What Americans Spend Each Year on Faith, Hope and Charity

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:13, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

What do Americans spend each year on faith, hope, and charity? If we assume that gambling is like buying hope and religious donations are like a purchase of faith?

Hope - 0.6% of GDP
Faith - 0.6% of GDP
Charity - 2.2% of GDP.

So, the numbers seem to support Paul's claim.

Trump's Impulsive Push for a Fed Chair Who Will Aggressively Lower Rates Threatens to Re-Ignite Inflation

Trump is signaling he wants a Fed chair who will cut rates much faster - he’s said policy should be “two or three points lower,” which would be a big swing from today’s 4.25% - 4.50% range. That kind of drop might boost equity prices in the short run - and might boost prices more generally, re-accelerating inflation.

This is the core tradeoff the Fed manages: ease policy to juice growth and hiring, or keep policy tight to pin inflation near target. Right now the macro mix is actually close to “goldilocks”: unemployment is roughly 4.1% - 4.3% and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge (core PCE) is running about 2.8% year-over-year - above 2%, but not far off. Slashing rates aggressively from here could stimulate demand and prices.

A recent real-world cautionary tale: Hungary, led by Orban, a favorite of the MAGA crowd. After a period of very loose policies and energy price interventions, inflation surged above 20% in 2023 (peaking around 25%) before tough medicine and subsequent rate moves brought it down. When you're too greedy for economic stimulus, you will get inflation. (And, of course, Trump's tariffs alone will increase inflation.)

The U.S. has lived this before. Volcker’s disinflation drive in the early 1980s wrung out high inflation - but only with a painful recession. The point of an independent Fed is to resist short-term political incentives and steer toward the low-inflation/low-unemployment mix over time, even when patience is unpopular. With core inflation still a bit sticky and new tariff pressures in the pipeline, racing to 1–2% rates would be a gamble with a high probability of having to reverse course later - expensively.

Bottom line: quick cuts might cause stock prices to pop; they’d also raise the odds we re-learn the hard lesson that bringing inflation back down takes longer, hurts more, and ultimately costs more than avoiding the flare-up in the first place. It's kind of a classically impulsive Trump move though: maximize for now and worry about later ... well, later.

Household Chores Are More Dangerous Than You Might Think

Amerigo Dumini was Mussolini’s thug-in-chief - he helped murder a socialist who spoke out against the Duce, later fought through the chaos of WWII, and then even survived a firing squad that pumped 17 bullets into him. He walked away from all that violence, only to be killed nearly a quarter of a century later while changing a lightbulb, taken out by a simple household chore.

If I were a handyman, this story and tagline might just be my ad. "You might think you'll be fine if you do that household chore yourself, but why risk it? Be safe. Be smart. Call us instead."

The Steady Degradation of Trump's Mind

Donald Trump is the oldest person in the history of the US to have ever been sworn in as president.
Yesterday, after his absurdly and predictably ineffectual meeting with the international war criminal Vladimir Putin, as he stood on Alaskan soil, Trump announced that - meeting over - he was returning to the US.
There was no art.
There was no deal.
He didn't even know where he was.

Average Wages in Silicon Valley Are Not Just 2 to 3X the National Average - They Understate Actual Compensation

Silicon Valley isn’t just paying the highest wages in the country - it’s doing it at a pace only two other places can match: King County (home to Amazon and Microsoft) and Manhattan. The numbers are eye-popping on their own, but here’s the twist: they still leave out a huge part of the story.
The wage data counts salaries and the value of stock options exercised during that quarter. That’s it. If you exercised options before or after the reporting window, or you’re sitting on unexercised options that have skyrocketed in value, none of that shows up in “income.”

So imagine an Nvidia employee in Santa Clara. The county average wage is $220K, but at a company like NVDA, pay could easily be two or three times that. Now layer on this: in the last year, Nvidia’s stock jumped about 50%. For someone holding a lot of shares or unexercised options, that wealth increase could equal - or exceed -their annual wage.

