Welcome to the December issue of “Just One Thing,” my monthly attempt to tackle a biggish story or issue in some depth.

I was planning to write about COVID this week, both the disease and the vaccines, and to go through several of the “conspiracy” claims from two years ago that have since been proven true. But I’m going to hold that essay for another time.

Instead, I’m going to give you my take on the November election, addressing the questions and claims that have ranked highest in social media, such as:

* Was it a landslide or was it much closer than the Republicans claim?

* Was I right in predicting in the Aug. 16 issue that the decision would be made by undecided voters? 

* Was I also right when I predicted in that issue that abortion would not be a deciding factor?

* Was it really all about immigration and the economy – or were there “softer” factors that turned out to be more important?

* And what can we expect from Trump – and the media – after he takes office in January?

Why Trump Won and What It Means for Everyone

The Eve of Destruction 

The day before the election, a family member asked me if I was ready for a “landslide.” He was confident Harris would win by historic proportions because “No woman or person of color is going to vote for Trump.”

I just smiled because I wasn’t sure – and I didn’t want to set myself up for an “I told you so!” from him. What I believed was that the election would be very close. And I think I felt that way because I’d been reading predictions from both conservative and liberal media, and they were all reasonably convincing.

As the exit poll counts began shifting towards Trump later the following evening and it looked like he might achieve the unthinkable and win every swing state, I was tempted to send my relative an “I told you so!” text. But I didn’t.

Well… the truth is I did. But as soon as I hit the “send” button, I felt bad about it. It wasn’t fair to gloat.

In fact, my Never Trump friends and family members were so devastated by Trump’s win that I was told several times, in no uncertain terms, that I should not speak to them until they could “process” it.

How Close Was It? 

If you get your views from the NYT and CNN, you probably think Trump won the election by a narrow margin. The fact that he won the popular vote by only 1.5% could be said to support that view.

If you get your news from the NY Post or Fox News, you may believe it was a landslide. The fact that he won every one of the swing states could be said to support that view.

So let’s take a quick look at the numbers…

The Count by State 

As you can see from the map above, Trump won 31 states while Harris won 19 (plus the District of Columbia).

Despite the initial enthusiasm Harris’s candidacy created with the Democratic base when she entered the race in July, she fell far short of collecting the votes expected in every state and every demographic.

The belief among her campaign team, which was uncritically reported in the legacy media, was that her age, her gender, and her race would play strongly in her favor. And that, at the very least, her numbers would be better than Biden’s were in 2020.

It didn’t happen. In Arizona, she received about 90,000 fewer votes than Biden had. She received about 67,000 fewer in Michigan and 39,000 fewer in Pennsylvania. In four other states – Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin – Harris won more votes than Biden. But Trump’s support grew by more. In some states, significantly more.

Harris’s strongest results came in Georgia, where she received almost 73,000 more votes than Biden did when he very narrowly carried the state. But Trump did better than that, adding 200,000 to his 2020 total, and winning Georgia by roughly two percentage points.

The Electoral College Vote 

Trump swept the seven most competitive states to win a convincing electoral college victory, becoming the first Republican nominee in 20 years to win a majority of the popular vote.

The Count by Cities, Counties & Rural Areas 

Of the 27 cities with populations of more than half a million, Harris won 12 (Boston, New York, Washington DC, Richmond, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle). Trump won the other 15.

Though Trump improved across the map, his gains were particularly strong in the urban counties of Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, and in the industrial swing states Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Finally, Trump did better with rural Americans than he had in 2020, from the Southwest to the Acela Corridor. And in doing so, he bulldozed the once invincible Blue Wall.

The Count by Gender 

One of the biggest surprises of the election was the women’s vote.

Biden won 55% of the women’s vote in 2020 and it was expected that Harris would do much better than that. In fact, she did not even equal Biden’s numbers, winning only 53% of the women’s vote. Meanwhile, Trump won 46% of women, 3% higher than he’d garnered in 2020. Trump also increased his share of male voters, from 53% in 2020 to 55% in 2024.

The Count by Race 

The other big surprise of the election was the count by race. Democrats have long enjoyed a significant advantage with racial minority voters, but this lessened considerably in 2024. Compared to 2020, Trump increased his share of Black voters by 10%.

Harris beat Trump with Hispanic voters 52% to 43%. But in 2020, Biden won 69% of the demographic. That’s a 17-point swing in Trump’s favor.

The Count by Age 

The polls predicted that Harris would crush Trump with the youth vote. She won the demographic, but it was not a landslide, On the contrary, the results were mixed.

In 2020, Biden won the women-under-30 vote by 32 points, but Harris did considerably less well in 2024 by only 18 points. Meanwhile, male voters under 30, who had voted for Biden over Trump in 2020 by a margin of 15%, went for Trump by a margin of 13%. A 28-point swing.

The Count by Political Affiliation 

The biggest leaps to the right weren’t taking place exclusively in Republican-leaning counties, but also in the most Democratic-leaning counties. Michigan’s Wayne County swung 9 points toward Trump, tying the more Republican-leaning Antrim County for the largest movement in the state.

The Popular Vote 

The 2024 voter turnout was lower than 2020’s by 4.2 million. Nevertheless, Trump picked up about 6-7 points in the national popular vote, receiving 2.5 million more votes than he had four years before, while Harris lost about 6.9 million votes.

What’s interesting is that Blue state voters drove the shift. Six of the top seven moves to Trump occurred in hard-left states, led by California, the hardest of all. (Florida, the only exception, has gained hundreds of thousands of Blue state refugees since 2020, helping drive its shift.)

Was Trump’s Victory a Landslide?

The short answer is no.

Depending on how you do the count, there were probably two dozen presidential elections in US history that topped Trump’s win.

Just for fun, I did a little research, and the results surprised me.

In first place was the very first presidential election in 1789. George Washington won 100% of the electoral college. All 69 votes. Of course, he had a big advantage. He ran unopposed.

Next was the election of 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon, a very weak candidate, by 97 percentage points. It’s commonly believed that Roosevelt’s landslide victory was due in part to the promise of the New Deal. But it was also a result of his ability to read the shifting winds of voter sentiment and his willingness to change sides to accommodate them.

The third greatest landslide may surprise you. It was the re-election of 1984, when Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale with a very successful campaign dubbed “Morning in America.” It crushed Mondale’s campaign by 525 to 13 electoral votes. This landslide has been credited to Reagan’s brand of folksy conservatism that gave American voters, after suffering through the turbulent 60s and 70s, hope for a new era of political and economic stability.

Fourth place in the landslide race may be, in retrospect, another surprise if all you remember about the victor was the inglorious way he left office. It was the 1972 victory of Richard Nixon over George McGovern, winning the popular vote by an astonishing 18 million. Nixon’s huge victory was in large part due to the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Nixon had already reduced the number of troops in Vietnam and had promised to end the draft.

There were two other landslides in my lifetime: The 1964 race, when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes against Barry Goldwater’s 52. And Barrack Obama’s 2008 win over John McCain by 9 million votes.

Next to those margins, Trump’s win was hardly a landslide.

Nevertheless… 

But it was a good deal better than the election of 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college while losing the popular vote. And it was a slightly stronger electoral college win than Biden enjoyed when he beat Trump in 2020, which left the Republicans with control of the House.

I think the reason Trump’s win may feel like such a big victory to many voters on both sides is because it came as such a shock to virtually all the pollsters and pundits who had predicted Harris would win by a significant margin.

That said, the significance of Trump’s victory should not be discounted. He won all seven of the swing states, and the popular vote to boot. Furthermore, he moves into the White House in January with a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate. Which means he has just about all he needs in terms of political power and popular support to get his promised agenda done.

And there is one more thing: The fact that Trump beat Harris, the first Black and female presidential candidate, with both women and Blacks, as well as with Hispanics, Jews, and young voters, gives him a moral advantage that he will surely use to dismantle most if not all of the progressive policies and programs that were enacted during the Biden/Harris administration.
Why Did Trump Win? Let’s Count the Ways 

The Economy 

It’s often said that the ultimate determinant of federal elections is the state of the economy.

And that’s probably why, beginning about a year ago, the Biden administration began promoting the idea that the economy was strong and getting stronger. They had some numbers to support their case. Rising employment, for one. A rising stock market, for another. They went so far as to tout these increases as “Bidenomics.”

It was a cute idea, but it didn’t work. Throughout 2024, Biden’s “trust” ratings on the economy plummeted. The reason for that wasn’t complicated. The increase in employment was not due to an expanding GNP. It was merely the return of millions of working- and middle-class Americans that had lost or quit their jobs during COVID.

And those weren’t better jobs with higher paychecks. They were the same old jobs at the same salaries that workers were getting before the lockdown. But nearly four years later, those paychecks had much less purchasing power due the rising cost of all the most important things that middle- and working-class people spend their money on. Principally fuel and food, but also such things as building supplies, cars (new and used), and home, health, and life insurance.

Most working Americans never bought the “miracle” of Bidenomics. But the progressive politicians and media that were promoting the ruse didn’t notice that because during
that same period, from 2021 to 2024, they saw their stock rise by 50%.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see what a mistake it was to push the Bidenomics lie. Affluent voters knew that Biden had nothing to do with the fattening of their 401(k)s. And the rest of the voters were feeling the pain of stagflation.

Immigration 

Immigration was the second most important issue that affected the outcome of the election, according to most pollsters. And for good reason.

The Biden administration’s open-border policies resulted in something like 11 million immigrants entering the country during his term. Most were not vetted. Instead, they were given notices for court dates when they were expected to appear sometime in the future.

