I think I agree with Richard Reeves, if this characterization of his recent book at Democracy is in any way representative of the work:

Reeves opens Dream Hoarders with a story to illustrate his point. In January 2015, President Barack Obama proposed eliminating a college savings program called “529s.” The 529 program, put in place in 2001, allows families to set money aside that grows tax-free so long as it’s used only for higher education expenses. The 529 program is quite generous, but it mostly benefits upper middle-class families. Since he doesn’t provide the statistics, I looked into it and found that a parent can save up to $70,000 a year—or $140,000 for a married couple—for each child. Thus, families with the means to save such substantial sums can and do save much more than what the typical (median) U.S. family earns, which was $56,516 in 2015.
In Reeves’s view, what happened next threatens everything that makes America great and fully illustrates the “favored fifth’s” privileges and how they protect them. President Obama proposed replacing this program with a tax credit that would benefit taxpayers of more modest means. The public outcry among highly educated elites was immediate. After complaints from a few members of Congress—particularly representing upper middle-class districts—the Administration backtracked; the 529 plans would not be touched. Reeves argues this furor over the proposed elimination of an educational privilege for the upper middle class demonstrates their chokehold on access to opportunity. He uses this story as a touchstone throughout the book to build his case that the members of the favored fifth are wedded to their privilege.

To my eye here’s the kernel of the piece:

In the Progressive and New Deal eras, low- and middle-income workers created a coalition with upper middle-class professionals to push toward a new vision of government. To be sure, there were some downsides, such as mandatory assimilation—requiring new immigrants to adopt American lifestyles, including the Puritanical ethic of abstaining from alcohol—and some glaring omissions, such as when the otherwise-pioneering Federal Labor Standards Act of 1938 excluded the primarily African-American domestic and farm workers from the protections of the law. Still, there was a compact between the highly educated professionals and the communities they sought to serve that focused on improving living standards for the broad middle class. Frances Perkins, the first woman to lead the Labor Department and author of much of the New Deal, is emblematic of this bond. She was a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, the elite liberal arts school for women, who spent her evenings and weekends at Hull House, the first so-called settlement house, working within the working class communities she sought to serve.

In other words via rent-seeking professionals and a big chunk of what used to be thought of as blue collar government workers have managed to create a substantial gap between themselves and other workers. Just to use Chicago as an example, the median Chicago public school teacher, Chicago cop, or firefighter is in the top 20% of income earners (many teachers, police officers, and firefighters earn well into six figures). How the city can afford that in the long time with neither the power to impose a graduated income tax or retain high wage workers within the city is anybody’s guess. IMO it’s a flawed business model.

So the enormous incomes and power of the top .1% of income earners isn’t our only problem. The entrenched power of the top 20% of income earners is major problem and you need do no more than look at who spends the most money on lobbying to discern their business model.

Democracy and I part company here:

The path forward requires that we rebuild that coalition.

The path forward is to restrain what can be accomplished via rent-seeking. Otherwise the numbers just don’t add up. When you’re subsidizing 80% of the population you aren’t subsidizing anyone.

In USA Today’s lament for Sears, I don’t honestly think the editors sound exactly the right note:

Sears, like other companies, is failing in part because it did not understand that this is an age of visionaries, not administrators. The wildly successful companies of today, including Amazon, did not merely ride the waves of change that swamped the likes of Sears. They created them.

They succeeded by thumbing their noses at conventional wisdom. That has meant pouring vast resources into good ideas, sometimes not knowing how they’d make money. It has also meant cannibalizing existing lines of business on the understanding that if they didn’t do it, someone else would.

Sears is slowly disappearing because of catastrophically bad management over a period of decades. Here’s how the USAT editors characterize Sears’s first try at world domination:

Like Amazon, Sears used its retailing strength to expand into related industries. It launched its own merchandise brands, such as Kenmore and DieHard, created Allstate Insurance, and even ventured into the stock brokerage and real estate brokerage businesses.

