“Inflation is not all bad. It has allowed every American to live in a more expensive neighborhood without moving.” US Senator Alan Cranston.

Cranston was a character, perhaps the only American ever sued by Adolf Hitler in US court (successfully, nonetheless). Cranston knew German and the first American edition of Mein Kampf had, um, softened the message. Cranston sold half a million copies of his own, more accurate, translation until copyright law got in the way. Not the point, but worth remembering.

Cranston was also the son of a successful land developer and knew real estate well. He looked around and saw a problem not unlike today’s: neighborhoods became more exclusive without moving an inch. By 1981, with interest rates at 16%, a new mortgage cost 52% of median household income.

The graph below shows Nikita Sokolsky’s explanation of the math. In a follow up post, he found it was even worse for 1981 Seattle, where payments cost 67% of income. In Miami, it was 81%.

We have a housing crisis today. It is not the first, nor is it the worst. In the late 1940s the housing shortage was statically 2x today.

Thanks, Professor! I’ll sleep in my parents’ basement in joy and splendor knowing it used to be worse!

Fair.

To make history useful in 3 ways, let’s:

1) Explain why housing prices got messed up

2) Explain how to fix it

3) Since no one is going to solve it soon, explain how to thrive anyway

Idea #1: Home prices going up is historically weird

In 1990, homes in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Dallas cost the same (inflation adjusted) as they had in 1890. Homes in St. Louis didn’t exceed their nineteenth century values until 2003. For 100 years, house prices stayed the same.

The only places costs rose had local housing shortages: LA, NYC, DC and the easily abbreviate-able mega cities. People moved in faster than housing went up, so supply became more valuable. To be fair, half of the land around San-Fran is Pacific Ocean and Manhattan’s 1.6 billion tons of housing is sinking into the Atlantic one. But in most places, sink-proof land, lumber, and carpenters were plentiful so prices stayed the same.

Then 2008 happened, and everyone stopped building all at once. The whole nation turned into abbreviation-land. Existing homes got more expensive just by sitting there. Cheap money pushed everyone to bid up the left over houses, and now starter homes cost $1 million in over 200 cities. We turned a few regional housing shortages into a big, let’s hold hands and do this together, national one.

Experts debate how many homes we need. Two million? Five? Erdmann’s Housing Tracker says its 15 million units, which seems high until you realize that’s just a 10% shortage. However measured, its far more than we can quickly build. That’s a pickle.

Idea #2: Housing Avengers, Unite

Building code complexity, “Vote No!” button-clad residents at council meetings, and lawyers made it functionally illegal to build new things in desirable places. Construction Physics calls this “The Great Downzoning.”

What really went up was the price of good land you were allowed to build on, not the price of the houses. Homeowners are actually landowners, anti-heroes demanding a toll to cross the bridge from Renters-ville to Houselandia because they already paid theirs and need a refund.

The solution? Build an awkward alliance of developers who want to build, renters who want to buy, and homeowners burdened with skyrocketing tax bills who need to share the burden. Assembling this team portends a large political lift. It requires developers willing to build something aesthetically less awful, renters avoiding stupid placebos like rent control, and politicians who can spread the tax burden out wisely while resisting voter backlash.

Good luck with that.

In red areas, developer-funded Republicans clash with locals worn out by non-stop slash & burn tract homes. In blue ones, it’s Abundance Democrats pleading with wealthy HOAs to allow any growth at all. We can’t unite because the core components of Team YIMBY are separated by the Quantum Realm of Blue/Red states.

Idea #3: While Waiting for Ezra Klein …

You’re living inside a problem everyone wants solved but no one can, at least not soon. While our eyes scroll podcasts for deliverance, you have bills to pay.

How have Americans dealt with these problems before? Did they get ahead, or just give up? The answer is you, quite literally, you. They persevered or you wouldn’t be here.

Put another way: you’re going to have to solve this yourself just like they did.

Strategy 1: Move more.

You are neither the first nor fourth American generation to face a housing shortage. The answer then may be the answer now: get up and go. For most of time, between one-in-three to one-in-five Americans changed addresses every single year. Today, it is one in thirteen. Our nation of strivers is hoping to strive close to grandma, and I get that. But great-grandma probably moved multiple times, and so should you given that you live in the largest free market zone in the world. There is opportunity for you somewhere, and many of those places have homes half the cost of where you are. People who leave California save nearly $700/month and are nearly 50% more likely to own a house.