Notwithstanding the miniscule incursions sent by border states northward to upscale Blue communities like Martha’s Vineyard, the impact of this massive influx of largely uneducated, non-English-speaking foreigners had a direct and damaging impact on the lower-income communities around the country where the Biden administration had been sending them in military planes under the cover of night.

Looking back at it now, one might wonder why the Biden administration would have thought that letting so many millions of undocumented immigrants into the US would help them win the 2024 election. I don’t think that was ever their intention. It’s obvious to me that the play was to get by in 2024 and then lock themselves into successful reelections thereafter with a widely expanded base of Hispanic voters, which have traditionally supported Democrats.

But they didn’t quite get away with it. Instead, Biden’s open-border policy pushed a significant number of Black and Hispanic voters (mostly men) to Trump. The demographic remained predominantly Democrat. But there was enough of a shift to make a difference in key voting districts.

However, in my view, those two issues – the economy and immigration – which were touted by Republican analysts to be the critical issues in giving Trump a marginal win, were not what made the difference.

As I see it, more important were the “softer” issues to which the Biden team paid scant attention.

Social Media and the Woke Movement 

For the last 25 years, the way the world generates and consumes information has changed profoundly.

In 1999, for example, people in literate cultures received basically all their news from two media sources: television and newspapers. And each of those sources had fewer than six news channels, for a combined total of about a dozen. But those channels were not all doing primary research and reporting. Most relied heavily on international agencies. (UPI and AP were the largest.)

Which meant there was a limit to the amount of news that was being collected around the world and, therefore, to the diversity of events that could be reported on and facts that could be discovered.

To be sure, there were news channels that were thought to be left- or right-leaning and a few that were in between. But because they were all drawing from the same few wells, the range of opinions about the news was limited, too.

Another way of putting that is that in 1999 both conservative and media outlets were largely agreed on a great number of basic facts. Those facts were seen as indisputable and thus uncontroversial. Which meant that differences of opinion could, with good faith and logic, be discussed reasonably so that common agreement was possible.

This is what made the great 1965 debates between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin so civilized by today’s standards. And it is what allowed such debates to be watched by millions of Americans across the political divide.

Today, we have a very different media landscape. Thousands of independent outlets dispense news gathered from thousands of different sources and provide the potential for millions of different perspectives on a virtually unlimited number of facts.

I remember reading an essay about this about 20 years ago. The writer predicted that one of two things would happen: Either the production of information would fractionalize into hundreds of options feeding hundreds of different individual consumer profiles, which he saw as a “democratizing” event. Or a small handful of media outlets would oversee the production and dissemination of most of the information to most of the world.

As it happened, both predictions were right.

We now have countless primary news sources feeding into countless broadcasting channels. But because of the introduction of algorithms and AI, individual users are being fed information tailored to their individual interests and biases in a manner that has steadily eaten away at a consensus of common belief. Rather than enjoying a significant wellspring of factual truth, we live in a world where truth has become determined by computer programming and belief systems have become tribal.

This change from what I would call a belief in truth and rational discourse to tribal beliefs that feel true and rational occurred gradually at first. But then, according perhaps to Moore’s Law, accelerated to the point where a perfectly intelligent person could, based on his instincts and prejudices, believe almost anything, including such ideas as White people are inherently racist, men are inherently toxic, and men can give birth.

The final stage of this transition began, I’d like to say, with the MeToo movement of 2006 – which, when it became a viral hashtag in 2017, had half of the country accepting the “fact” that in the US and other Western countries, the underlying social system was a hierarchy of brutish men and toxic male values that oppressed women in every aspect of their lives and tolerated every sort of injustice towards them, including rape.

The George Floyd incident of 2020 deepened and extended that divide. Enter the Black Lives Matter movement, ANTIFA, and academics pushing the ideologies of intersectionality, systemic racism, White privilege, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). In this view, men were the oppressors and “people of color” were the oppressed. Whites were inherently racist. White privilege was ubiquitous. Racism was universal and systemic, and the only solution to that would be a Socialist (race-based) revolution and reparations to Black Americans.

You would think that would have been the highest possible level of the intersectional, blame-and-shame movement when suddenly, almost out of nowhere, a new entry emerged. What group could be more oppressed than homosexual women of color? It turned out to be a group that most of the world hardly knew existed – people who were even more marginalized and oppressed than women, homosexuals, and people of color, but whose biological gender didn’t comply with their gender identity!

At first, the larger public didn’t quite understand. Eventually, we learned that the term “trans” referred to girls/women who saw themselves as boys/men and boys/men who saw themselves as girls/women.

In prior days, we thought of them as feminine boys/men and masculine girls/women. But now we learned that these were not quirky preferences, but states of individual identity that were as deep and permanent as color and needed to be respected as such. Not only that, but they were not in any way artificial. If a biological boy displayed girlish tendencies, it was not because of some passing fancy. It was because he was a girl. An actual girl. The fact that he had only one X chromosome and male genitalia was irrelevant. Not only that, but if you referred to him as a boy – directly or indirectly – you were guilty of harming him. Violently. And there was a term that could be applied to you. You were “transphobic.” Which was as bad as or worse than being sexist, homophobic, or racist.

During Trump’s first run for office, it was hardly even a topic of discussion. But by 2023, a transwoman had been honored as “Woman of the Year” by a British magazine and another transwoman was Biden’s guest of honor at a celebration of international womanhood at the White House.

This was nuts. But Woke ideology had progressed so far by that time that laws were being enacted to allow biological males to use the bathrooms previously reserved for biological females and compete against them in sports. Worse were the laws passed that allowed such troubled children to be “treated” for their “dysphoria” through “gender affirming care” (i.e., chemical castration and bodily mutilation). In some cases, without parental knowledge or consent.

The Rise of the Silent Dissenters 

I believe it was this extreme development of the “trans” movement that ultimately led to Trump’s victory and the defeat of the Democrats in both houses of Congress.

It was one thing to acknowledge that children with “gender dysphoria” should be treated with kindness and respect. It was an entirely different matter to claim that we should abandon reality in how we thought about and treated them.

But by 2022, progressives had taken identity politics to such an extreme that it was impossible to say the obvious truth about this lunatic set of cultish beliefs without being shamed and ridiculed and, in some parts of the world, face legal action.

What happened then was a massive chilling of common sense. Voicing disapproval or even doubts about these unwritten transgender commandments meant condemnation and/or ostracization from one’s otherwise likeminded community. So, tens of millions of liberal and leftist American voters had to go quiet on the issue.

But in the privacy of their personal thoughts, they knew the progressive movement had gone too far.

There were few if any surveys to indicate how large the group of silent dissenters had grown. But there were plenty of indications in the declining viewership of the progressive media and the declining revenues of many of America’s largest companies that associated themselves with the trend.

From 2020 to 2024, all the major TV networks, as well as the largest liberal newspapers, saw their audiences decline precipitously. In some cases, by as much as 50%. Revenues from Disney-produced Woke movies plummeted, as did sales of Bud Light and Target when they put their chips on Woke advertising campaigns.

Some of the decline came from conservative consumers who were being exposed to the craziness daily by conservative media. But I believe there was also a very sizeable loss from moderate and even liberal consumers who quietly decided they couldn’t take it anymore. They weren’t rushing to Fox News or the New York Post necessarily, but they could no longer watch MSNBC and The Washington Post.

This disaffection from the extremities of the progressive movement happened not only with the news and entertainment, but in all sorts of other industries. In 2024, there were dozens of large businesses that turned their backs on their DEI efforts and returned to hiring and firing people based on merit.

But virtually none of this disaffection was being reported in the legacy press.

Depending on the poll you looked at, Harris was either going to win in a landslide or by a modest margin in the electoral college. But she was certainly going to maintain the popular vote.

My point is: The pollsters were so terribly wrong this time not because they were misreporting the facts, but because a whole lot of the centrist and even liberal voters weren’t being honest with their answers. They didn’t want anyone to know that they were going to vote for Trump.

What Trump’s Election May Have Put an End To 

As I said above, I don’t believe Trump’s victory was a landslide. Trump won a solid majority of the electoral votes, both houses of Congress, and a majority of the popular vote. But he will face resistance in trying to implement many of his promises. Not just from the Democrats in Congress, but also from a portion of the Republican politicians that have no desire to really drain the swamp.

What he can accomplish now that he understands Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy and has appointed outsiders to dismantle it has yet to be seen. But I do think that his victory may put an end to some of the worst excesses of the progressive movement.

For example…

Forbidden and Compelled Speech 

A nation doesn’t need a constitutional amendment to protect speech that the government approves of. The founders of our country understood that. They also understood that forbidden speech was, more than anything else (including political ideology), the primary and most powerful way that government can usurp democracy. That’s why they made freedom of speech the First Amendment.

The Biden administration seemed to have forgotten about that when it bent a knee to forbidden speech by entertaining the concept that certain kinds of speech were not protected by the First Amendment.

As Biden-Harris Climate Czar John Kerry said at a World Economic Forum conclave prior to the election: “If people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick… our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”

If that wasn’t scary enough, Biden and Harris went so far as to conspire to establish a government office to monitor and prosecute speech that might be determined to be hateful. The next step, something the Biden administration also entertained, was to establish laws and regulations to compel “correct” speech – like Canada did by passing its gender identity rights Bill C-16.

