The TikTok handle @ourvillageslifestyle provides occasionally viral videos of septuagenarians getting freaky on the dance floors of Florida. They dance like no one is watching their lusty retirements. That’s in part because America has quietly run one of the largest financial experiments in world history to test a simple thesis: can the stock market bear the weight of funding old age for the masses?

So far, so good. Typical retirees today are worth over $400,000, four times those of the 1980s even adjusting for inflation.2 That money is funding the sultry seaside parties where grandma reminds everyone that she’s still got it.

If we stopped time right now, President George W. Bush’s thwarted effort to privatize Social Security in 2005, mocked as moronic after the Great Financial Crisis, appears in hindsight borderline brilliant. After the idea died in Congress, the stock market beat inflation by over 7%. Meanwhile, Social Security for median earners has a real internal rate of return of barely 3%.3 Our nation of amateur portfolio managers have good reason to “feel the rhythm of the music get-ting-stron-ger.”

But what happens if the music stops?

The Forever Paycheck

A growing fear among Baby Boomers and the Generations who hate them is that this conga line might not go forever. We’re rich, but anxious. Pensions gone. Social Security broke. Generations sandwiched. It feels like we need a hero to come out of retirement, squeeze into that super-suit, and save our retirement future.

That hero has a name: Annuities.

Like Pops partying on the dance floor, this seemingly boring insurance product, which transfers savings into a lifelong paycheck, is overdue for a comeback.

Or, perhaps, it is more a coming out of the closet. It may be lost on Gen Z, but saying nice things about annuities is every bit as controversial in finance as a same-sex kiss was 30 years ago when Ellen did it. It is, in the words of a new book, verboten.

Enter that book, Jean Chatzky’s The Forever Paycheck. Chatzky’s resume in financial journalism is long: financial editor for the Today Show, editor at Money, writer at Forbes; she is a veritable institution to herself. HerMoney, which she founded in 2018, is among the largest female-focused financial media brands in the world. She’s been on, well, just name a big show, she’s appeared on all of them.

Few will notice why the book is so controversial. The thesis is simple. The details, which she goes to great lengths to make relatable, are still about insurance and thus, well, very much like talking about insurance.

But as Chatzky explains, coming out of the closet for annuities is surprising even to her. When a financial advisor suggested annuities for her aging mother, she curtly informed him they would do no such thing. EVERYONE in personal finance by the late 1990s knew why.

Annuities were not heroes, but villains. They stole from the naive and gave to the savvy, a reverse Robinhood product.

Do you know how hard it is to get Dave Ramsey, who has no debt, and Robert Kiyosaki, who is over $1 billion in debt, to agree?

But they both hate annuities.

So why did Chatzky change her mind?

And is she changing mine?

A Risqué History of Insurance

Though forms existed back to Hammurabi’s Babylon, insurance as we know it today started out as an Italian joke, taking bets on which ships at sea wouldn’t make it back to Venice. Coffee shops in London eventually kept tallies of wagers on a board, a 17^th century dead pool. You could bet on celebrity lifespans, the first name of Louis XV’s next mistress, or the true gender of the androgynous French diplomat Charles de Beaumont. Insurance used to be fun.

It was also very useful. By placing a bet against yourself (my ship will sink), you sold your risk to the other bettor. If things went wrong (it sank), the losing bet paid you, offsetting your losses (You sunk my Battleship! Oh, look, money!!!). Survive, and you’d lost the bet but won the game. An industry born betting on bad luck and bawdy jokes became a way to handle risky behavior.

Insurance was red hot in the nineteenth century. First fire, then disability, death (ironically called life), even losing your job became something you could insure against. There was insurance for horses, plate glass windows, and oil lamps. You could insure against getting married, where bachelors spent $8 a year ($265 today) against the risk of falling in love and needing starter funds for wedded life. Throughout the late nineteenth century, Americans were crazy for insurance.

And then there was retirement. Today, retirement savings and wealth building are treated like two halves of a whole. That is entirely new.

In the past, saving for retirement was a version of an emergency fund: “Oh, crap, I didn’t die. Now what?”