Strategy 2: You aren’t going to like it.

It involves another “one-in-three” stat.

That is the percentage of homeowners who rented out rooms in their house to pay off the mortgage at any given time before 1900. By World War II it was still over 20%. Realtors advertised family homes with extra rooms as “terrific for income” because they added at minimum 10% to the family bottom line. Nearly half of unskilled workers afforded their homes only because of their renters, often 3-4 at a time.

It was the primary American mortgage payoff strategy for 200 years.

I told you that you wouldn’t like it. But consider the logic. By definition, a housing shortage privileges those who monetize space. Yes, it requires work, but your great-grandmother used to have to feed and wash clothes for renters (meals/laundry came standard). You just make sure they keep the music down.

Strategy 3: You REALLY aren’t going to like it

Today, the Year of Our Lord 2026, it is cheaper in most large cities to rent than to buy, though still cheaper to buy than to rent in most counties (think ex-burbs and the Midwest).

There are lots of good reasons to rent: you can leave for opportunity, spend less, and your dog gets to pee anywhere she wants. Maybe rent your home and invest the difference.

But you should absolutely consider buying someone else’s. This housing shortage isn’t going away very soon. At best we’ll hit population equilibrium in the late 2030s, but more likely the tipping point is well into the 2040s-50s. That is most of your investing lifetime.

Consider this quote from The Washington Post:

“It’s getting harder for renters to become homeowners. “Prices have gone up relative to income … A 20 percent down payment is a lot more money now than it was 30 years ago.”

That was 10 years ago, in 2016.

Or this, from MarketWatch:

“With home prices remaining high and mortgage rates rising, more people are being priced out of the real-estate market and are instead looking to rent.”

… 2006.

Remember: house prices going up is historically weird, but we’ve been historically weird for about 40 years now. Since 1982, home prices in the US have roughly doubled in real terms for all the reasons above. We live in more expensive neighborhoods without having to move. It’s the land.

This insight combined with the post-2008 housing price collapse is how I’m able to sit on my butt and write. Part of the way to manage through a housing shortage is to take advantage of it.

I doubt home prices ever double again, but if you’re waiting on them to crash by half, think again. There just aren’t enough of them, and the good ones are on the best land. Even if the population were to decline, as happened in Japan, we’ll see more people move to large cities because that is where the amenities, hospitals, and restaurants will have workers. Real estate in Raleigh is probably a lot safer than in rural Oregon.

Listen, I’m a liberal academic humanities professor at heart. Please a) understand how we got here, and b) encourage your local pro-housing heroes to unite as one. But in the meantime, you should c) consider which side of the housing wealth equation you want to be on.

Most of my wealth is in real estate, and I’m totally happy to see it go down. Solving the housing crisis would add roughly a trillion dollars to GDP. I’d rather have a smaller slice of a much larger pie. Go Team Abundance! But if you don’t act on the world, you sit around hoping it will act on you. At which point…

Help us, Ezra Klein. You’re our only hope.

Buy the Book!

Order on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Books A Million

For a decade, I had a bee in my bonnet that no history of everyday Americans and their money existed. Did they get ahead (yes) and how (long story)?

But I was the ONLY person who thought this mattered. Naively, I approached 5 of the top literary agents in the country, assuming I would pick between them.

90 Nos later….

That’s my QueryTracker Dashboard, the system authors use to get an agent.

85 rejections/no-replies. Just 8 showed interest. Five then rejected the proposal itself. Another mostly sold soft-core cowboy erotica, but said he could try.

And then, an email came from a successful veteran agent who saw what I saw…

Here was a history that could help people, a story never told on a topic everyone cared about. He was ready to sign me that day. This was November, 2024….

This is today:

Publisher’s Weekly and USA Today National Bestseller Lists

I’ve had about 48 hours to absorb the news that How to Get Rich in American History hit two national bestseller lists, #17 on Publisher’s Weekly and #26 in USA Today.

Since I mostly write optimistic histories about everyday people getting ahead, I thought I should write an optimistic history of me getting ahead, and how other writers can, too.