The percentage of Americans that believed this made sense was probably equal to the percentage of Americans who suffered from gender dysphoria. Almost none. But by embracing the craziness, Biden and Harris (who proudly announced her pronouns on several occasions) signaled to moderate, undecided voters that they – and the progressive wing of their party – had abandoned common sense. If they were willing to pretend that biological males could transform themselves into “real” females simply by identifying as female, what other insane political ideas would they embrace?

With Harris’s defeat, the madness of criminalizing hate speech and/or compelling “correct” speech has, at least for the foreseeable future, fallen into the cesspools of Woke thinking. I don’t think it will come back in my lifetime.

DEI and Virtue Signaling 

If you spent any time over the last four years watching Congressional hearings of Biden appointees, you witnessed the fruits of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology. One crazy person after another was nominated for important positions, most with no other qualification than fitting into and supporting some favored category of DEI. Harris herself, by Biden’s own testimony, was selected for her race and gender. (Imagine how much better the Democrats would have done in 2024 if Tulsi Gabbard, who demolished Harris in the elections, had been Biden’s nominee.)

DEI was dumb. But it was accompanied by an equally dumb idea: that espousing DEI was morally virtuous – and that denouncing DEI was racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

As John Leake, a politically moderate Substack commentator recently wrote:

Memo from the American People to Democrats: We don’t believe your virtue-signaling is an expression of true moral integrity, so stop virtue-signaling and try to learn something from your humiliating defeat. Analyze your mistakes and try a fresh approach at the next election.

I don’t think we have to worry about this bad idea resurfacing during Trump’s term or for the foreseeable future. DEI was a hot topic among Fortune 500 companies and leading educational institutions in the last four years. But almost all of the companies and even many of the institutions are abandoning those policies after suffering the embarrassment of showing the world how well they work.

Lawfare 

Towards the end of the summer, as the election drew near, never-Trump celebrities and media personalities began talking about their fears that Trump would initiate a campaign of vengeance against his political opponents and even attempt to throw them all in jail. They made these statements with straight faces, oblivious to the fact that Trump had just endured two years of progressive-led lawfare against him. All of which was covered happily by the legacy media, and all of which was obviously political. The strategy failed completely. It couldn’t increase the base of Trump haters. They were already committed.

But it could, and I believe it did, make Trump a sympathetic character in the drama for enough undecided voters to help bring him the victory on Nov. 4.

On Jan. 20, Trump and the Republicans will be in the catbird seat to do exactly what his opponents are worried about him doing. It will be interesting to see if that happens.

Race & Gender Baiting as a Political Tactic 

I cannot think of a political personality in my lifetime that has been called a racist more times than Donald Trump. Or a misogynist, for that matter. Pick any version of these two pejoratives and ask Google how many times it’s been applied to public personalities. Trump will be at the top of every list.

It’s said that if you make a claim, true or false, seven times in a row people will begin to believe it. This did not happen with the vilification of Trump. Like the lawfare strategy, the effort to turn voters away from Trump by slandering him backfired. It may have sated to some extent the hate felt by those who did the name calling. But it had no chance of pitting undecided voters against him.

And that wasn’t the big mistake. The tactic that sealed the deal was the same one that give Trump the victory in 2016, when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables.” Watching the most visible Trump haters proclaim that anyone who would even think about voting for him is racist, sexist, transphobic, galvanized a significant percentage of undecided voters.

In retrospect, that so many prominent Harris supporters would employ this vicious and impulsive ad hominem name calling as a rhetorical strategy can best be explained as a symptom of the less virulent term of ridicule used by the opposition: Trump Derangement Syndrome!

Since the election, some outspoken progressives who called Trump racist and sexist during the campaign have admitted that the name calling was ineffective and questioned the wisdom of having done it. But others have doubled down by expanding the target of their slander to anyone and everyone who voted for Trump – i.e., the majority of the electorate! It seems clear to me that if the Democrats want to win back the White House and Congress, they will have to abandon this foolish exercise in self-indulgence.

Trust in the Legacy Media 

One of the most salient facts about Trump’s win was that he won convincingly without any support from the legacy media, including the NYT, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, and NPR.

This was not a surprise. In the eight years that elapsed since he won the presidency in 2016, most of the major media outlets saw their audiences gradually get smaller.

And since the 2024 election, those numbers fell off a cliff. MSNBC, for example, lost roughly half its viewership, from an average of 1.34 million prior to Nov. 4 to an average of only 660,000. CNN lost about 40% of its prime-time viewership since Nov. 5, from an average of 739,000 to 448,000. Ratings for the broadcast and cable news channels saw a decline of 15 million since 2020, from an average of 57 million to 42 million.

A similar pattern has taken place in the newspaper industry, with daily nationwide circulations falling from more than 30 million in 2019 to less than 20 million. If the trend continues, one-third of newspapers will be lost by 2025, according to a 2022 study published by Northwestern University.

Fox News, on the other hand, has seen its prime-time viewership increase by about 25% since Election Day, from 2.4 million to nearly 3 million.

As for the why of this trend, some of it can surely be attributed to the rise of independent social media news outlets, and particularly conservative ones. But it’s also impossible to deny that an equally big part is attributable to a decline in the public’s trust of mainstream media. Recent polls indicate that only about one in three Americans have confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.”

It will be interesting to see whether the legacy media will try to recapture its audience by more balanced reporting or double down on their positions, as some liberal think tanks have advised.

And to be fair, the huge gap that currently exists between the legacy and the conservative media will probably narrow after Trump takes office in January. Some percentage of those that left CNN and MSNBC will almost certainly come back for news and views that are critical of Trump. But I don’t think there is any chance that the recovery will be much more than half of what was lost.

Recommended Reading 

Different perspectives on lying from The Free Press

* Matti Friedman: “When We Started to Lie”

* Peter Savodnick: “The Big Scramble”

* Bari Weiss: “The Era of the Noble Lie”

Your first weekly issue of January 2025… including clippings from my JournalNews & Views (political, social, and cultural news stories about which I have an opinion that I think stands apart from what the rest of the media – right or left – is saying), a section on The Economy & InvestingRecommended Reading/Watching (brief introductions to essays, articles, videos, etc. that I think you will find worthwhile), and your monthly Quiz.

Arnold Schwarzenegger admits he tricked Sylvester Stallone into doing a crappy movie… 

Watch it here.

It’s all about money this week. In this, the “Works in Progress” issue of the month, you’ll find:

* More from The 7 Natural Laws of Wealth Building

* An excerpt from The Art of Collecting Art

* The “Introduction” to Wealth Culture, a new book I’ve just started to work on

Plus…

* a quick video course I put together on Keynesian Economics

Note: These are not final drafts. So if you see anything that I got wrong, or if you want to suggest something I didn’t think of, please leave a message for me here.

An Excerpt from The 7 Natural Laws of Wealth Building 

Friction

Thirty-four years ago, on my 40th birthday and a year into my first attempt at retirement, I decided that K and I should do some estate planning for our family.

I came to that decision because I had recently gotten into the habit of paging through publications like The Robb Report and Forbes issues on the richest men and women in the world, and I was reading the occasional biography or autobiography of great American industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Flagler, and Henry Ford.

I was doing this sort of reading because I had, in the span of less than 10 years, brought myself up from humiliating penury to a net worth of more than $10 million, which, in 1990, put me in what I believed was the category of having “great wealth.”

So, I engaged a lawyer I knew to write me up an “estate plan.”

After seeing the size of our financial assets, he assembled a small group of people to provide us with the full spectrum of the legal and accounting services that he told me we needed. The group consisted of my tax accountant, another guy I knew that was an accountant, and a local lawyer who did my real estate closings. At the last minute, on impulse, I asked MN, at that time the CFO of my primary business, to sit in on our first meeting and tell me what he thought.

After the meeting, he pulled me aside and said, “Mark, these guys are clowns. What you need is a company that specializes in this sort of thing.” And he recommended what was perhaps the best estate planning firm in the US. They were way more expensive than I had anticipated, but in retrospect, they were worth every penny of the more than $1 million I have paid them so far.

As it turned out, this was in the middle of my wealth building career. Since then, my net worth has increased by a multiple of 15, which has made their intensive, personalized, state-of-the-art advice worth even more.

A Concern Surfaces 

When the plan was in place, K and I felt pretty good – like we had accomplished what responsible people with significant assets should do.

But then I read something that concerned me. Apparently, even the wealthiest people, working with the most sophisticated estate planning professionals, didn’t always get it right. Even with the best technical and legal structures, the most common result of leaving fortunes to their heirs was (A) the destruction of the wealth they left behind within two generations, and (B) the destruction of the family itself.

A few families, however, such as the Cargills and Waltons, had avoided these heartbreaking outcomes. One of the deciding factors was the way they wrote their wills and structured their family businesses. The other one – the more interesting one, it seemed to me – was that the entire family met several times a year to make financial decisions together.

I expressed my concern about the long-term effects of our estate plan to several people whom I’d come to trust at the firm that had put it together. Three of them recommended the same company – a small husband-and-wife team that specialized in what is called the “soft” side of estate planning.

When I contacted them, I explained that K and I weren’t so much interested in growing or even preserving the wealth that we would be leaving to our heirs. “We’re much more concerned,” I said, “that in leaving so much money to them, it could result in resentments, objections, fights, and even worse if things got really out of hand.”

They told me that we were right to be worried. They said that they used to work on the “hard” side of estate planning – asset protection, portfolio management, etc. But because of their own experiences as children of wealthy parents, they had decided, instead, to focus their careers on helping clients like us who were aware of the dangers of giving away a fortune.

