The Directional Difference Between Socialists and Capitalists

Socialists and capitalists largely agreed that society and the economy are inseparable.

Where they differed was in what to change first.

Socialists focused on reshaping social relations—class, gender, power—believing that fairer economic outcomes would follow.
Capitalists focused on reshaping economic incentives—markets, capital, innovation—believing that social progress would emerge as a consequence.

Put more simply, socialists tried to make social change that would also impact the economy whereas capitalists tried to make economic change that would also impact society.

In practice, every successful era combined both: economic change required social legitimacy, and social change required economic capacity.

I Didn't Say She Was Emotional

I didn’t say she was emotional. I simply said she got choked up each morning reading her horoscope, imagining all the wonderful, if vague, promise it held.

AI's Great - Largely Unspoken - Potential for Intellectual Matchmaking

A frontier we rarely capture is the value hidden in the interactions between fields. We train specialists to go deep, but many discoveries occur where domains overlap—where, say, material science meets biology, or optics meets chemistry, and the emergent behavior is the real prize.

The bottleneck is not intelligence; it’s coordination: finding the right counterpart in another field and then constructing a shared language to work together. 

AI has the potential to lower both costs. It might surface non-obvious connections across literatures, suggest plausible joint hypotheses, and translate between vocabularies—essentially matching complementary experts who would never have met or even realize that their great theories and expertise could meet and have a baby that would yield something dramatically different. 

But the final step is institutional: we’ll need incentives and structures that reward the collaboration AI makes possible. To translate these possibilities into value means creating institutions that fund these efforts and create the supporting infrastructure of teammates, equipment, project management, and experts who might be called in for portions of this project. And, of course, visionary marketing to create the support needed to translate this possibility into reality. 

Fortune Cookies as a Gateway

I'm beginning to suspect that fortune cookies reveal little about the future ... but by now they've got me hooked on the Chinese food and it's too late to stop.

Two Amendments That Shifted Policy from A Focus on Just Capital to Capital and Labor

The 16th Amendment (1913) gave the federal government the capacity to raise modern revenues through an income tax; the 19th Amendment (1920) giving women the right to vote changed who politicians had to persuade about how that revenue should be used. 

There is strong evidence that women’s enfranchisement shifted policy priorities, increasing public spending on public health and education, strengthening child-labor restrictions, establishing minimum wages for women, and expanding aid for mothers and children. Granting women the right to vote did more than improve representation for women themselves; it amplified the political voice of those advocating for children and long-term human development.

In the late nineteenth century, public investment focused primarily on land and capital. By the early twentieth century, the government began to invest more deliberately in labor—in people—many of them children.

Mencken's Rebuttal to Thorstein Veblen's Claim of Conspicuous Consumption

Thorstein Veblen famously defined conspicuous consumption as people buying, wearing, driving, and enjoying certain products and services less for their intrinsic value than for the status they signaled. H.L. Mencken, rebutting Veblen's claims that people bought pricier goods because of the status they conferred, wrote, in Prejudices, First Series (1919):

Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one - or because I delight in being clean?
Do I admire Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists - or because I genuinely love music?
Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver because plow-hands must put up with the liver - or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose?
Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman, because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman - or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better, and kisses better?

It might be that the pricier goods communicate social status. It might also be that they're pricier simply because they're more pleasing. 

If You Can't Decide on a Genre For Tonight's Entertainment ... might we suggest sports?

If you watch sports, you don’t know what genre you’re getting.

It might be a feel-good story—your team dominating, the hero delivering, everything clicking just right.
It might be a thriller, decided at the buzzer.
Or it might be a tragedy: your team never quite strings together three good plays, the opponent keeps stumbling into success, and your favorite players look painfully mortal.

Not sure whether you’re in the mood for heartbreak, suspense, triumph, or some uneasy blend of all three?

If you can’t decide, might we suggest… sports? It's a way to turn your mood for the rest of the evening over to chance.

Proposing Cat Stevens Updates One of His Classics to "Oh Very Old!"

Time for Cat Stevens to release an update to his classic "Oh Very Young." Titled, "Oh Very Old," it'll be a meditation on inheritance and end of life distribution of gifts and charity donations.

Very little change needed for the opening lines, simply changing the word young to old.

"Oh very old, what will you leave us this time?
You're only dancin' on this earth for a short while."

Don't Forget the Mary in Merry Christmas!

Don't forget the Mary in Merry Christmas! Everything starts with mothers. Call your mom and thank her for this - and all your other - days.