Here, as best as I can tell, are my lessons learned.

1) Believe (in the project)

You must believe, to your core, that this needs to be said.

People say they “want to be a writer.” My question is, “about what?” You have to believe in the message more than the messenger.

Great writing is about readers and stories. Your job is to bring them together. Writing is matchmaking. You must believe these two just have to meet each other.

The logic said to give up at rejection number 9, 19, or thereafter.

I just… believed.

Also,

• market test. Don’t tell people your ideas. Tell them your stories. Do they laugh/cry/ask for more or do they change the subject? Books are read by everyday people, intermediated by agents-editors-publishers-show bookers-hosts. You’re going to have to get those intermediate people’s buy in, but in the end readers decide if the next page is worth the turn. You’ll see it in their eyes. Remember, the order goes hear about-buy-read, in that order.

• lean on the people who believe in you. It helps to have at least one.

2) “No” is a feedback mechanism. Respond to it.

“No” ≠ “never,” it means something isn’t working. The question is not, “should I quit?” but “should I change and how?”

Either:

1. Your title sucks: a great idea poorly packaged is the same as a bad idea. Apparently “Financial Advice in History” translates as “Delete.” Agents can sell a mediocre writer with a great title easier than a great writer with a bad one. Someone said “There is a reason it’s called the best-seller list, not best-written list.” You need a hook.

2. You have a great idea that doesn’t need to be a book. Books require the reader to spend 2 things: 1) money, and 2) time (8 hours on average). Your idea might be worth neither $32 nor a full work day. Some ideas need to be articles, essays, or posts. Frankly, your idea may go farther, faster on social media than waiting years for shelf space.

3. You don’t have a great (or new) idea, after all. Hard to swallow, sometimes true. When Morgan Housel published The Psychology of Money, I spent a very lonely night asking myself if I was done. Ultimately, I decided I had something different to say (conclusions, topics, and buying land on the moon). But it was a close call. Ask yourself, “is this a vanity exercise?” When in doubt, return to lesson #1.

4. You have a great idea, title, book… but no followers. This makes me mad. The new truth in publishing is you bring buyers with you. The first thing agents/editors do is look you up. They ask not “can you write?” but “can you sell?” I happily logged off years ago. So:

   1. fake it till you make it: I had the good sense after 20 or so “nos” to get myself a website, good photos, and visibility to my previous stuff. Highlight what they care about, not what you care about. My first academic book sold maybe 200 copies, but was reviewed as “often-witty.” I put that everywhere.

   2. good news: Influencers have a bad habit of caring mostly about being influencers, not selling out advances. Come up with a plan for how you will relentlessly sell this book to convince the press they can trust you on other people’s media. Put this in your proposal.

Also,

• your query letter quality matters. A good guide is here

• your book proposal matters even more. I went away to a mountain cabin for a week to write mine. A good guide is here

• there are no rewards for humility. Tell them how great you and your ideas are.

• take NONE of this personally. If you were an agent, you would say “No” a lot, too.

3) Your book is a business. Run it that way.

Writers feel icky about selling. But you are a small business now (Writer, Inc.) and your book is a product. Think entrepreneurially.

1. You will not DIY the bridge to the promised land unless you already have 1 million followers. You’ve read this far. You do not have 1 million followers.

   1. It is EASY to sell 10 books. You have friends.

   2. It is DOABLE to sell 100 books. Your network has dry tinder.

   3. It is EVEREST-like to sell 1,000 books. People are sick by your 3rd Facebook post. Welcome to “the market.”

   4. You need a small percentage of a huge number, not a large percentage of your friends

2. You need partners (carefully chosen).

   1. Agents can teach you how this market works. Listen. Learn.

   2. Editors know how books get read. Listen. Learn.

   3. PR people know how hard attention is to grab. Listen. Learn.

   4. Be a good partner. Ask everyone what they need from you, then do that! If they ask for you to write an op-ed, turn it around ASAP. If they get you on a tiny podcast with 4 subscribers, show up early & prepared.

   5. Remember, they have other clients and books. You can’t just sit passively waiting for them to bring success to you. Agents/editors/marketing/PR want authors willing to email every person they once met at a conference.