The program they laid out sounded very much like the approach I’d read about that was taken by the Cargills and Waltons. They called it “family governance.” We liked the way it sounded, and we signed a contract.

And then, within days – before we could even begin the program – two of our sons got into a tiff about what they should do with our primary residence after our deaths. Sell it and split the proceeds? Or keep it and use it as a beach house for the extended family?

“I hope this ‘family governance’ stuff works,” I thought. “If it doesn’t, K and I might be looking at the beginning of the end of everything we’ve worked so hard to achieve over all these years.”

 

Introducing Friction 

In the science of physics, the word “friction” is used to describe forces that slow forward momentum – more specifically, forces that resist “the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material elements sliding against each other.”

Common examples of physical friction include such things as dryness, roughness, competing currents, and so forth.

In the world of wealth building, “friction” would include countless impediments. For simplicity, I’ve classified them into five categories: external friction, internal friction, economic friction, personal friction, and political friction.

External Friction 

In business, external friction includes all the built-in demands and obstacles you can run into that come from outside forces, such as the regulatory agencies of federal, state, and local governments, industry associations, business groups, and basically any outside organization whose requirements get in the way of your efforts to grow your business and your wealth.

Those requirements would include OSHA and ADA rules, SEC and FTC regulations, state and local zoning and building codes, local business regulations, and so on.

Though many of them are necessary to reduce malfeasance and safeguard public interests, they almost always slow down forward momentum.

What to Do About External Friction 

I wish I could tell you that I’ve discovered ways to avoid every sort of external friction we experience when we are building businesses and building wealth. Alas, I cannot.

External friction comes, as I said, from outside agencies, many of which have enforcement powers. Unless the project you are bringing them is going to add tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues to their coffers, any energy you spend on attempting to alleviate the friction by getting them to back down is likely to be wasted. More than likely, you’ll just end up delaying your project and tacking on extra dollars to its cost.

What you can do, however, is keep the friction to a minimum by being stoic about it and not allowing yourself to get upset.

 

Internal Friction 

Internal friction refers to problems that arise from within a business. These would include differing priorities, communication systems, and corporate cultures.

Individual departments, for example, may have different vacation policies, working hours, break times, and so forth. Or one department might use a different meeting and/or notetaking system than another department, which can make it difficult for everyone to be on the same page.

Most irritating can be clashes between individual employees… and you!

What to Do About Internal Friction

You might think, “I can’t believe these people are giving me – the person who pays their salaries – such grief!”

And to be sure, one way you can eliminate that kind of internal friction is to fire the offender.

But although that is sometimes exactly the right thing to do, it’s not always so. Sometimes employees slow you down because they can see that what you want them to do is going to have negative repercussions that you will regret.

That’s the challenge in dealing with internal friction.

What I’ve learned to do is not especially clever. It’s a technique I discovered 40 years ago, and it’s worked so well that I’ve never needed another one. Here it is: When an employee criticizes a plan or project you want to set in motion, instead of discussing it with them to try to win them over to your side (which could take a lot of time and only increase your frustration), say something like, “That’s an interesting point, John. I’d like you to think about it and come back to me tomorrow morning with three suggested solutions.”

The next day, one of three things will happen. John will come back and admit that your idea is good to go. He will come back with a better idea. Or he will come back and tell you, “It’s not my job to find solutions, that’s your job!” – in which case… you fire him.

 

Economic Friction 

Economic friction in business includes macroeconomic factors such as inflation and deflation, industry factors such as material and labor gluts and shortages, supply chain issues, regional and local competition, union demands, and, of course, federal, state, and local taxes.

The big problem with economic friction is that it is often unpredictable and almost always beyond your control. Taxes, of course, are predictable and therefore easy to plan for. But macroeconomic swings cannot reliably be predicted. And even industry trends and responses, which often can be foreseen, will sometimes happen quickly and without warning.

What to Do About Economic Friction 

The good news about economic friction is that – although there is almost an infinite number of types – they all have the same solution: insurance.

Insurance was invented to protect individuals and businesses against unpredictable and uncontrollable negative future events. Because insurance programs work with large pools of customers, they can often give you the protection you will need for a price you can comfortably afford.

But is it possible to buy insurance against economic events like inflation or deflation or recession or depression? Not conventionally, as you would against fire or flooding. The way to insure yourself against future economic friction is two-fold: Always keep the spending you do to a minimum. And put a portion of every dollar of profit you get in an “economic emergency fund.”

I have done that with every business I’ve ever owned or run. I do it with my personal income, as well. I do it because I know myself. I know that what I hate much more than saving money for a rainy day is having to come out of pocket to pay for that rainy day.

 

Personal Friction 

Now we come to the sort of friction that every wealth builder and every aspiring wealth builder will inevitably have to deal with. It’s what I call personal friction – meaning it is manifested by your family and friends.

When internal friction in business is manifested personally, it usually comes from partners or colleagues or employees that are not on board with your plans to build the business and are making it more difficult for you to move ahead. And as I explained above, my technique for dealing with it in the case of employees (which is most often the case) is, in my experience, extremely effective.

But here’s the problem with personal friction. If you try to apply that technique to family and friends – as would happen if you tried to apply it to partners or colleagues in business – they won’t likely be willing to come back to you with three solutions to the problem at hand. And if they don’t, you can’t fire them.

What to Do About Personal Friction 

The most important thing to know about personal friction problems is that your chances of solving them by persuading the friction-causing friend or family member to see things your way are very, very slim.

When friends and family members question and criticize your ideas, they are rarely doing so because they want to help you avoid making serious mistakes. They’re doing it because of what psychologists would refer to as “relationship dynamics” – patterns of behavior developed over the years by the people in the relationship, for whatever reasons, that affect the way they interact, communicate, and relate to each other.

And this puts you in a very difficult position:

* You can’t change them.
* And you can’t fire them.

So, what do you do?

I have discovered only one thing that works. And even then, it is far from perfect. My solution is to change the only thing I have a chance of changing: the way I react to the friction they are creating.

I convince myself that, however much it irritates me, they are doing what they are doing out of love. And then I imagine myself – I actually visualize myself – receiving their criticism calmly and even gratefully. I imagine myself thanking them for their caring thoughts. And then I imagine myself ignoring everything they’d said.

It may be hard to believe, but you really can, through purposeful thinking, meditation, and visualization, do this.

Because this kind of friction is a part of you, you have the power to control it.

 

Political Friction 

There is one final sort of friction you may encounter – especially when you’re trying to build a family-owned business.

In terms of a category, I’d call it half personal and half internal. What makes it especially difficult to handle is that it is invisible. Which means that it can fester and grow without you even being aware that it is happening. And its potential for destroying a strong and profitable business is great.

This kind of friction exists in almost every medium- to large-sized business. And yet it is almost never addressed in business classes or talked about among businesspeople.

I call it political friction.

What to Do About Political Friction 

The fundamental currency of business – the metric one uses to measure the financial health of a business – is profit. Honest, sustainable, enduring profit. Which means that whether you’re the CEO or an employee working on the clock, the obvious way to advance your career is to continually contribute to the long-term profits of the business you’re in.

Politics is nearly the obverse. The currency of politics is power. All politicians understand that advancing their careers is about acquiring more and more power. Although having wealth can sometimes help a politician advance, wealth is not, in and of itself, a reliable way to acquire power. In politics, it’s all about making connections and making deals and making promises to colleagues and constituents.

The problem with power as a currency is that it operates in a zero-sum universe. Gaining more power means, by definition, taking power away from others.

In business, on the other hand, the potential for profit is unlimited. A business can (and often does) continually grow its profits by, for example, continually expanding the market for its products.

There are, however, more than a few smart and ambitious people in every industry who take the political approach to advancing their careers. Rather than focusing their time and intelligence on improving the profit potential of the businesses they work for, they apply their energy to acquiring personal power within the organization – which usually means pandering to their superiors.

Politically minded executives breed political underlings because they are not seeking to hire people to help them improve the profits of the business. They hire people like themselves – people who they know will do whatever it takes to please their boss. And that often includes executing projects and policies that make the customers unhappy and the business weaker.

If you have someone like that working for you, it may be difficult to spot them. That’s because political employees are especially skilled at making you believe they have your back and will help you move up the corporate ladder. And they will do so, so long as it helps them in their own climb. But since their loyalty is only to themselves (and the power they hope to acquire), they will throw you under the bus the moment it is helpful to them.

You’ve been warned. So be wary.

When I mentor young executives, I explain to them that, in rising to the top of any business, they will encounter all sorts of challenges and problems. I tell them that they will be able to handle many of them by analyzing data and using logic to find solutions. But when they get involved in people problems – either individual personalities that aren’t committed to the company mission or political personalities who think only in terms of acquiring power – they are getting themselves into corporate quicksand.

There is one more type of friction that has a significant impact on slowing down the natural wealth accumulation curves. It applies to not just business building but to individual investing – and if not identified and remedied, will eventually erode any progress you’ve made over the years by hard work and smart thinking.

I’m talking about…

 

Friction in Finance and Investing 

The most common and most serious friction you will encounter as an investor is expenses – often hidden expenses – that you will be asked to pay.

I’m thinking about such impediments to wealth building as brokerage commissions and fees, transaction costs, taxes, and more.

Benjamin Obi Tayo, Professor of Engineering & Physics at the University of Central Oklahoma, talks about this sort of financial friction using the metaphor of a rocket:

When a rocket is launched into orbit, the rocket has to generate enough thrust to compensate for the incessant gravity [friction] produced by Earth. As a matter of fact, rockets burn about 95% of their fuel to escape Earth’s soupy atmosphere.

