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America 250: The Great Enrichment
As we celebrate 250 years since the Founding of these United States and our beloved Founding Fathers, I want to look through a wider lens.
And my favorite way of looking at this is The Great Enrichment, proposed by Deirdre McCloskey. I have a Great Enrichment page on my website. Here is a log graph.
Per capita real GDP goes from $4.7 per day in 2017 dollars in 1800 to $191.2 per day in 2017 dollars. That means that real personal per capita income today is 40 TIMES what it was in 1800.
Really, nothing else matters alongside this. As President Trump says about everything: “there’s never been anything like it.”
Now back in the day a chap forecast all this. In England, Carew Reynell wrote in 1685: “Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer." He was thinking of manufacturing.
But do you note something important with the chart? Exactly. It is shaping up as an S-curve. Meaning that our best days are behind us, unless AI sets the curve back on the up-and-up.
The other thing to notice about the curve is that there's only been one real disruption, in the Great Depression of the 1930s. I interpret that to mean that the politicians and experts and robber barons and oligarchs and activists don't really move the needle. Unless the Federal Reserve Board lets 5,000 banks fail in four years. Unless you have social scientists Stalin and Mao in charge. There is something bigger, deeper, at work than mere politics and mere markets and business.
In the 250 years since the Declaration of Independence we have seen a steady progress of understanding of the economy, from the idea of the “invisible hand” to the prediction of disaster by Marx because of the conflict between labor value and exchange value to the Marginal Revolution of 1870 that said that prices are prices. We have seen five technological revolutions, with AI the sixth. We have seen staggering advances in science from the discovery of oxygen in 1776 to Einstein’s e = mc2 as a prediction from his special relativity to the crazy world of quantum mechanics.
It has been, you might say, a remarkable time to be alive, and we are blessed by the remarkable people that made it all happen.
What comes next? Do humans become multiplanetary, or do we go extinct because of declining fertility?
Stay tuned.
| Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:32:59 GMT |
Another Day Another DSA
It’s getting to be regular order. A young DSA immigrant ingénue wins a Democratic primary in a D+20 district. The latest is Melat Kiros:
Melat was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, just weeks before her father was selected by the United States’ Diversity Visa Lottery. Seeking out community and support from other Ethiopian immigrants, her family moved to Denver, Colorado.
Now she’s a lawyer and a hard-left socialist, and likely to win the 1st Congressional District in Colorado, which is D+29 according to Wikipedia. At least hard-left DSA NY Candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier was born in Florida to Dominican immigrants.
The question that experts are puzzling over is whether the DSA surge is a cunning plan that will take over the United States, or whether it is a Baldrick’s Cunning Plan that ends in disaster.
My non-expert guess is that the DSA candidates are going to encourage ordinary middle-class voters to come out and vote Republican. There is no politics without an enemy, and the whole point of populist nationalism is to fight the educated class domination and hegemony to a draw.
I’m reading a long critique of the populist movement — particularly in Europe — by Eugyppius, in which he criticizes the populists for being too amateurish and too disorganized. Obviously the right-wing populists are the opposite of the hard-left DSA bunch who are highly organized trained activists that seem to be taking over the Democratic Party without even firing a shot.
But I think that the populist nationalist movement is disorganized by necessity. If it were organized then the establishment would play the Nazi Card and demolish the populists. Of course, they play the Nazi Card anyway, but since all the populist leaders — except perhaps Tommy Robinson in UK — project a just-folks vibe, the Nazi Card doesn’t work too well. Guess why Nigel Farage likes to be photographed with a pint of beer in his hand.
It’s interesting, and it makes sense. The populist movement is not really a movement to gain political power. Ordinary people don’t think that politics can do much for them; they just want to live their ordinary lives in peace — but don’t you dare cut my Social Security. Establishment figures in the Democratic Party want to climb the greasy pole according to the current rules. But the DSA folks are revolutionaries; they want to burn the place down.
Here’s my take. I suspect that revolution only works after defeat in war. Russia in 1917 was wrecked by World War I. Germany was wrecked by the punitive Versailles treaty. China was wrecked by the combination of the Japanese and the various rebel armies marching around raping and pillaging. They were ripe for revolution.
Perhaps it is true that the Democratic Party right now is semi-wrecked by a generation of incompetents, from Obama to Biden to Harris. That makes the party vulnerable to attack from populists on the right and DSA crazies on the left.
And here is another idea, that the current political situation is similar to the runup to the Civil War. The North was industrializing and flooding with immigrants from potato-famine Ireland and Germany. The South was defending the old ways, of slave plantations, that had served them well for generations. But the North said: enough already, and the South said: No.
Let’s describe the current situation as tech lords trying to implement AI on the one hand, and Organized Crime Democrats trying to keep the grift going on the other hand.
Perhaps the Colorado 8th District, with lefty (but not DSA) State Rep. Manny Rutinel winning the Democratic primary, will tell us the real story in November. The District is north of Denver up to, but not including Boulder, home of the University of Colorado, or Fort Collins, home of Colorado State University. When I visit relatives in Loveland we drive through this district on the way to and from the airport. It is pure modern suburban sprawl, voting D+0, and is represented by Republican Gabe Evans. It’s 51.7% White and 38.5% Hispanic.
Keep your eye on that race if you want to know the direction of the USA.
| Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:11:34 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Most successes are a consequence of second, third and fourth attempts.
All Activism comes from a place of privilege.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Rene Girard and the Scapegoat