3. After every interview, large and small, follow up. Be grateful to every person who has you on their show.

4. Make new friends! You’ve been ushered into a party of some of the world’s most interesting people. I’ve started at least 3 new acquaintance-ships/friendships going through this process because these guys are just super cool/quick/funny/smart.

Also,

• people take money from anxious authors. I paid for ads generating no sales, got emails from “famous authors” (scams), and fielded dozens of “book clubs” that for a “small fee” will “feature” you. Scare quotes everywhere. Vet everyone.

• most writers don’t live off writing. You need a business plan to turn your ideas into income: speaking, subscriptions, a fortunate marriage. I had the great luck of getting rich from my research. Don’t plan on that.

• You have to spend money to make money. You do not have to set it on fire.

4) The death of the gatekeepers was greatly exaggerated

I will go anywhere to talk to anyone. That doesn’t move books. What does?

Traditional media.

This is not 2018 anymore. People have gotten numb to “my next guest has a fascinating new book.” Think about your own podcast feed. Do you buy books after every listen? Why should they?

Podcasts build brand awareness. It says, “this is what I’m about.” If they like you, they find and follow you.

A few weeks before launch, my book was going nowhere. All those interviews were for naught. Then, out of nowhere, I started zooming up Amazon charts for seemingly no reason. It started Friday. I checked obsessively like Notre Dame was playing football but I was out shopping with my wife. We scored again! The shoes look great.

By Sunday, I was #1 New Release in Personal Finance, #3 overall in Economic History, and #7 in Finance. I had no idea why.

It was Bloomberg. The press sent out copies of the book, and their Personal Finance section did a review:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-17/saving-for-retirement-lessons-from-300-years-of-financial-history

Short interviews on tv, radio, and newspapers spiked sales more than many podcasts combined. The legacy media is alive and well.

Also,

• Show bookers don’t care about your book. They care about the interview. You need to work at being a great guest. I carry 40 flashcards in my pocket like I am an undergrad prepping for an exam.

• It is okay to start small. The top media bookers cannot risk having you “ummm, like, uhhhh” on national TV. They could lose their job over you! Prove yourself. You are not too good for “Wake up with Wendy” at 5am in Tulsa.

5) Borrow Credibility

As soon as you sign the contract, you get to spend the publisher’s street cred. It’s not little-old-you emailing, its a Big Name Press author.

I call this success-stacking, and it is how I’ve gone from a tiny junior college in the South living in a rotted out trailer to whatever you call where I am now. Take one tiny win, make it sound as big as possible, and use it to grab another two. Now you have 3 wins. Make them sound as big as possible. Rinse-Repeat.

Borrow credibility. Stack success. Once you have your own, lend generously.

Also,

• on the “self-publish vs. traditional” debate: media bookers are drowning, DROWNING in book pitches. I have a friend with a decent sized podcast. He gets 10 pitches every … single … day! Traditional publishers are social proof. You need them.

• Seth Godin says there are “knock-knock” books. Once audiences hear the joke, why buy the book? Interviews are exercises in entertainment. Be fun. Leave them wanting more.

6) Soak it in.

This book was supposed to flop, and I knew it. We missed many media targets. The Bloomberg spike, plus the evangelical force of my mother and mother-in-law flooding the earth with the good news, meant by launch week we had sold out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-million, etc. I was going on tv to sell a book nobody could buy from an author no one ever heard of.

Then, my brother called.

My baby brother played college and pro baseball. He was good, but couldn’t stay healthy. Finally, with a heart to play forever, an arm that could still pitch, but a shoulder that wouldn’t quite put the ball where he wanted it to go, he retired to become a CPA.

I was about to fly to New York. He said roughly this:

“For the rest of your life, people will want to talk about how far you went.

But all you’ll think about is how close you got, but missed.

I was standing on a mound, in front of thousands of fans in Joliet, IL, where a million men wished they could be. One day you walk off the grass, untie the cleats for the last time, and it hits you … I should have soaked it in.

Don’t tell me you didn’t get on Rogan. You got to do something really, really cool…

you wrote a book!”

I hung up. I’m 48 years old. Cried like a child.

I hit New York like a tornado. This thing was going to flop, and I was going to love every minute of it. New York Stock Exchange-NASDAQ-podcasts-dinners-conversations…

“Hi. We haven’t met but, …”

I even staked out The New York Times lobby hoping to give Andrew Ross Sorkin a copy.