When the rocket is in orbit, it becomes the master of space – covering thousands of miles with just a touch of propulsion.

The Earth’s atmosphere and incessant gravity are your investment costs and fees. These fees and costs can greatly slow down your wealth building process.

To illustrate, Tayo offers this hypothetical study of two investment strategies.

Case 1: An investment in an S&P 500 index fund with an annualized average return of 10%.

Case 2: An investment in an actively managed fund that produces an annualized return of 11% but charges 3% for management fees and costs.

The table below shows the portfolio balances for the two cases.

“We observe from the table above,” says Tayo, “that over a 50-year period, a portfolio that is passively managed with less frictional costs produces a return of over $1,100,000, while the portfolio with more frictional costs produces a return of about $500,000 over same period, a difference of over $600,000.”

In a recent issue of Legacy Wealth Monthly, Sean had this to say about the friction caused by financial fees:

The financial industry has been under a lot of pressure recently to lower fees, and it’s all thanks to low-fee or no-fee competition.

In the past, stock brokerages made most of their money from commissions and trading fees. It used to be the case that stockbrokers would charge 2% fees for the amount traded.

That’s buying and selling.

Meaning: When you purchased, you were immediately 2% in the negative. And when you sold, you lost 2% of your total stake.

Now we’re entering an era where trading fees are almost non-existent for the vast majority of self-directed online brokerages. (This hasn’t begun happening all over the world. But in America? It is now almost impossible to find a brokerage that has trading fees.)

However, wealth managers will still charge up to 1% of your assets that they manage per year.

And many mutual funds, closed-end funds, and ETFs will charge management fees and expense ratios.

Consider something like the Invesco KBW High Dividend Yield Financial ETF (KBWD), which lures investors in with its 12%+ dividend yield.

What most investors fail to notice is the fund’s 3.84% expense ratio!

Just to illustrate the comparison, let me show you how this can impact your wealth.

The chart above shows how much $25,000 would grow to if you achieved a 10% return for 20 years with no fees. That’s investment A.

But investment B shows you the same investment, the same returns, but with a 3.84% fee.

As you can see, adviser and fund fees are a major drag on the performance of your portfolio. And it only gets worse over time.

So not only is it important to avoid trade commissions and wealth management fees, it’s also important to avoid mutual fund expense ratios – especially if they’re greater than 0.6%.

 

Back to the Idea of Estate Planning… 

I began this chapter by telling you what I learned about the dangers of dumping a ton of money on your family after you die and hoping it will make everyone happy.

When the wife-and-husband team we hired to help us avoid a trap that so many other wealthy families had fallen into joined us in our first official family meeting, they arrived with countless stories and facts confirming our worry that leaving our heirs lots of money would only create anger and family fragmentation.

And they arrived with at least a half-dozen techniques that they said they had used with other families with good results.

The first was a test designed to identify our individual work or “leadership” styles – to match each of us with one of four profiles: directors, persuaders, counselors, or analysts.

You should understand that neither side of our family – neither the Fords nor the Fitzgeralds – are comprised of people that would be comfortable with these sorts of psychological assessments. Especially any that sought to suggest that our individual personalities could fit into some sort of universal type. Speaking for myself, I would say that the test seemed more akin to astrology than to science.

Nevertheless, we all agreed to suspend our suspicions for the moment and take it.

Each of the leadership types, we were told, tends to approach decision-making in different ways.

Directors are quick to take the lead, suggest solutions, and are impatient to see their solutions carried out.

Analysts are uncomfortable with quick decisions, preferring to mull over questions and opportunities, considering what might go awry before coming to a conclusion.

Like directors, persuaders are quick to come up with solutions. But unlike directors, they are not necessarily impatient when it comes to implementing them. They prefer, as their title suggests, to first achieve consensus through persuasion.

As for counselors, they are not much interested in solutions per se. Their main interest is in keeping the group dynamics pleasant.

None of us was particularly optimistic that this test would be at all applicable to us. But when we saw the results, we were surprised.

I was identified as being strongly in the “director” corner. And everyone agreed that “director” matched very well with my actual work style.

K and our first two boys were labeled “analysts,” and our third son was somewhere between “persuader” and “counselor.” Again, we all agreed that the test’s conclusions were right.

The next step was about recognizing the challenges that each personality type has in communicating effectively with the other three.

We learned that of the four types, the greatest natural conflict tends to be between directors and analysts. And it was clear to all of us that if we wanted to succeed as a family unit, our director and our three analysts had to learn how to get along with one another, without the constant squabbling and subsequent bad feelings.

Which brings me back to the reason we got involved in this program in the first place…

 

Overcoming Friction to Make Good Financial Decisions 

I eventually realized that what we were dealing with here – the tension caused by a clash of personalities within the family – was a form of friction that would inevitably thwart the estate planning I was trying to put in place to benefit them. To overcome it, the group came up with several suggestions.

One example: When I have an idea about something we should or shouldn’t do as a family, instead of simply stating it as a “done deal” (which is what I usually did) and then being forced to defend it against the barrage of criticisms that would always follow, they told me to present the idea as soon as I come up with it, and then give them some time to consider it.

At first blush, this seemed unnecessary and artificial. But when we put it into practice, it worked very well.

I didn’t feel attacked. And they didn’t feel pressured to have an immediate opinion. They could go home and take a day or two to do the analytical thinking they liked to do.

The net result was that decisions involving the family were made with more cooperation and less stress. Better yet, we learned that when decisions were made by consensus, it immeasurably improved the likelihood that they would work long-term.

The Takeaway 

Almost everything you do to build wealth – either by starting or investing in active businesses or by investing – is going to meet with some sort of resistance or “friction.” It’s The Third Natural Law of Wealth Building. And like Newton’s Laws of Motion, it is governed by internal and external forces.

You can’t avoid it, but you can overcome it.

It will be challenging, but that’s a good thing. The fact is that the universe is designed in such a way that nothing worth having is easy to get.

 

An Excerpt from The Art of Collecting Art 

Introduction

I fell in love with art when I was twelve.

That’s not exactly right. I fell in love with Gabriella, a petulant 14-year-old beauty.

She was the daughter of German aristocrats – Jewish intellectuals who had emigrated to America before World War II. Our parents knew one another through part-time teaching jobs they had at St. John’s University on Long Island, New York.

Gabriella’s father was an art critic and historian, and both of her parents were collectors of art. Their home was a museum of paintings and drawings and sculptures – much of it done by (I now know) early 20th century modernists – as well as curiosities and collectibles of every possible kind.

They lived in a neighboring town, and once a month or so, our family would spend a day visiting them. I loved being there, mostly to be in the Gabriella’s aura. But my love was not requited. She was more interested in spending time with my elder sister. And so, I spent a fair amount of time in that house by myself, looking at all the art.

Thinking back now, I don’t know if Gabriella’s family was wealthy or merely upper-middle class. But their house, with all its art, felt like wealth to me. Later, in my teens and twenties, whenever I would dream about becoming “rich,” the image that would come to mind was always some version of that house.

And that may be why, as soon as I could afford to, I began collecting art.

At first, I bought from street fairs and flea markets – whatever I could afford that pleased me. And what I could afford back then wasn’t much. As the years passed and my income rose, what I was willing and able to spend on art rose along with it.

Eventually, I experimented with buying art at auctions. That was an entirely different experience. Very fast. Very exciting. And, usually, a lot of fun. Auctions are tailormade to appeal to buyers like I was then: enthusiastic, overconfident, and ignorant.

But there was an upside to buying at auctions – at least at the bigger auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s. They were public. That meant there were published evaluations of the art they were selling. And those estimates could be validated by the bidding. So long as I didn’t let myself get carried away and kept my bids at or below the estimated ranges, I could feel reasonably confident that what I was buying had some legitimate market value. So long as I didn’t chase any piece too far into the bidding, I could feel comfortable knowing that, if I won it, the price I paid was realistic.

That was my thinking. And in retrospect, it was mostly correct. Later in my collecting career, I came to understand more about how art is priced from the inside. And how much auction houses make on selling it. And how they participate in buttressing certain artists and types of art.

Still, buying at auction the way I was doing it then was giving me some protection against being swindled. That was something that surely happened to me time and again when I did all my buying at street fairs and flea markets, with no understanding of what I was buying and no idea how to determine its actual worth.

I have come a long way since then. And, based on my experience, I believe that it is possible for anyone, even a rank amateur like I was, to assemble, over time, a first-class collection that will not only provide decades of enjoyment, but also an appreciating store of wealth and a lasting legacy for their heirs.

It can be used to balance a conventional portfolio of stocks, bonds, and real estate, help protect that conventional portfolio from inflation, insure against economic or political instability, and even contribute to a retirement income.

I did it, and you can, too.

Let’s get started…

Part I: I Dip My Toe into the Art Business and End Up with My First Collection… and Then Another One… and Another One

In 1989, I bought a half-interest in an art gallery in my hometown of Delray Beach, Florida. It was a way for me to live out a fantasy that had been materializing in my imagination for many years. I had this image of myself owning a boutique gallery and spending many happy hours there surrounded by beautiful things, reading books, and occasionally chatting about art with potential customers that would stop by. I thought of it as something I could enjoy in my free time while I was still working and eventually do full-time when I retired. (My main job was in publishing, but I had also started to develop several entrepreneurial businesses.)

Reality did not comport to my imagination.

In my role as co-owner, I learned that the art business was 80% about selling and only 20% about the art. And one needed to work just as hard to sell art as one would work to sell anything in any other industry.