Enter tontines, essentially death pools, but where people risked together. Everyone pays in, and the longer you live the more you get. Losers don’t care about losses (they’re dead) and the elderly get cared for. By the turn of the twentieth century, 2/3 of American life insurance policies worked this way. They were, in essence, an emergency fund for the very real crisis of living too long.

Insurance became Americans favorite way to save and invest before the Great Depression. The industry’s most popular product, cash-value plans, were originally a brilliant innovation born of fierce competition. In a world where savings was easily lost to financial panics and workplace death occurred a whopping 50x more than today, combining insurance with cash savings solved two problems at once. Insurers stored up portions of premiums as savings plans. When plans expired, if you had not died, you could get a portion (and eventually all) of your money back. It was like the prize at the bottom of the life insurance box. Congrats on not dying! Here’s cash.

In the meantime, many families borrowed against that cash to buy homes, fund weddings, and live life. Cash value plans and annuities dominated families’ financial strategies, second only to real estate, for most of American history. Americans would literally skip meals to avoid forfeiting their insurance policies.

As late as 1952, when the Today Show, MAD Magazine, and CheezWhiz all debuted, just 6.5 million US citizens owned stocks. Another 53 million had savings accounts. But there were 104 million insurance policies, enough for every adult in the nation.4

All those premium payments had to go somewhere. At their peak, insurance companies held. . .

(and you really should take a breath before you read this next part)

. . . assets valued at 37% of Gross Domestic Product.

One third of the American economy was owned by insurance companies: farms, mortgages on those farms, stocks, bonds, skyscrapers. If it reliably made money, an insurance company probably held the title.

That is why there are no Christmas movies about crowds running to get their money out of life insurance companies on their way to the old Building and Loan. In the early 1930s, 40% of all banks failed (over 10,000). In that same Depression, just 19 insurers went under with losses of barely $1 million: 0.0007% of total industry assets.

Nothing super safe stays sexy for long: it loses appeal. One hundred years ago people spoke openly to family and friends about “the duty to insure.” No longer. The once ubiquitous insurance agents that blanked the nation were replaced with ads begging us to get protected from mayhem or trust a good neighbor. We must be entertained, or terrified, to even ponder insurance these days. As an asset class, household balance sheets make insurance an afterthought. American families today hold more money in savings accounts than the value of their insurance policies. That stat would have been unthinkable a century ago.

What happened?

The tide turned in the 1960s-70s. As inflation surged, insurance didn’t keep up. Suddenly, the policy’s cash “value” was denominated in dollars from twenty years ago. The value of old annuities in many cases became barely 75% of their old purchasing power, and sometimes less.

Nearly every popular financial guru in America turned against insurance in favor of stocks, bonds, or real estate: Sylvia Porter (1960s), Venita Van Caspel (1970s), Charles Givens (1980s), Suze Orman (1990s), and Dave Ramsey (2000s) agreed on very little about personal finance except the foolishness of cash value policies and annuities. In a world where the average person could buy into a stock market that went up and up, one best-selling finance book explained in 1980, “Insurance is for dying. Investments are for living.”

Retirement saving was no longer an emergency plan. It was a path to prosperity. Insurance was no longer fit to purpose.

Greed hurt too. Insurers faltered in part because they lost the hard-won reverence of families for solving their needs. No one doubted companies made profit, but families increasingly found that salesmen “recoiled in horror” as one Reagan era housewife recalled, when they suggested buying a simpler, less profitable plan. He was selling, she realized, the best policy for his wife and children. Everyone in finance had a story (many still do) of a foolish family member sinking their entire savings into a grotesquely high fee, penalty-if-you-pull-out, variable annuity that underperformed a savings account. Things got so bad, and the industry so slimy, that even insurance salesman wanted to escape the stink. They banded together in 1969 to become “Financial Planners.”

Frankly, Monsieur Insurance Company, we don’t trust you anymore. You stopped paying attention to OUR needs! So, we started getting frisky with someone else, Mr. Market. He may be volatile, but we always know where we stand.

And, OMG!, AMAZING in the spreadsheets.