And, in the background, the team delivered. It is a business, remember?

The publisher pushed inventory fast, PR opened doors, and all the media training meant I nailed interviews. I nearly flubbed one, but an amazing publicist sat me down for an hour and helped me find the right words.

Also,

• not all sales count, which is weird. We sold over 1,000 copies to a library group that never registered for “bestseller” sales. You need to get educated on how that works so everything you do counts. Your publisher and agent can explain it better than I can.

• Many authors describe launch day as depressing/anticlimactic. Ask friends/family to host an event so you have something to do rather than sitting at home checking your feed.

“Gratitude turns what you have into enough.”

I think Simon Sinek said that, but I’m too tired to check.

Publishing isn’t fair. You will be shocked 😲, shocked I tell you, to discover that most bestselling books are written by journalists already at major newspapers. If a book debuts to acclaim and immediately becomes a movie, check to see if the author’s mom just so happened to be high up at a major media outlet. This is the norm.

Don’t focus on it.

You are smart, well educated, and live in a society abundant enough to afford time to write. You probably have an ancestor who was smarter, less educated, with no such time. You probably aren’t the best possible writer in your family tree, just the first with a chance.

Use every advantage you have. Don’t resent the ones you lack.

Resentment doesn’t sell books anyway. Action does.

You get to act on the world with words. How cool is that?

Postscript

Nobody predicted this, and by the end even I gave up. Because of the logistics, and despite hurling every spare penny I had into getting this thing off the ground, I went to bed the night before lists published telling myself it wasn’t going to work out. I would be at peace. Stoic even. Seneca with a book for sale.

I did not sleep at all—getting up every 45 minutes or so to pace and check my phone.

Sometime around 5am I passed out. At 7:05 my wife called in tears. “We did it!”

As Ted Lasso, the great philosopher of informed optimism once said,

“To believe in yourself. To believe in one another. That’s fundamental to being alive… can’t nobody rip that apart.”

Buy the Book!

Order on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Books A Million

Most people would NOT say this one. We’ve had a bad case of pandemic, a mild case of inflation, and two rather serious cases of elder abuse in the White House.

I’m guessing you didn’t say the 2010s, either, which started with Occupy Wall Street, turned left at #BlackLivesMatter, right at a presidential upset, then inward at Brexit. New England alone had a bombing and an elementary school shooting. We impeached the same guy twice then ended the decade arguing about who was in charge.

So, not the good old days.

I noticed several years ago that I could guess someone’s politics just by asking when they thought the best decade was. Conservatives usually say the 50s or the 80s. Liberals pine for the 60s and the 90s.

Here’s the History Channel’s Version:

I call this the Sam Hunt Problem. He “bet that breaking up was easy in the 90s.”
No, Sam, it sucked then, too. We were freaking out, Sam. We were scared. That great sucking sound was our parents’ jobs going to Mexico, so much so that 20% of them voted for Ross Perot, a man who looked and sounded like a ventriloquist’s dummy came to life. Japan had already won the race to the future. A single US company lost over $4 billion in a quarter, the same season Ace of Base released Cruel Summer. The top movie plots mostly tracked the real-time implosion of an economy that just so happened to house half of the nuclear weapons on the planet and a lot of suddenly unemployed bioweapons scientists. To quote Peter Thiel, “Whatever the cultural fascination with Nirvana, grunge, and heroin reflected, it wasn’t hope or confidence.”

Do I really have to do this for all the decades? If you think everyone was happy “Back Then” then you forgot what happened back then.

Okay, fine. We’ll do the 60s. Between 1967-1970, a majority of Americans disapproved of NASA going to the moon. Half the decade saw unemployment rates over 5%, a number we haven’t seen (other than the COVID) since 2016. In 1961, two (two!) nuclear bombs fell on North Carolina. One nearly went off. The other is still missing. They didn’t put kids under desks for better views.

When I tell people they live in the greatest moment in American history, my wife quickly makes up something to distract people from her husband’s early onset dementia.

Not to go all C.S. Lewis on you, but either I’m crazy or its true.