So, instead of the leisurely hours of enjoyment I had imagined, I was spending all my time there trying to make sales.

I stuck with it for more than a year. But I finally had to admit to myself that it wasn’t for me.

I took my partner out for drinks one evening and told him that I wanted out. He wasn’t happy. But he wasn’t surprised. “What the hell did you think this was?” he said, shaking his head sadly. “It’s a business!”

He was right. The gallery business – at least the way he did it – was intense and non-stop person-to-person selling. He expected me not only to close a sale with every warm body that wandered into the gallery but also to harass my family and friends into spending money there.

The deal that we worked out was interesting. Rather than buy me out with cash, he would give me artwork from the gallery with a retail value equal to my original investment. I understood the difference between retail and wholesale was considerable, but I figured that was the tuition I owed him for learning two very important lessons: One about what sort of work I was willing to do at that point in my life. And the other about the day-to-day business of buying and selling art.

I had closed the door (at least temporarily) on my dream of living out my retirement years as an art dealer. But I had opened the door to the equally enticing dream of becoming a collector.

 

An Excerpt from Wealth Culture 

Introduction

In The Wealth of Nations, the 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith said that “wherever there is great property (private wealth), there is great inequality.” And “for every rich man… there must be at least five hundred poor.”

When Smith wrote those lines in 1776, the English and American economies were still largely agrarian. And notwithstanding a rising middle class consisting of artisans, merchants, and traders, the aristocracy owned 90+% of the farms and virtually all the large industries of that era, including textiles, shipbuilding, and metalworking.

The “First” Industrial Revolution 

In the 60 to 65 years that followed the publication of that book, the economies of England, America, France, Spain, and Portugal grew rapidly. Buoyed by trade with and investments in their colonies, the middle classes of these countries (merchants, artisans, shipbuilders, textile manufacturers, metalworkers, and traders) grew even more. Along with this growth in their gross domestic product (GDP), PCI (per-capita income) grew as well.

And yet, the gap between the richest and the poorest grew wider. Not because the poorest got poorer (that would have been nearly impossible) but because the middle and upper classes became considerably richer.

Fact: In the years leading up to the 1789 French Revolution, the top 10% of the country’s population held around 90% of the wealth, and the top 1% held up to 60%.

 

The Second Industrial Revolution 

Beginning in about 1880, a second Industrial Revolution occurred. This one lasted only about 40 years. But it was larger than the first one because it was spurred by the advent of modern technology, the availability of natural sources of energy, and the globalization and sophistication of banking, including the expansion of free-market Capitalism, which allowed entrepreneurs and business visionaries to finance their profit-making dreams.

During this Industrial Revolution, the aristocrats and wealthy families that had occupied the highest strata of wealth for hundreds of years were replaced by industry leaders – i.e., the factory owners, oil diggers, coal miners, railroad builders, and bankers that rose to the top of their industries.

The middle classes also grew and prospered during the second Industrial Revolution, as merchants, tradespeople, and small business owners profited from the ever-increasing flow of money that was generated by the now much richer and more populous upper class.

The Working Classes 

Much has been written about the plight of the working classes during the second Industrial Revolution – most of it depicting working 12-hour days, six days a week, for meager wages.

In fact, the working classes saw financial improvements during the second Industrial Revolution. Their incomes and savings went up – not as much as those that employed them, but enough to provide them with slightly more comfortable lives.

What has been talked about considerably less in discussing the economics of the time was a new and fast-growing group of people. I’m talking about the “unemployed.”

These people were largely penniless, like the working classes before them, But one could argue that they were worse off because they were forced to rely on scarce charitable sources (mostly religious organizations) to survive.

There is no doubt that for most people at the time, the two Industrial Revolutions produced more economic opportunity for more people than anything else that had ever happened. But the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest was even greater than it had been in the previous hundred years.

In the 20th Century…

Wealth and income inequality was far higher in some parts of the world than others. Nevertheless, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest within each country did not disappear. In some cases, depending on how you measured it (median vs. mean incomes, for example), it widened.

The Communist revolutions of Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and some African countries were, in theory at least, an attempt to narrow the gaps. And they succeeded, although not greatly, with the gaps between the middle classes and working classes. But the gaps between the richest and the poorest remained wide.
In the 21st Century… 

In 1989, the total household wealth in the US had been $32.87 trillion.

* The top 10% of Americans owned (67%) of US wealth.
* The next 40% owned less than a third (30%).
* The bottom 50% owned only 3% of the wealth.

In 2016, 27 years later, total household wealth in the US nearly tripled, to $86.87 trillion.

* The top 10% of Americans owned (77%) of US wealth.
* The next 40% owned less than a quarter (22%).
* The bottom 50% owned only 1% of the wealth.

And in 2024, the top 10% of Americans owned 67% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% owned only 2.5%.

Observations on Historical Patterns 

In free-market economies, when countries grow richer, so, too, do their populations. The degree of enrichment is never even.

Those at the top – the entrepreneurs, owners, and leaders of high-growth industries – generally become vastly wealthier, proportionately, than everyone else.

Those that directly support economic growth (bankers, lawyers, CEOs, senior marketing executives, brokers, etc.) are usually next in terms of the disproportionate advancement in net worth.

Next are the high-earning professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, analysts, engineers, real estate brokers, art and collectible dealers, and others who service the wealthy.

Then comes the larger middle and working classes, whose incomes rise at a rate equal to or a bit above the general escalation of wages and products.

And finally, there are classes that, for whatever reasons, are unemployed and/or depend on private charity or public welfare. These people are generally unaffected by the trickle-down growth of the economy. Thus, in terms of relative income and wealth, the gap between them and the rest of the population increases.

In countries whose economies are agrarian or oligarchical or centralized and controlled, there is usually little or no advancement in personal wealth among any of the classes except for the government officials and bureaucrats that tax the GDP growth and take most of it for themselves.

In short:

* In agricultural economies, the richest are those who inherit power or seize it.

* In Socialist economies, the richest are those that garner the most political power.

* In Capitalist economies, the richest are those that create industries.

However, this is not the whole story. What is more interesting for the purposes of this book is that within all countries with free-market economies, there is always a significant disproportionality between cultural groups.

And that is because some cultural groups are already positioned, in terms of where they are in the hierarchy of income and wealth, to enjoy the disproportionate increase in the growth of their economy’s overall increase in wealth.

This book is about those cultural groups. Why is it that they are almost always positioned to see their individual incomes and rates increase over everyone else’s?

And why is it that even if they emigrate from a middling economy to a strongly growing one, they move quickly into higher positions in the wealth hierarchy and almost always rise faster than others at the same higher levels?

My research suggests that there are certain groups of people in the world – ethnic, religious, and cultural – that have ingrained values and habits that give them a significant advantage to not only get into superior positions of wealth advancement, but also move up the ladder of income and wealth accumulation faster.

Thus, my thesis is that by learning what these values and habits are, and by adopting them into one’s own values and habits, anyone can have the same wealth-accumulation advantages as those at the top of the hierarchy, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, or the financial position they’re in at the beginning of their income and wealth-building transformations.

In the first chapter of this book, I will identify the cultural groups that are predisposed to building wealth. I will provide data to support the conclusions of my research – that these values and habits are the essential factors in capturing higher incomes and accumulating wealth.

In the second chapter, I will identify what I believe those values and habits are and provide evidence to support my claims.

And in subsequent chapters, I will attempt to create a template that can serve groups of people, large and small, as well as individuals to move rapidly up in the income and wealth hierarchy, regardless of where they begin.

 

A Quick Video Course on Economics in 8 Lessons 

The ABCs of John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian Economics

John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman were the two most important and influential economists of the 20th century. I published my first quick video course on economics – on Friedman – in the Nov. 1 issue. This one is about Keynes.

But before we get to the videos, let me give you a brief history of the man and an explanation of why his ideas are necessary if you want to understand how the world works today.

Who Was John Maynard Keynes?

John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883 in Cambridge, England, into a well-to-do academic family. His father was an economist and a philosopher; his mother became the town’s first female mayor. He excelled academically at Eton College and then at King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics.

After graduating, Keynes worked in the civil service, joining the Treasury when WWI broke out. In 1919, following signing of the Versailles peace treaty, he published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he criticized the exorbitant war reparations demanded from a defeated Germany and predicted that it would foster a desire for revenge among Germans. The book became a bestseller and made him world famous.

Keynes amassed a fortune from the financial markets. He became a prominent arts patron and board member of several companies and was part of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals. In 1926, he married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballerina.

In 1942, he was made a member of the House of Lords, and in 1944 he led the British delegation to the Bretton Woods conference in the United States. At the conference, he played a significant part in the planning of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

He died on April 21, 1946.

“Keynesian economics,” as his theory is called, has become a cornerstone of modern economics theory and undergirds the structures of most advanced economies in the world.

Keynes’s best-known book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, was published in 1936. In it, he challenged what economists call Classical Economics Theory, a philosophy derived from the ideas of David Hume and John Stuart Mill and realized in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.

The core tenets of Classical Economics Theory were:

1. The concept of private property
2. The establishment of laws to protect private property
3. The establishment of free markets absent of government interference or regulation
4. The employment of private capital to fuel economic growth through industry and trade

Keynes believed in three of those ideas, but not the third. He believed that there was a role for government in smoothing out market fluctuations and preventing massive economic downturns.