That isn’t exactly what happened. What Sears actually did was capture its private label vendors by making excessive demands, accompanied by ultimata. Eventually Sears was their vendors’ only customer and they’d acquire the companies, proceeding to drive them into the ground and destroy whatever had been good about them to begin with. Just because you can run a successful retail operation doesn’t mean that you can manufacture furniture or design and produce garments.

But they’re right in one respect: Sears should be ruling the roost. The company cut its teeth on the catalog business, the 19th and early 20th century equivalent of online sales. What happened? They repeatedly did just the wrong thing at just the wrong time. Rather than cultivating their vendors, they acquired them in a bid to gain a horizontal monopoly. Rather than focusing on the growing suburbs and suburban shopping malls, stocking products that would appeal to that clientele, they concentrated on their inner city stores. When name brands were just gaining steam they doubled down on their store brands. Rather than creating an online catalog and payment operation, in the early 1990s they got out of catalog sales to concentrate on those brick and mortar brick and mortar stores. Basically, they did just the wrong things at exactly the wrong times. The only explanation I have for that is incompetent management.

Thanksgiving dinner went very well last night. After well over a half century of preparing them I may finally be getting the hang of it.

One of my siblings, spouse, and twenty-something son joined us as well as a long-time friend who’s been a guest at our Thanksgiving dinners for 30 years. I prepared my conventional menu: smoked turkey, my wife’s family’s dressing with sausage, black olives, apples, etc., brussels sprouts and chestnuts, the cranberry sauce recipe I’ve settled on, homemade dinner rolls, and pumpkin chiffon pie. I’ve posted the recipes for everything here over the years.

Every single dish came out just about perfectly and in some instances the best I’ve ever made them. Love my new smoker. My timing was with pinpoint accuracy.

Today I’m trying to recover.

In a review of a book on the foundations of early states titled “Why Did We Start Farming?” at the London Review of Books, Steven Mithen writes:

Fire changed humans as well as the world. Eating cooked food transformed our bodies; we developed a much shorter digestive tract, meaning that more metabolic energy was available to grow our brains. At the same time, Homo sapiens became domesticated by its dependence on fire for warmth, protection and fuel. If this was the start of human progress towards ‘civilisation’, then – according to the conventional narrative – the next step was the invention of agriculture around ten thousand years ago. Farming, it is said, saved us from a dreary nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherer existence by allowing us to settle down, build towns and develop the city-states that were the centres of early civilisations. People flocked to them for the security, leisure and economic opportunities gained from living within thick city walls. The story continues with the collapse of the city-states and barbarian insurgency, plunging civilised worlds – ancient Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica – into their dark ages. Thus civilisations rise and fall. Or so we are told.

The perfectly formed city-state is the ideal, deeply ingrained in the Western psyche, on which our notion of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a ‘city’ wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde, and Brexiters’ desire to ‘take back control’ from insurgent European bureaucrats. But what if the conventional narrative is entirely wrong? What if ancient ruins testify to an aberration in the normal state of human affairs rather than a glorious and ancient past to whose achievements we should once again aspire? What if the origin of farming wasn’t a moment of liberation but of entrapment? Scott offers an alternative to the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state.

There are so many handicaps in a sedentary agrarian society by comparison with a hunter-gatherer society it makes one wonder why anyone would adopt one. On average members of hunter-gatherer societies are healthier, live longer, and don’t work as hard as those who live in agrarian societies. Let me provide several explanations for why one would go from something that is better to something that is worse.

First and possibly most importantly, hunter-gatherers can’t brew beer. There actually is some evidence that sedentary habits were adopted specifically to allow people to brew beer.

Second, hunter-gatherer societies don’t respond well to environmental change or success. Success can cause populations to grow beyond the environment’s carrying capacity. Hunter-gather societies commonly impose restrictions on reproduction for just that reason. That itself could be a reason to adopt an agrarian economy. And the one thing we can say with some confidence about the environment is that it will change. The species on which you depend for food may die. You may exhaust the resources of flint, obsidian, etc. on which you depend and your neighbors might not appreciate your encroaching into their territories for them.

The ability to store surpluses is quite limited. You may come across a bumper crop of berries in your wanderings. You must eat them now because you can’t carry them with you.