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Getting Back With Your (Financial) Ex

That may be about to change. Boring is bad. Boring and sleazy is worse. The insurance industry, slowly, took notice. In 2018, the nation’s largest insurers began a non-profit marketing push, “The Alliance for Lifetime Income,” to fix their image. It was mostly a PR gig. But it also involved simplifying offerings and becoming (somewhat) more transparent about fees. The NAIC, a coalition of government regulators, pushed through a “best interest” of the customer standard for insurance sales that took effect in 2020. And, crucially, it is now possible to get low-fee annuities. Just as they did for stocks, Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab entered with dramatically lower fees than traditional players. They now offer annuities with fees lower than most mutual funds.5 Insurance may not have gotten its act together completely, but it is making the effort. And, as exciting as Mr. Market is, he is manic. There is something alluring in stability.

This is a moment for the insurance industry to rekindle that old appeal if it can do what it once did and solve a real problem for American families: secure our yet untested DIY retirement system.

Remember how we got here. Insurance isn’t really something you buy. Like the name of the monarch’s future side-chick, it is a bet you make. You are taking the risks of life—whether forgetting to turn off the curling iron or running out of time to show off that new hip—and auctioning it to Allstate. You don’t buy insurance. You sell risk.

And risk is in the air right now. Society turned the stock market into a retirement vehicle for the masses but never stopped to notice an important detail: that is not what the market was originally built to do.

Wall Street was designed to allocate capital. The promised abundance of a rising market lifting all retirement boats is increasingly dependent on the rising part. When water stops flooding in, then what?

Insurance companies can buy Americans’ retirement risks, and at our societal age that is an increasingly appealing trait in a (legal) person.

(who doesn’t love a good Citizens United joke?)

Annuities are functionally self-purchased pensions. They lock in a modest retirement that won’t depend on the market’s meteoric rise to the moon. How? Insurance companies own a vast array of assets beyond stocks: mortgages, timber, farm land, private firms, loans and, crucially, hedges against market declines. Big, diversified, old money wealth has a certain appeal that average Joe stock-trader can’t compete with.

Plus, the average Jane … and apparently Jean … are changing. As Americans have ever fewer children to leave inheritance to, and as the cost of elder care increasingly falls on the few we have, we’re putting more and more of our eggs into the passive index fund nest. That’s risky, or as they said in early eras, risqué. Risqué is exactly how insurance companies can catch Americans’ eye again, by offering to buy our risk and offer more stable futures.

One of the lessons of history is that what “always worked” kept changing.

And that is why Chatzky’s take is that rare thing in finance literature: an important book saying something truly new . . . precisely because it understands the past. The Forever Paycheck doesn’t prescribe throwing your entire nest egg into annuities. You should not do that, and she says as much. Her recipe calls for adding just enough annuity cream (around 1/3 of your nest egg) to make up the difference between the thin sauce of Social Security and your retirement appetite. Keep the rest in a stock/bond portfolio to grow your principal and, as she rightly points out, you can then take bigger risks with the remaining principal since you’ve secured your base. Blind trust is for youthful romance. Mature thinkers never put all faith (or funds) in either Wall Street or Connecticut (fun fact: the state with the highest concentration of insurance companies in the Union).

This is a truly useful book, and if you’re trying to square the retirement circle, it provides a step-by-step guide worthy of your time that offers a clear action plan to make simple sense of a complex topic. She breaks down the wild array of product names and meanings clearly. The book is also very sharp on marital finances in the golden years.

My critiques are few. She walks right up to the line, but doesn’t quite bark out the play, to avoid variable annuities. I suspect this is an Ivy League educated journalist being measured. As a rural southerner raised with phrases like “well butter my butt and call me a biscuit,” I get to be less subtle. So, …

NEVER BUY A VARIABLE ANNUITY!!! Variable annuities are what would happen if a 401(k) ran off with a traveling salesman, had a baby, gave the baby up for adoption, and then made you pay the child support. The upside is theirs. The downside is yours. These only makes sense if you are already rich, and if you are already rich you need neither a forever paycheck nor my strongly worded opinions.

So, as I was saying, good book.