It is a Curious Thing to Advocate for a World You Can't Live In

Turning Point USA was founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk and Bill Montgomery. They were prominent critics of mask and vaccine mandates and strong advocates for the right to bear arms.
Bill Montgomery died from COVID in 2020.
Charlie Kirk died from gun violence in 2025.

YTD Returns on Various Assets Through 23 December 2025

Start an argument at Christmas dinner. Tell everyone you shorted Trump Media & Tech stock using the Canadian $ so that you profited twice off of the Donald.

Here are YTD returns on various assets.

The Miracle of Community & Culture in a World in Which We Can Distinguish Between 7 to 10 Million Different Colors

Culture is something we share because we live in community. It also depends on our willingness to gloss over differences that might otherwise set us apart—not just from others, but from who we thought we were even last year.

Culture is partly about categorization. Sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in fine ones. We fit in—or stand out—through our clothes, our jokes, our values, our ways of seeing. But culture is far more finely grained than our categories suggest.

Under ideal conditions, normal human vision can distinguish millions—often estimated between seven and ten million—different colors. We have no vocabulary for those gradations, and no memory precise enough to retain them, yet we experience them all the same.
Something similar happens in culture. “Red” is something we hold in common, but the reds themselves spill into the tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands. When we call a rose red or a sunset red, we are not seeing quite what anyone else sees, or even what we ourselves saw the last time.

We live in communities, so we are compelled to converge on something like red. But we live in our own heads, and there we register how different this red is from the last—how fashion, dance, manners, or belief or politics let us share an experience that is still uniquely our own. An experience we do not fully share even with our past or future selves, much less with those around us.

Real GDP Percent Change from Year Ago = 2.3%

 This is an economic number that drives most every other.

source:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1#

7 Million Shades of Cultural Reality

Culture is partly about categorization. Sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in fine ones. We fit in—or stand out—through our clothes, our jokes, our values, our ways of seeing. But culture is far more finely grained than our categories suggest.

Under ideal conditions, normal human vision can distinguish millions—often estimated between seven and ten million—different colors. We have no vocabulary for those gradations, and no memory precise enough to retain them, yet we experience them all the same.

Something similar happens in culture. “Red” is something we hold in common, but the reds themselves spill into the tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands. When we call a rose red or a sunset red, we are not seeing quite what anyone else sees, or even what we ourselves saw the last time.

We live in communities, so we are compelled to converge on something like red. But we live in our own heads, and there we register how different this red is from the last—how fashion, dance, manners, or belief let us share an experience that is still uniquely our own. An experience we do not fully share even with our past or future selves, much less with those around us.

Culture binds us by what we share, and by what we quietly agree not to notice, including how much we ourselves have changed.

Oh the Dickens You Say

“This box is empty. Empty. This—this is what you got me? What is this supposed to be, Jerome? What’s supposed to be under all this wrapping paper?”

“It’s the Ghost of the Christmas Present.”

Reading Minds

He claimed he could read dogs' minds. We asked him to prove it. After calmly holding his hands over the dog's head for about 4 minutes, he began to pant and bark. He clarified that he could read their minds but not translate. That was a completely different gift.

UM Consumer Sentiment Index at Lowest on Record (going back to 1960)

University of Michigan consumer sentiment index at its lowest in more than 6 decades.

Hey UM. You think that's remarkable, ask me about my citizen sentiment right now.

source:https://www.sca.isr.umich.edu/charts.html 

Herod's Violent Crackdown

Matthew 2: 16
Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.

This World, a poem

THIS WORLD

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror-
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.

Poem by Nobel Prize winning Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz.

The 10 Richest Americans are Worth a Combined $2.6 Trillion

The 10 richest Americans are worth a combined $2.6 trillion.

Only 7 of the 190 countries in this world have a GDP larger than $2.6 trillion.

This as of 18 December 2025.

Karma of a Different Sort

Karma sutra.
An awkward position you find yourself in as the result of some stupid thing you did in the past.

Are You Closer to Bankruptcy or Billionaire?

I feel as though I'm about as pro wealth creation as anyone I know but ...

Each year, between 500,000 and 1 million Americans file for personal bankruptcy.

In a typical year, perhaps a dozen Americans become billionaires. (There are roughly 1,000 billionaires in the U.S., but the club grows most years.)

Designing policy to encourage wealth creation matters.

But designing policy to reduce the vastly more probable outcome of personal financial crisis matters more.

One overlooked bit of genius of Trump is that through cultural wars, he got millions of Americans to imagine they had more in common with - and were more likely to join - the billionaires than the bankrupt.