Finally, it may be that “we” didn’t adopt an agrarian economy, it was forced upon us. Agriculturalists, because of their ability to store surpluses, can afford to specialize and that means agrarian societies can have armies. And armies can compel erstwhile hunter-gatherers to adopt an agrarian economy.

In a Thanksgiving post at Econlog Scott Sumner outlines the joys of living in Orange County:

After moving to Mission Viejo in late July, I frequently experienced brief moments of euphoria. Sometimes I would almost burst out laughing at how ridiculously convenient my life had become. Now that I’ve been here for 4 months, I’ve come to the view that southern Orange County has the highest living standards in the entire world, for any region of at least a million people. (Here I’m thinking of Orange County south of I-55.) As an aside, there are Tesla cars everywhere, at least 6 or 8 within a couple blocks of my house.

I base this claim partly on the fact that the region is affluent and very conveniently laid out. Other places that might have a similar claim to high living standards (say the northern suburbs of Dallas) lack the delightful climate and beautiful scenery of this area.

I’d guess that leaving Boston caused my living standards to improve as much as someone moving from middle class to upper middle class, or upper middle class to rich. It’s amazing how much more convenient life has become.

but finds any lessons that might be drawn from his experience elusive. I’d like to suggest a couple. First, it’s good to be rich. The median income in Mission Viejo is around $96,000, comfortably within the top 10% of income earners. The median home price in Mission Viejo is over $700,000. The Teslas he sees tooling around are $70,000 automobiles.

Second, there’s a distinctive sort of hypocrisy in living in Southern California. Present lifestyles there would be impossible based on the water and energy produced there. Now, I don’t think that everybody should be self-sufficient. I buy my groceries at a grocery store and my gas from a filling station.

But I don’t curse grocery stores and filling stations while I’m doing it and I don’t delude myself into thinking that I have some particular virtue because I don’t produce enough food to feed myself or enough oil to power my car. I haven’t saved the earth by my choices. I’m just instantiating Adam Smith’s view of specialization as the key to prosperity. They’re not reducing carbon emissions by not producing energy or by taking water from the Colorado. The emissions and water are just coming from somewhere else.

I would caution Scott that the lifestyle in Southern California is poised on a razor’s edge. It will be increasingly difficult to sustain as California and its surrounding states become more populous.

It seems like just a year ago that the editors of the WaPo were telling us that homicide rate was not really rising and that it wasn’t a problem. Now, apparently, it’s a problem:

THE NATION’S homicide rate has risen sharply in the past two years after a decades-long decline, and a record share of the murders, nearly three-quarters, are now committed with firearms. That has prompted some officials to endorse get-tough policies that, although politically popular, are ill-conceived and as likely to do harm as good.

Virginia is a focal point in the emerging debate over responses to the homicide spike, because candidates in the recent statewide political campaigns talked about it and because of a program implemented in Richmond in the midst of a previous surge in murders 20 years ago. That program, known as Project Exile, targeted gun criminals by diverting them from state to federal courts, where they received mandatory-minimum sentences in out-of-state prisons and were usually ineligible for bail.

but there is no quick fix:

Mandatory-minimum sentencing regimes are despised by many judges as a one-size-fits-all approach to crime-fighting; the late chief justice William Rehnquist was among those who denounced them. Politicians looking for quick fixes in the face of rising crime rates should examine the evidence first.

Comparing Richmond’s homicide rate with New York’s is specious. Sad as it is to point out, urban homicide rates are correlated with percentage black population. Richmond’s black population is over 50%; New York’s is 25%. Their respective black populations are different in other ways. New York has many more Africans and Caribbeans, for example.

I agree that there is no quick fix and I doubt that mandatory minimum sentences will do much to curb the problem. The problems in the black communities of Richmond, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago have been 80 years or more in the making. They won’t be solved over night. IMO there will need to be more opportunity and much better law enforcement in the neighborhoods where the problem is most severe.

There must be social changes as well. More must be asked of young black men and they must be able to come through.

Oh, well. They say that the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. They’ve now acknowledged that there is a homicide problem. Maybe in a year or so they’ll summon up the courage to admit the nature of the problem.