(Recent reporting suggests that about 80% of NVDA employees are now millionaires and about 50% are worth $25 million or more.)*

Which means the headline story (“Silicon Valley workers make 2–3x the national average”) actually understates their total compensation. For many, the real number - their salary plus stock wealth - makes the income gap between tech hubs and the rest of America even wider than most people realize.

raw data:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cewqtr.t01.htm

source for portion of NVDA employees worth $25 million or more 
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/nvidia-employees-net-worth-wealth-created-inside-nvidia-reach-stunning-levels-nearly-80-of-employees-are-millionaires/articleshow/123143042.cms

Hamlet for Current Times

“This blustering revel of tariffs and travel bans makes us mocked by other nations; they call us boors and bullies, and the good we once stood for is eclipsed by our vices.”

- Hamlet (only slightly modified), Act 1 Scene 4

Situationships

Ran across this term in a chapter on the third sexual revolution in Christian Smith's fascinating Why Religion Went Obsolete: the Demise of Traditional Faith in America:

“situationships” (casual intimate relationships lacking definition, expectations, and norms due in part to the fear that clarity might make things awkward).

And yet this seems to me precisely a condition that would make things awkward.

Democracy by Langston Hughes

Democracy

[1949]

by Langston Hughes

Democracy will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day. I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom Is a strong seed Planted In a great need.

I live here, too. I want freedom Just as you.

Reagan, Fox, MSNBC, and Simplifying the Mess of Reality

In the Industrial Economy, value was created in steel mills and assembly lines. In the Information Economy, it is often created in studios and newsrooms. The raw material is not ore or oil but culture - packaged into stories, symbols, and narratives that resonate with our emotions as much as, or more than, our rational faculties. The world is far too messy and complicated to fit neatly into a single theory, so we rely on simple narratives. Specialists wrestle with complexity; to win 51% of the vote, you need a story most people can follow. Politics in the Information Economy became a kind of cultural production.

Ronald Reagan grasped this before most. The only president to master radio, television, and movies before entering politics, he understood the power of affirming rather than informing. His speeches bypassed the fact-checker in your head and spoke directly to the emotional truth you recognized from your own memories, hopes, and sense of identity. He could make the policies he championed feel like episodes in your hero’s journey. You weren’t just living in America—you were starring in a distinctly American story, one where a government that got out of your way left you free to live it.

This was a sharp break from the media climate in which Reagan emerged. In the 1960s and early ’70s, the three major networks delivered a nightly reality check: Vietnam body counts, civil rights marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses, polluted rivers catching fire, women demanding more than secretarial roles, long-haired neo-bohemians rejecting middle-class norms. These images forced Americans to confront contradictions and complexity. They unsettled worldviews across the spectrum and left the nation wrestling, in real time, with disruptive change. (Rivers on fire might be the simplest illustration of cognitive dissonance that this unmediated reality forced on its audience.)

Reagan’s storytelling offered relief from that fatigue. He gave Americans a coherent, reassuring frame—a sense that the story of America still had a clear arc and a starring role for the individual. Where the 1960s media posed open-ended questions, Reagan delivered emotionally satisfying answers. The times were turbulent; his voice was calm.
Roger Ailes, who worked with Reagan on his 1984 campaign, would later industrialize this approach as the founding CEO of Fox News. The nightly newscast became a continuous narrative stream—curated facts and frames reinforcing a specific worldview. MSNBC followed with a similar strategy for a different audience. Both evolved into identity factories: manufacturing stories that make their viewers feel not just informed, but confirmed.
This was a profound shift. The network news of the 1960s might unsettle you; Fox and MSNBC aim to reassure you. The old model treated discomfort as the price of being informed. The new model treats discomfort as a defect in the product.