My grandfather proudly placed The Encyclopedia Britanica in the front room of a home he literally built himself on weekends with his brothers. (Fun fact: the bestselling book of 1950 was Your Dream Home: How to Build it for Less than $3,500. Spoiler alert, build it yourself and be wary when using dynamite. I own a copy).

Everything we could know was on that shelf, and if you had a question the first thing he would do was send you there to read an article about hornets or corn varietals. Of course, whatever edition they could afford was the edition you got, so if hornets or corn evolved, you’d have to learn that in college.

If you wanted to absorb any of the following skills, you could get a solid start right now on YouTube: statistics, Python, the essentials of buying fast food franchises, advanced excel tricks, reading income statements, API integration, sales funnels, web scraping, and how to calculate the time value of money.

You are living in the greatest decade for flourishing (and probably the nation where that flourishing is greatest) in the history of humankind. Ever. Like, it was never better at any point before.

PETA should get involved as often as I’ve beaten this horse. You live longer and soon will live even longer, still. Why? Waymo to the rescue!. While AI was coming for all our jobs, the employment rate went up, nearing all-time highs. Before AI can steal work, it must increase productivity, the very thing making society rich enough to work less. You can train for another job if you wish: 32 states have free community college. Whatever your views on gender, women’s professional status has never been higher, a net good for society. Boys spiraling on Reddit should know there are plenty of jobs for young men to be, well, men. In a world where 28-year-old electricians earn over $200k and employers can’t stop them being poached, the problem is not that work left the Rust Belt. It’s that the families didn’t leave, too. As I’ve written (and dozens of smarter people have proven) you earn more working less in an easier and less dangerous job than at any time in history.

Think of the sheer scale of food diversity. My other grandfather ordered his first pizza, which he mispronounced piss-a, when he was nearly 40. Today you can live in Huntsville, AL and eat Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Cuban, Jamaican, Italian, German, Greek, Cajun, and Dairy Queen. There are multiple options for each.

But we’re broke? No. Consumer balance sheets are now 10x liabilities, the highest ratio in history. Are the asset values inflated? Sure, but the point is that the debts didn’t inflate, too.

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Odd thought: you are the beneficiary of all the recessions that came before. Whatever you think of the FED as economic QB1, it’s gotten a lot better at not throwing dumb interceptions under pressure (1930, 1937, 1960s, 1970s, 2000s). There is institutional memory inside those suits, and they manage to keep the economy out of the ditch many more years than not.

Yes, a lot can go wrong: A nuke/pandemic/oil crisis/tech outage/ Men in Black being propaganda to acclimate us to aliens.

But a lot can go right, too. A lot is going right, right now.

The 90s weren’t that great. It was the tail end of an older world. Many of my classmates still went into the few factories and mills that survived NAFTA. A girl I regularly flirted with married someone else, took one of those jobs, and lost her left arm in the machinery.

The only way you’ll see the good ahead is to stop looking over the cultural shoulder with such fondness. No, it wasn’t better back then. Every reason you give that “nobody can get ahead” people were saying in your preferred decade. Except they were (maybe) right, and you’re not.

Okay, Doomer.

Buy the Book!

Order on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Books A Million

Order on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Books A Million

—

“Eye opening, deeply researched, and snort-out-your-nose funny. I dare you to put it down.” —William Bernstein, author of The Four Pillars of Investing

“Refreshingly unequivocal advice.” —Publishers Weekly

In richly told stories and wild self-experiments, historian Joseph Moore tests history’s best and worst financial advice to find what worked, what didn’t, and why everyday people can still get ahead—including you.

What if so-called timeless beliefs about money like “invest for the long run,” “compound interest builds wealth,” and “real estate always goes up” were shockingly new . . . and rarely true.

From Benjamin Franklin to TikTok gurus, what “everyone knows” about personal finance has rarely stayed the same. Parents once taught children not to save and that stocks were only for suckers. Meanwhile, supposedly new phenomenon like Airbnb, crypto, skipping lattes, and complaints that nobody can get ahead are far older than we think.

In How to Get Rich in American History, Joseph Moore shares the unexpected and counterintuitive lessons of the past—from the scams we keep falling for to the long allure of creating generational wealth—so we can avoid the same mistakes and make the most of our own finances today.