“For my part I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.” – John Maynard Keynes

And now for the video lessons…

Lesson One: An Introduction to Keynesian Economics

Part 1
Watch Time: 11 min.
Watch it here.

Part 2
Watch Time: 10 min.
Watch it here.

Part 3 
Watch Time: 12 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* Keynes’s economic theories existed in the space between the theories of Adam Smith and the ideology of Marx and Engels.

* Keynes believed that government should play a role in managing its economy to avoid major recessions and depressions and to smooth out the smaller economic ups and downs.

* The government tools for limited intervention that Keynes recommended were industrial and business regulation and stimulating the economy by borrowing and spending money to increase demand.

Lesson Two: Key Distinctions Between Keynesian and Classical Economics Theories

Watch Time: 13 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* Keynesian Economics is not a refutation of Classical Economics, but an addendum.

* Classical Economics (Adam Smith) argued that economies work best if governments leave them alone and that any attempt to regulate or manipulate an economy will only make matters worse. Keynes believed this was wrong and that there was a place for “judicious” limited involvement.

* “The invisible hand” is a metaphor for the unseen forces that move a free-market economy. Because of flexible prices and wages, it naturally correct itself. As consumption increases, inflation takes place and prices rise. Consumption slows and prices go down (deflation). Aggregate demand slows and the economy decreases. Prices get lower and, because prices are lower, consumption increases.

* Keynesian Economics says that during a deflation, some point prices “stick” and won’t go down. The same is true of wages. If they go too low, they stop falling. The GDP may decrease but prices and wages won’t move.

 

Lesson Three: Keynes’s Supply & Demand Theory

This video lesson comes from the Kahn Institute. The approach here is technical. Other lessons in this course cover the same material, but this one provides extra value in acquainting you with some of the easy-to-understand-but-fancy phrases used by economists.

Watch Time: 12 min.
Watch it here.

 

Lesson Four: Demand-Side Economics in 60 Seconds

The same information as Lesson Three… but in only one minute!

Watch Time: 1 min.
Watch it here.

 

Lesson Five: The Aggregate Supply Curve (The Keynesian Curve) 

Watch Time: 13 min.
Watch it here.

 

Notes: 

* Why it is that when there is an economic recession or depression costs don’t increase as you grow out of it?

* A difference between Classical Economics and Keynesian Economics explained through “the silly story of a young couple.” The lesson is about spare capacity vs. full capacity and undercapacity.

Lesson Six: Keynesians vs. Monetarists on Macroeconomy

From Enhance Tuition, a brief lesson on the difference between Keynesian and Monetarist theories.

Watch Time: 5.5 min.
Watch it here.

Notes:

* Classical Economics Theory (Milton Friedman) believed that the financial markets would adjust themselves to economic irregularities naturally in time because of the natural fluctuation of interest rates and the decisions of individual economic actors pursuing their best interests.

* Keynes believed that sometimes – during stubborn recessions and depressions – the free-market solution can take too long. And that government spending can speed up that process and thus obviate the worst conditions.

 

Lesson Seven: Problems with Keynesian Economics in Action 

From The Kahn Academy: In this video, the narrator identifies the primary weaknesses of “Keynesian Thinking.” You may find it, as I did, a bit too technical. B ut it has the advantage of identifying the problems with specific and pragmatic examples.

Watch Time: 8 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* When governments spend large sums of money to stimulate a stagnant economy, the rise in wages and prices that follows is nearly impossible to reverse.

* Over the long run, priming the economic pump can work. But when that government spending is fueled by debt, the long-term result is almost certainly bad – a choice between high inflation or a crushing recession.

 

Lesson Eight: Other Schools of Economic Thought 

From Crash Course Economics, a brief summary of different economic theories from Malthus to Friedman to Hayek to Marx and Engels to Keynes.

Watch Time: 10 min.
Watch it here.

Notes: 

* Thomas Robert Malthus: Predicted world population growth would lead to inevitable global famine. He was wrong. He didn’t factor in technological advancements.

* Adam Smith: A person following their own self-interest will produce a greater common good.

* David Recardo: Free trade is better for everyone.

* Marx and Engels (Communism): A natural conflict between workers and capitalists.

Principles of Economics by Alfred Marshall (published in 1890): introduced the concepts of supply & demand and the diminishing marginal utility of income and wealth.

* Keynes: Governments needed to interfere by using monetary and fiscal policies.

* The Great Depression was caused by bad monetary policy.

In this clip, Arnold Schwarzenegger talks to Jimmy Kimmel about his early competition with Sylvester Stallone. If you don’t think of him as funny, it will change your mind.

Last month, I read four books and watched four films/TV series that I wanted to bring to your attention. I can wholeheartedly recommend all but one of them. The exception is a book from a heralded author, so I thought you might be interested in hearing what I have to say about it.

The books:

*A Ladder to the Sky
The Message
Excellent Advice for Living
Fanny Hill

The films/TV series:

Documentary Now!
Hamilton: Building America
LaRoy, Texas
Preacher

A Ladder to the Sky 

By John Boyne
384 pages
Published: Nov. 2018

The secret deciders of The Mules selected A Ladder to the Sky as our November read. At 384 pages, it’s a bit long for my modest reading speed, but the diction is simple, the grammar direct, and the story compelling enough to make it at least feel like a fast read.

The Plot 

The story begins in a hotel bar in West Berlin, where Maurice Swift, a would-be novelist working as a server, waits on Erich Ackermann, a prize-winning novelist, whom he recognizes. The two strike up a conversation that results in the older writer offering the aspiring one the opportunity to accompany him as a travel assistant and literary mentee on the remaining weeks of a book tour he is taking through Europe.

Because the story is told from Ackermann’s point of view, the reader is privy to the older man’s homosexual interest in turning the apprenticeship into an intimate relationship. Furthermore, because of that same perspective, the reader is allowed to understand the young man’s intentions before the older man does.

As the relationship develops, Ackermann tells Swift about his life 40 years earlier when he was a fledgling writer living in German just before WWII and was infatuated with another aspiring artist – a story that ended in tragedy and betrayal. Which is exactly what subsequently happens between Ackermann and Swift, but in reverse.

The other stories that comprise the novel are similar in that they all revolve around Swift and present the themes of tragedy and irony, as well as ambition and homosexual love.

What I Liked – and Didn’t Like – About It 

I do have some criticisms about Boyne’s writing. But they are the sort of literary peccadillos most readers don’t care about. So, I won’t bother with them here. I don’t want to prejudice your thinking.

At its best, A Ladder to the Sky reminded me of Lolita in that it provided me with a view into a sexual impulse that’s alien to me. But unlike Lolita, the picture it painted of Ackermann was almost one-dimensional. There was, to be sure, plenty of stuff going on with Swift – lust, selfishness, ambition, and naïveté. But I was never able to understand any of those emotions beyond a superficial level, as I was with Nabokov’s disturbingly deep and sympathetic presentation of Humbert Humbert.

An important element of the writing is the way Boyne chose to tell the story. Rather than telling it from the narrator’s perspective or in the third person, it’s told by several characters. But unlike the conventional multi-narrator story, in which different characters recount the same event from their unique perspectives, the characters in A Ladder to the Sky tell different stories about how their lives were affected by the protagonist: Maurice Swift.

This contributed to my enjoyment of the book, because, although it was confusing until I figured it out, it added a layer of complexity and intrigue to the story, which is, if I had to pigeonhole it, a psychological thriller.

Critical Reception 

A Ladder to the Sky was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and Minneapolis Star Tribune. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2018 Irish Book Awards, and, for the most part, received positive reviews from critics and readers.

* “A deliciously dark tale of ambition, seduction and literary theft… an ingeniously conceived novel that confirms Boyne as one of the most assured writers of his generation.” – The Observer

* “Gripping … chilling and darkly comic tale of unrelenting ambition.” – The Daily Express

* “Marvelously engaging, barbed, and witty.” – The New York Times Book Review

On the other hand, here’s a less-than-glowing video review from The Book Worm.

And here’s one from Shawn the Book Maniac, who hated everything about the book, although he admits that most of his colleagues liked it.

About the Author 

Before reading A Ladder to the Sky, I knew nothing about the book or about John Boyne, the author. When I googled his name, I was impressed. He is an Irish novelist, which is always a plus with me. And he has published 16 novels for adults, six novels for younger readers, two novellas, and one collection of short stories. His novels are published in over 50 languages. His 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was adapted into a 2008 film with the same name.

In this video, he talks about his inspiration for A Ladder to the SkyThe Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

 

The Message 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
256 pages
Published: Oct. 2024

Ta-Nehisi Coates is about as celebrated as a contemporary writer can be. He’s received a “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation and a National Magazine Award. Between the World and Me, his second book, won the 2015 National Book Award and was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years.

His works of fiction – including short stories and comic books – have been successful, too. Most notably his comic-turned-movie Black Panther.

And if all that were not enough, Oprah is his producer.

His latest book, The Message, is an attempt to return to non-fiction. It is mostly about one of his favorite topics: institutional racism in America and the particular danger of White men. But in The Message, he extends his reach significantly with a section on genocidal Jews.

In “Journalism Is Not a Luxury,” the book’s lead essay, Coates writes about his childhood impulse to become a writer and his intellectual interest in language. The purpose of the piece seems to have been to alert the reader who was not aware of his many literary awards that he was a deep and sensitive thinker who belongs in the pantheon of the great political and social thinkers of all time. And to be fair to Coates, he is good at sounding deep and thoughtful. In reading this essay, I felt like I was always one step away from being given some exciting thought or observation that would deepen my own thinking. But it never came.