I think that David Brooks is onto something in his most recent New York Times column:

We once had a unifying national story, celebrated each Thanksgiving. It was an Exodus story. Americans are the people who escaped oppression, crossed a wilderness and are building a promised land. The Puritans brought this story with them. Each wave of immigrants saw themselves in this story. The civil rights movement embraced this story.

But we have to admit that many today do not resonate with this story. This story was predicated on the unity of the American people. But if you are under 45, you were probably taught an American history that, realistically, emphasizes division — between the settlers and the natives, Founders and their slaves, bosses and the workers, whites and people of color. It’s harder for many today to believe this is a promised land. It seems promised for the privileged few but has led to marginalization for the many.

Let me pause right there. Preaching division is “realistic” if your aspirations are for your preferred group to achieve power. It’s simply destructive if your aspiration is “E Pluribus Unum”.

“E Pluribus Unum”, “out of many, one” was adopted as the motto of the new United States in 1776. There is nothing in it that limits it to a single race, stratum of society, gender, nation of origin, religion, or anything else other than aspiring to reconcile competing factions. The story of division that has prevailed for 50 years isn’t realistic. It’s nihilistic. It arises from the attempt to, in Voegelin’s phrase, immanentize the Eschaton which will always be frustrated. He continues:

The story of America, then, can be interpreted as a series of redemptions, of injury, suffering and healing fresh starts. Look at the mottos on our Great Seal: “A New Order for the Ages” and “Out of Many, One.” In the 18th century divisions between the colonists were partially healed. In the 19th century divisions between the free and enslaved were partially healed. In the 20th, America partially healed the divisions between democracy and totalitarianism. In the 21st, we have healing fresh starts still to come.

The great sermon of redemption and reconciliation is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

This is a speech of tremendous intellectual humility. None of us anticipated this conflict, or its magnitude. All of us “looked for an easier triumph.” None of us are fully in control. “Let us judge not that we be not judged.”

This is a speech of great moral humility. Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years. The scourge of war, which purges this sin, falls on both sides. Lincoln fought any sense of self-righteous superiority the Northerners might harbor. He rejected any thought that God is a tribal God. He put us all into the same category of ambiguity and fallenness.

This needs to be considered in context. Lincoln grew up in the environment of non-orthodox Christianity. In the theology of non-orthodox Christianity not only is the individual “born again” but born again and again and again. That’s the reason that Arkansans voted Bill Clinton into office first as Lieutenant Governor and then twice as governor. It isn’t that they were unaware of his failings. It was that they forgave him. He transgressed; he said he was sorry; they believed him. That career would not have been possible outside of that context.

We do need either to revive our historic national “narrative” or to formulate a new one. However, I also think Mr. Brooks’s grasp of American history and Christian theology is too weak for him to understand the underpinnings of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or why his hope for a new American secular religion based on forgiveness and redemption is doomed to disappointment. Repeated forgiveness is incompatible with the lex talionis of post-Christianity, something so evident in the campus demonstrations all over the country, BLM, and other contemporary groups.

Quite to the contrary, IMO never has “e pluribus unum” been so relevant but so hard to achieve. When the country of your birth is just a Skype call away and returning to it just a matter of hours after hopping on a plane, coming to the United States isn’t nearly the commitment it was a century ago. Today coming to the United States is more like commuting to work—no commitment required, least of all to forgiveness and redemption.

The rededication of the last paragraph of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

demands that you had that commitment to start out with. When I look around me I just don’t see that.

Here’s a little list of some of my posts from Thanksgivings past from 2004 to 2014:

Thanksgiving 2014

The Unbearable Awfulness of Thanksgiving Movies

Shenandoah at Thankgiving

Cross’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

Thanksgiving Resources

Thanksgiving 2004

With all of the handwringing about Angela Merkel’s inability to form a government after the recent German elections, that pretty well scotches her chance at the title of “leader of the free world”. Trump is so widely despised (at least publicly) that he’s ruled out. Theresa May’s and Emmanuel Macron’s respective problems disqualify them.

The free world such as it is will just need to get by without a leader. I think we’ll get by. I just wish we were freer.