Along the way, Moore tries these old ideas on himself, with hair-raising and hilarious results. His personal journey includes wild investments, get-rich-quick schemes, founding a cryptocurrency, and how he went from his working-class roots and facing financial ruin to retiring in his forties. Ultimately, Moore finds that despite today’s loud pessimists, success has never been easier to achieve in American history than it is right now.

Fun, accessible, and filled with eye-opening insights you can apply for yourself alongside laugh-out-loud stories you never learned in school, How to Get Rich in American History pushes back against skeptics who claim the American dream is out of reach. It is a thoughtful, practical, and surprisingly hopeful read that sheds new light on the prospects of getting by and getting ahead then . . . and now.

Order on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Books A Million

Buy the Book Now

Yet almost every single statistic begs to differ.

Lifespan: longest ever. Education levels: higher. Wages: up. Divorce rate: down. Hours worked: less. Gender wage gap: narrowing. Cars: safer. Health insurance: 92%. Kids with health insurance: 94%. Leisure Time: more. Music variety: Spotify. Girls in sports: logo 3.

Even the stats about bad things show they are good. A non-profit reported that 14% of American kids live in “crowded housing.” The definition was “households that have more than 1 person per room.” When did “One person, one bedroom” get promoted to a human right? My mother was raised in a farmhouse proudly featuring a “boys room” and a “girls room” dividing seven children. Before open concept was cool, colonial New Englander Beatrice Plummer1 slept with her husband in their parlor, but were considered wealthy because they owned a second bed for (all) the children. That second bed stayed in the kitchen, so the Plummer’s made all future children very quietly.

It is well known that rich white men telling everyone else how good things are is a great way to win hearts and minds. So, I’m here to tell you…

I’m so confused.

On the one hand, we’re crying poverty while brushing our hypoallergenic dogs. On the other hand, all this anger didn’t invent itself.

We are in a war of the worldviews. One determined to be discontent no matter what. The other can’t read the room. “Excuse me, Professor. The angry mob outside seems unappeased by your assurances that life is just fine.”

Can anyone explain why the wealthiest large nation in the history of the world feels broke?

There are several ideas:

1) “The Marie Antoinette theory”: Most people tell surveys that they are doing great, but their neighbors’ lives suck. Besides, you can’t make the whole crowd happy. The Economist reasons: “voters want contradictory things: low prices when they shop, high wages for themselves; not many immigrants but lots of cheap labour; rising house prices when they own and lower ones when their children want to buy.” True, but only useful if inflation’s “basket of goods” might include your severed head. The closer you are to an academic job, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

2) The “I thought there’d be servants” theory: The problem is we’re all getting richer, and the richer we get the less rich things we can have. When we celebrated with steak and wine becoming official millionaires, after a long pause my wife said, “I thought there’d be servants.” Welcome to a very not-exclusive club. There are 24 million millionaires in America today, 1 in 5 families. But the number of millionaire-y things didn’t grow. Nick Maggiulli calls it the “Death of the Amex Lounge.” If you’ve ever seen women rush to save an open seat by throwing their Neverfull onto it, trust me, you’re better off at the airport bar. David French reckons this is the youth-travel-sportification of American life: what once was near free (a field, a glove, a ball) is now a fiercely competitive marketplace against other almost-affluent people trying to get the last spot on the softball team/Disney Lighting Lane/Boarding Group 1/insert Your Favorite Baumol’s Cost Disease Illustration Here. The closer you are to Manhattan, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

3) The billionaires took our lunch money theory: This theory comes in several varieties. The starter kit offers Bernie Sanders yelling that the really rich stole from the really poor, the nearly poor, the might-be poor, or the poor adjacent. Then there is the Ro Khanna expansion pack, which comes with a tie, Yale Law degree, and a scratch off sticker to see if you get part of Jeff Bezos’s wealth tax. There is a fixed pie. Someone took more than their fair share. The closer you are to the Pacific Ocean, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

4) The Globalization Theory: all the good jobs went to all the bad places, then all the people from the bad places came to the good place and ruined it. That, as best I can tell, is how people tried to explain Populism 2016. The closer you are to a Dollar General, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

