences to navigate these mysteries, gradually improving our health, harvests, and longevity.

Later, we came to rely on governments and markets - systems no individual could fully grasp but that shaped our prosperity and freedom. And again, we developed theories—some insightful, some inadequate - to guide how best to engage with these forces, even as democracies and dictatorships alike sometimes smoothed and sometimes amplified the chaos of economic life.

There is always a cost - whether we embrace or reject the systems that exceed our understanding. One might argue that Donald Trump’s rejection of global trade is rooted less in policy than in a basic distrust of a system too complex to fully grasp. But turning away from these systems carries a price: diminished prosperity, missed opportunities, isolation. His supporters distrust what they cannot understand. And yet, much of modern life depends on precisely that - trust in systems larger than us.

In this sense, ASI may simply be the next layer in a long human tradition: benefiting from systems we do not fully comprehend. Like nature, like markets, it may become essential before it becomes fully understood. Perhaps acceptance - grounded in results rather than full explanation - isn’t a surrender, but an acceptance of the realities of an interdependent, complex world.

The Limit in an Information Economy is Attention (or why you need to act rather than react in deciding on where to focus)

In an information economy, the limit is attention. If Trump and Musk can capture the attention of the pundits on their Friday wrap up of the week and of the citizenry in their consumption of social media and news ... Americans are not talking about a budget that simultaneously- Increases the deficit by record amounts,
- While offering a huge tax cut to the richest,
- And slashes support to the poorest - many of whom are kids

Know this about the next 3.5 years of Trump's presidency: he will shamelessly, recklessly, and incessantly say and do increasingly egregious things that will outrage, amaze and - most importantly - distract the American pundits and public. You can focus on that. You can be manipulated. Or you can focus on his agenda that is like Putin's wet dream, and push your representatives to resist cashing in our future for his strange impulses, instincts and greed. Even more importantly? Spend time thinking about and arguing FOR the policies that you think will create a better future.

You need to act - rather than just react - in how to direct your attention. 

Trump and Musk - A Collision Between Two Win-Lose Forces

Trump and Musk owe their success to a few things:

1. the ability to fascinate audiences in this information age in which information is unlimited and attention is not and the reward for fascinating people is massive. (TSLA has been a good company but its price has been inflated because it is a meme stock.)
2. shamelessly willing to try anything that feeds into 1.
3. measuring success without regard for any social norms or quaint sense of morality.

The fight between them that will spill over the next while seems as likely to destroy Musk's wealth and Trump's power as it is to result in Musk ending up with Trump's power or Trump ending up with Musk's wealth.

What happens when two win-lose guys go to war? My bet is on a lose-lose outcome.

The Deadly Cost of Living Under a Dictatorship

Estimates are that Russia has hit 1 million casualties in its Ukrainian war (about 100,000 to 150,000 of those are deaths). This is one of the few "advantages" to a dictatorship: in a democracy, ruthlessly throwing this many of your men into the meat grinder of war would lead to a big backlash in public approval and pressure to negotiate peace or even your ouster from office. Given Putin can't be safely challenged within Russia, he can continue to wage a war with devastating consequences for his people with no consequence for him.

Under a dictatorship, it's not just your right to protest and speak out that are compromised. So is your right to a full and healthy life.

Ukrainians Spend Hundreds to Destroy Billion Dollar Bombers

Yesterday Ukraine made a massive drone attack on Russian bombers deep in Russia.Ian Bremmer claims that the drones used to attack cost about $300 to $400 each, as opposed to about one $BILLION each for the Russian advanced bombers Ukrainians attacked (which the Russians no longer have the military capability to build more of). This is - in the odd calculation of war budgets - a 100,000X return on investment.

So many bizarre scenarios that could come from this.