Chatzky calls on consumers to reconsider an old flame, because she realizes times changed.

Now it is time for insurance companies to show they’ve changed, too. Return to what made people love you in the past. Buy our risqué. Satisfy an urge Americans are just beginning to realize we have—breaking free of the barely tested DIY retirement system. Stocks were fun, but we’d like to settle down now.

Meet our needs, and we’ll swipe right. Treat Americans not as a high-fee, one-night stand but like a safe, reliable partner.

If they do, it might make insurance sexy again.

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A phrase that has never been uttered seriously.

But there are some helpful history lessons in the theory of Fast and Slow Time, if you know where to look. Here are a few of those lessons.

For reference, see Parts 1 (the theory) and 2 (the equation)

Slow Time is Loud

Slow Time is rarely boring. It is full of people shouting from the rooftops that you just missed your chance at millions, or all the money you have is about to disappear.

Here are two headlines, less than 3 months apart, from The New York Times.

No Sign of Depression Here Soon1

BUSINESS WARNED OF DEPRESSION2

The year?

1948.

Can you tell me anything, anything of historical significance that happened in 1948 without using ChatGPT?

How did it turn out? The stock market ticked up 5%, real estate was up 2%, and inflation 1%. 1948 was one of the most boring years in American history (except for that “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline).

Loud ≠ Fast.

When Fast Time comes, there is no mistaking it. But most of Slow Time is filled with people very, very sure they know what is about to happen who have no clue what is actually about to happen. Many of those people work in media.

Again, Slow Time is loud.

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How to Use Fast Time/Slow Time

If this theory holds, how would you use it?

“The future is unknowable” is both true and useless. You can’t point to a retirement timeline like it’s a map of the New World circa 1492 and write “Here Be Dragons!” (actually, you could and it would be the most amazing client pitch ever). So, here are a few more practical implications of Fast Time/Slow Time.

1) Slow Time is Loud! Do not confuse noise with needing to act: Show clients (or yourself) the contradictory headlines (below). If you want to make your own, simply follow any two active X handles where one is a middle-aged doom poster and the other’s motto is “To the Moon!” There will always be plenty of both. Predicting the future is overrated. Never forget: Slow Time is loud!

2) All Popular Histories Are About Fast Time (that is why they are popular!): Try getting a book deal on the story of stocks between 1973-82. $10,000, reinvesting all dividends, had an inflation adjusted loss of nearly $2,000. “They lost money slowly” isn’t a plot line. I got rejected by 90 agents trying to sell a true history of Americans and their money. 1929, Margin Call, heck even The Wolf of Wall Street are histories of everything going crazy. The point of these stories is not to short the housing market or sell penny stocks. It is to move books and tickets. Let clients know that the book/movie everyone is talking about is life at 4x speed.

3) How to Slow Down Time (or Speed it Up): Liquidity, Debt Deadlines, and Concentration slow time down (or speed it up). Those are the only things in your (or your clients’) control. Back to that HR exec in a crisis from Part 2: if she had built more liquidity (say a larger emergency fund than the “3 months” she was told about), opted for a 30 year mortgage instead of a 15 (spreading out her debt deadlines), or if she had been socking away money into investments and that Etsy business her friends rave about (not concentrating her income streams) she could shelter in place instead of fire selling the house. She could have slowed time down, but once it sped up, time was out of her hands.

You (or your clients) can’t control Volatility or its exponent. All we can do is decide how fragile we are willing to be when it comes. This is true in both directions, of course. Too little exposure and too much liquidity can keep time slow when everyone else is riding the boom. Helping clients see that they are probably living through Slow Time, and the decisions they make now will get stress tested in Fast Time, can help them have (or let them borrow your) historical sensibility. In the equation, ask how an exponential move up or down would impact Concentration or change Debt Deadlines/Liquidity.

This a working theory, both because I’m still working on it and because I’ve spent the last 10 years working with it.

I’ll value your feedback on how to perfect it.

There is a perfectly valid criticism of social scientists that they use equations to pretend to be real scientists. The closer you are to the Sociology Department, the truer this is.