5) The “Wow! Poverty sure is expensive these days!” theory: less known but deserves more attention. It gained traction when Michael Green’s estimated $100,000/year was the new poverty line. Green got the math wrong and the vibes right. The best expositor of this is Kevin Erdmann, who proved that housing inflation ate all the working-class wage growth. Inflation among the travel sports crowd was 2%/year, but for the paid-per-hour people it was 4%. Why? Usually, homes filter down: Professionals’ neighborhoods of 1960 become middle class by 1990, then working class. The housing shortage put the engine in reverse: now houses filter up, so that people who bought pre-2016 could never afford their homes today, and those making under $50k have nothing to trade down to. Half of home value increases was the price of land (since nobody builds anymore). Erdmann calls it the “troll under the bridge,” (homeowners) who demand extra payment to cross into house-land. We’re counting the value of the homes and the income of the troll as wealth, but one of them is taking wealth away. The closer you are to the real estate industry, the more likely you are to believe this theory.

The first theory fiddles while Rome recounts its ballots. The second makes sense to me, but not to the 80% who walk so they don’t pay for parking. The third gets votes, but assumes if one person gets poorer another gets richer (not true). The fourth forgets that China didn’t restrict building permits, nor did Mexico offer you student debt to pay for the 18 Associate Deans in the School of Arts. The fifth is probably most accurate, but doesn’t explain why the moment the White House switches parties, Democrats and Republicans statistically invert, nearly to the exact percentage, from saying the economy is great/sucks to sucks/great.

If you’ve read this far, you probably a) believe things are better than everyone says but don’t want to sound insensitive, or b) are my wife. Hey, Honey!

Maybe we can’t explain all the angst, but we can at least explain what to do with it. History offers lessons about life, just rarely the lessons we think. Here is ours:

There was always something wrong. In every era, something sucked. For them it was debtors’ prison (wife and kids stay free!), slavery, Civil War, grasshoppers in the Dust Bowl, 25% unemployment, Pearl Harbor, nukes in Cuba, double digit inflation, Y2K, or the writers’ strike that ruined “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World.”

For you it is healthcare, housing costs, and everyone’s political opinion being shared in real time.

But this truth confronted every person who wondered if the good times were over in 1820, 1920, and 2020 … I have to try to get ahead, anyway.

The question is not what type of economy you would build, but what you will build in this economy.

I’ll confess to being in awe of modern America. My grandfather, a farmer, possessed a nearly childlike glee showing you any technology, whether on a tractor or a television, because he remembered a world without either. In the past 100-ish years, the typical American went from never dreaming to easily having: indoor plumbing, hot water, electrical lights, refrigerators, freezers, cars, fresh fruit in winter, radios, personal cameras, washing machines, vacuums, dishwashers, ice makers, daily showers, antibiotics, microwaves, televisions of all sizes, computers, internet, GPS, 911 operators, riding lawnmowers, Starbucks, Pell Grants, all recorded music available instantly, video calls with Grandma, overnight delivery, Amazon, Keurig instant coffee, Bluetooth, and remote work. Oh, and apparently one bedroom per kid.

History seems like a lame lion to bring into contemporary woe-is-us debates, but I beg you to take a moment and realize one historical truth: it was never easy, but it has gotten a lot easier.

Sure, the fact that you have air conditioning doesn’t make it less expensive to use. But dear Lord, listen to yourself… and to everyone else bemoaning “late stage capitalism” for a minute.

Whatever your income. Whatever your race. Whatever your starting point. Whatever your politics. Your life is better than the ones that came before, and if you asked your ancestors what was wrong with your world they would slap you all the way from theirs.

You know this, but no one will tell you this. Big Woe, the Despair Industrial Complex, do not want you to think about it too long. There are no clicks for journalists, no votes for politicians, and no tenure for academics telling you the world is getting better. But they can get all those things telling you a) its bad, b) who broke it, and c) their plan to fix it. They are rewarded for telling. You are penalized for listening.

You live in the most amazing time to be alive. Turn off the people telling you that you have so little. Look back. Wonder at everyone who helped get you where you are.

The lesson I take away from the past is how foolish I would have to be to look back at the world before, around the world today, and somehow conclude this moment is anything other than amazing. I refuse to succumb to Big Woe. Optimism, realistic but relentless optimism, is the actual lesson of American history.

Ponder that.

Buy the Book!

Order on: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Books A Million