A critic whose name I can’t remember (sorry!) captured my reaction to this essay. He recommended seeing Coates as a composer of moods and feelings rather than a writer of stories and ideas.

The second essay in the book, On Pharaohs, starts with an account of a trip Coates took to Senegal, which leads to an exploration of the relationship between Africans and African Americans. Having lived in Africa for two years, I was eager to learn his thoughts on the subject. What I found was based on the sort of logic that ran through Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist – i.e., African Americans today are victims of White oppression, which was born of hate, formed by slavery and colonialism, and perpetuated by Jim Crow laws, and subsequent more subtle forms of discrimination such as redlining and IQ tests.

If Coates made an original case for any of these views, I would have been interested in hearing them, but I found them all to be almost word-for-word recitals of the leftist, post-modern arguments about intersectionality supported by the crippled logic of the EDI handbook.

In Wealth Culture (a book I’m writing now and will be sharing a chapter of next week), I point out several very significant refutations of this argument, including the history of a half-dozen ethnic groups with long-ago histories of slavery and racism and decades-long suffering from prejudice and discrimination in the States, and yet moved beyond the damage it inflicted on their ancestors and went on to claim positions of precedence over White Americans in income, education, net worth, and almost every other metric of social status.

I also debunk the logic that Colonialism is responsible for group inequities in such metrics by pointing out several notable exceptions, such as the Ethiopians in the US and Europe, who were never subject to Colonial rule and yet exist in the same hierarchy of such social metrics as African Americans generally.

Not to mention the historical fact that Colonialism and slavery were hardly Western inventions by White people. They existed for millennia among people of every color – both colonialized and enslaved – and in much greater number among Africans and Arabs. (There is even an argument to be made that slavery still exists in quarters of the Islamic world today.)

In another chapter, “Bearing the Flaming Cross,” Coates writes proudly about his experience working on the 1619 Projectwhen it was being developed by The New York Times. If you aren’t familiar with the 1619 Project, you should know that its thesis is that America was born not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first Africans were brought to Virginia as indentured servants and that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” The project was celebrated as a triumph of historical revisionism by many leftists and liberals after it was published, but has since been so roundly criticized for uncountable factual errors and logical inconsistencies by established historians of every political orientation and color that it is now largely ignored, even by those who once praised it. Why Coates wasn’t aware of this is puzzling at best.

And then there’s the book’s last essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” in which Coates describes a visit he made to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, followed by a long account of the Israeli-Arab conflict that could have been written by the propaganda arm of Hamas. I don’t think he missed a single charge against Israel that has been made by Islamic terrorist organizations and left-wing academics and their students – almost all of which can be easily disproven by a cursory reading of the facts. Since this is a book review and not an argument defending Israel, I won’t extend my critique of the chapter here, except to say that it was congruent in its thinking and its rhetoric with the previous essays in the book.

Critical Reception 

Reviews of The Message were generally positive.

* “Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual.” – Kirkus Review

* “Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose…. These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.” – Associated Press

* “A challenging, thought-provoking read that’ll stick with you long after you’ve turned the last page. Coates continues to cement his place as one of our most important contemporary thinkers and writers.” – The Bookshelf Elf

Interesting

* Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates attended Howard University, leaving after five years to start a career in journalism. He is the only child in his family without a college degree.

* The name Ta-Nehisi has its roots in ancient Egypt and carries significant historical and cultural connotations. Derived from the Egyptian language, it translates to Nubia or Land of the Black.

* His father, W. Paul Coates, is the founder of Black Classic Press, which specializes in African American books. He was recently given a controversial lifetime achievement award by the National Book Foundation. Click here for the story.

Click here to watch an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates about The Message with Jon Stewart.

And click here for an interview with Sean Illing on the Israeli-Arab conflict.

 

Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier 

By Kevin Kelly
224 pages
Published: May 2023

We were on our way to a board meeting. SL picked me up in his oversized Ford pickup at my undersized cigar bar/office. I saw it as I heaved myself up and into the shotgun seat: a smallish book with a garish cover. The title was Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. Not the sort of book I’d expect SL to be reading.

The author was listed as Kevin Kelly. A common name. I looked on the inside flap on the back and, yes, it was the same Kevin Kelly that helped launch Wired magazine and wrote bestselling books about technology and the future. I’d not read any of his books, but I’d read a few essays by him. Smart. Forward-looking. Optimistic.

Like all of SL’s books, it was tagged with page markers and busy with underlining and cryptic notes. It looked like SL was gobbling it up. But it wasn’t a novel or non-fiction treatise of some kind. It was a collection of aphorisms.

In the preface, Kelly says that he wrote his first group of 68 when he turned 68 as a present to his three adult children. Then he wrote a few more for others. And a few more for himself. “I kept going till I had 450 bits of advice I wish I had known when I was younger,” he says.

Books of bits of wisdom are as common as photography collections of kittens. Most are written to be used as birthday or holiday gifts, which are put away and deteriorate gradually, unread and mostly unopened.

And for good reason. Most books of aphorisms are banal. Very ordinary explications of very ordinary observations. But there are exceptions: Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer, Maxims and Reflections by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Analytics of ConfuciusPensées by Blaise Pascal, and so on.

Excellent Advice for Living does not reach those heights, but Kelly admits that in the preface: “I am primarily channeling the wisdom of the ages… offering advice I got from others. I doubt any of it is original, although I tried to put it in my own words.”

But insights and observations that have been made before can still be useful and even inspiring or motivating if they are articulated artfully. About 20% of the 450 aphorisms in this book meet that mark. And that is not a small accomplishment.

Some examples:

* “It is impossible for you to become poor by giving. It is impossible for you to become wealthy without giving.”

* “All the greatest prizes in life in wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from the magic of compounding interest, by amplifying small steady gains. All you need for abundance is to keep adding 1% more than you subtract on a regular basis.”

* “If you ask for someone’s feedback, you’ll get a critic. But if instead you ask for advice, you’ll get a partner.”

* “That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult if you don’t lose it.”

* “Learn how to be alone without being lonely. Solitude is essential for creativity.”

* “Try hard to solicit constructive criticism early. You want to hear what’s not working as soon as possible.”

* “The natural state of all possessions is to need repair and maintenance. What you own will eventually own you. Choose selectively.”

* “You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.”

* “Be a good ancestor. Do something a future generation will thank you for.”

* “No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.”

Critical Reception 

Not surprisingly – and I think this is partly due to Kelly’s modest disclaimer in introducing the book – I couldn’t find any negative reviews. Here are some examples of what I did find:

* “Hovers between the practical and the poetic… a shorthand manual for living with kindness, decency, and generosity of spirit.” – Maria Popova

* “All will benefit from [Kelly’s] idiosyncratic wit and wry humor.” – People

* “An unapologetically upbeat offering.” – Publishers Weekly

* “If you don’t find at least 17 golden nuggets of advice from Kevin Kelly’s list you’re not awake.” – Daniel Pink

About the Author 

Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.

Among Kelly’s personal involvements is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on Earth, an effort also known as the Linnaean enterprise. He is also sequencing his genome.

 

Fanny Hill 

By John Cleland
178 pages
Published in two installments: Nov. 1748 and Feb. 1749 

John Cleland wrote Fanny Hill while he was in debtor’s prison in London. It is considered “the first original prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of a novel.” It is also one of the most prosecuted and banned books in history.

But it is loaded with euphemisms. Notwithstanding Cleland’s commitment to describing every possible detail of every body part involved in every sexual encounter, he does it only with flowery metaphors and figurative language. For example, the vagina is sometimes referred to as “the nethermouth.” (And, no, “fanny” didn’t mean “fanny” back then.)

The book was banned in the UK, and in 1749, a year after the first installment was published, Cleland and his publisher were arrested and charged with “corrupting the King’s subjects.” A bishop even blamed two earthquakes on the “unnatural lewdness” of the “vile book.”

It stayed banned in the UK for more than 200 years (until 1970), but pirated copies were printed and circulated in England and America. In 1821, it was outlawed by a Massachusetts court in one of the fledgling country’s first obscenity trials. And in 1963, when a new edition was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons under the title Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a case against it eventually made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled six to three that it was not obscene. Click here.

Why I’m Reading It 

I saw a review of the book in Literary Hub, a digital newsletter on all things literary that my brother recommended to me. The review piqued my interest. But what prompted me to read it was that there was a link at the end that took me directly to the manuscript as it was originally published.

The Plot 

Fanny Hill takes the form of two long letters to an acquaintance identified only as “Madam” from one Francis Hill, a rich Englishwoman in her middle age, who leads a life of contentment with her loving husband Charles and their children. Fanny has been prevailed upon by “Madam” to recount the “scandalous stages” of her earlier life, which she proceeds to do with “stark naked truth” as her governing principle.

Interesting 

Because of the book’s notoriety (and public domain status), numerous adaptations have been produced. Some examples:

Fanny Hill (US/West Germany, 1964), directed by Russ Meyer

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (US, 1966), directed by Peter Perry (Arthur Stootsbury)

Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980), a retelling by Erica Jong purporting to tell the story from Fanny’s point of view

Fanny Hill (West Germany/UK, 1983), directed by Gerry O’Hara, starring Lisa Foster, Oliver Reed, Wilfrid Hyde-White, and Shelley Winters

Fanny Hill (off-Broadway musical, 2006), starring Nancy Anderson as Fanny

Fanny Hill (UK, 2007), written by Andrew Davies for the BBC, starring Samantha Bond and Rebecca Night

Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you can read it – for free – here.