In the Information Economy, news is no longer just a public service - it’s a manufactured good. The raw material is events; the finished product is cultural identity. Reagan’s genius was offering coherence and assurance after a turbulent era. Fox and MSNBC turned that coherence into a subscription service, delivering a world where your side is always right, the other side is always wrong, and reality rarely demands any changes of you.

David Bromwich's Claim that Totalitarianism Provides a Simplification of the World

David Bromwich of Yale argues that totalitarianism is partly about denying the inherent contradictions in the world, as much a quest for world that is simple as it is a quest for a world with a central control. A simplification of reality is one of the goals of a totalitarian government.

There is a desire for coherent narrative that is simpler than - and easier to digest than - reality and you can gain power by providing that. Maybe the ultimate in power is providing the narrative people want to – and easily can – believe.

Hannah Arendt on Loneliness and the Temptation of Totalitarianism

After World War II, Hannah Arendt set out to understand how totalitarianism could take root in modern societies. In *The Origins of Totalitarianism* (1951), she argued that mass loneliness - not just private sorrow, but a felt "non‑belonging to the shared world" - is both a precondition for, and an instrument of, totalitarian rule. As she put it, totalitarian government “bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”

Arendt distinguishes isolation (being cut off from political action) from loneliness (being deserted by others and by a common reality). Loneliness, she argues, dissolves the “common world” - the shared facts, institutions, and spaces that anchor public life - and thereby prepares people to accept ideological fictions in place of lived reality.

Contemporary life can intensify this dynamic. In today’s information economy, much of what we “know” arrives pre‑packaged - memes, snippets, and ready‑made takes - rather than ripening through experience and conversation. We consume processed information the way we once learned to consume processed food: easy, quick, and often denaturing. The result can be a thinner common world and a thicker sense of aloneness—exactly the soil Arendt warned can nourish the worst political temptations.

Why Social Change Slows When People Live Longer (and one possible way to change that)

Ronald Inglehart, one of the world’s most influential political scientists, spent decades compiling cross-national survey data that tracked shifting values across dozens of countries. His work revealed that social change often appears to be a matter of evolving public opinion—but in fact, it’s more often the result of generational replacement than individual transformation.

Inglehart's findings suggest that people rarely change their core values after age 20 or 25. So when a society moves from widespread rejection of immigration and LGBTQ rights to broad acceptance, it's not because individuals changed their minds en masse. It's because older voters with more traditional views passed away, and were replaced by younger generations with more liberal, secular, and self-expression–oriented values.

But what happens when life expectancy rises and birthrates fall? You get fewer new voters entering the system and more older voters staying in it longer. That slows the pace of change—not because beliefs are getting more rigid, but because the demographic shift that drives change is happening more slowly.

Inglehart once put it this way:

“The most important political change is not that people change their minds, but that people with different minds replace them.”

In short: Social progress depends not just on new ideas—but on new people. And in aging societies, even progress has to wait its turn.

But maybe it doesn’t have to.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing modern societies is to create for their older citizens what public education once did for the young: institutions and experiences that stretch, inform, and enlighten the mind—long after graduation. A democracy of lifelong development might not just slow decline. It could accelerate renewal.

What Monthly Job Numbers Actually Track

Here's a reminder of what is actually being counted each month with the jobs numbers.

Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks millions of job changes - hires, quits, layoffs, retirements, firings, and more. These gross flows are large: for example, around 6 million people are hired and 5.8 million leave their jobs in a typical month (according to the BLS's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS).

When the monthly Employment Situation Report announces net job gains or losses - say, +150,000 - that figure represents the net difference between hires and separations across the entire labor market. They are not just counting / estimating 150,000 new jobs; they are counting / estimating nearly 12 million changes in job status amongst a labor force of about 167 million.

It takes a wild imagination to think that the task of counting NET job gains or losses amongst a population of 335 million Americans each MONTH is trivial or not subject to revision as more data comes in. This is just one of the many reasons that data is harder than memes.