But such equations aren’t really an attempt to “prove” an irrefutable fact, so much as to reduce complexity down to something you can carefully follow. Just as prayer allows tiny humans to offer simplified thoughts up to an unfathomably complex God, so equations help us track the most important of a trillion variables all moving at the same time, most of which we can barely see, much less measure.

Equations are not “proofs” in the way a physicist would use them. They are more like intellectual stick-figure drawings. Is this the whole truth? No, but that is definitely the family dog beside Mommy and Daddy under a big yellow sun. Simple, but no confusion.

So with that, I present my stick figure equation of Fast and Slow Time.

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The Equation

The factors that go into Fast Time and Slow Time roughly boil down to:

V= Volatility (the magnitude of price variance)

λ = how non-linear change is, or the “Wildness” of the randomness. We’ll call this the “Lambda Effect” (with apologies to physicists, who already use that term for solar turbulence)

C = Concentration, or if you prefer, Exposure. How exposed or concentrated is your financial life? Are you “all in” on one asset class or income stream?

DD = Debt Deadlines. It matters less how much debt you have, and much more when and how the debt is due. This includes payment schedules, but also how “callable” your loans are in a crisis. FYI, most HELOC loans are due when the bank says they are, and they are most likely to say “now” if you are in trouble.

L = Liquidity.

and, finally ….

ᵥ = applied volatility, or under the condition of volatility.

I am not aiming to provide a predictive equation because I can’t. But as a conceptual map, I think it helps in a stick-figure kind of way.

The factors work together something like:

The speed of financial time = V^λ x C x (DD/ Lᵥ)

The speed of financial time equals Volatility (and how wild it is) times your Concentration (how exposed you are on the volatility) times the relationship between your Debt Deadlines and your Liquidity when the volatility strikes. Notice a few key things:

1) V^λ means volatility amplified. Normal volatility stays linear: 1, 2, 3, 4. But when volatility explodes, the effects are exponential: 2, 4, 8, 16. In normal times, a change in one variable makes a small change in another. A 2% draw down in the market or a 5% raise matters, kind of. But in wild randomness, one change changes everything. The market goes up 30% and you’re rich! Or, instead of that raise, you get laid off and income goes from high to $0. Now all the ratios look different.

2) C is for concentration, or exposure. If you work on Wall Street, put all your money in index funds, and marry a stay-at-home spouse with a picket fence in Connecticut, you are highly concentrated in stock-world. You’re probably feeling as good today as your counterpart felt sick to their stomach in 2002. This describes me, btw (not the stay-at-home spouse part). 70% of my net worth is in real estate. If it goes up (as it has) I look great, and when it tightens (as recently) I can lose a year’s worth of salary in a month (a few percentage points on millions of dollars adds up). I’m highly concentrated. On the flip side, someone who has a job in tech, saves stocks and bonds, buys an annuity, is halfway through a 15-year mortgage, and dabbles in crypto is very much NOT concentrated. Volatility would have to be massive to wipe them out. When volatility catapults upward, though, their time is slower in that direction.

3) Notice what is NOT in this equation: “Equity.” Time doesn’t give a tinker’s dam about your net worth. My strong opinion on the meaninglessness of “Net Worth” is available on Amazon. In Fast Time, you’ll likely see your equity skyrocket or plummet before it can do you a lick of good. Historically, many people found out the hard way that their investments were most likely to crash at the very moments they needed them not to. When you must sell your house to get the money out, Zillow has no liability for changing the “Zestimate.” Speaking of which…

4) D (Debt) isn’t always dumb, but you can make it dumber with the other D (Deadlines). Historically, how much debt you had was less important than how the payments were structured. When (and how) is it due? If you have a 30-year 3.5% mortgage the size of that mortgage matters less than the payments. If you have a small business loan that fully matures in 6 months, time speeds up quickly. This is basically the entire history of Dakota farmers.

5) Lᵥ is liquidity when volatility hits, which is different than plain ole’ liquidity. Your HELOC, margin account, or credit card is liquidity, but under volatility it becomes less so. When loans get called, they shift from being L to being DD, and the equation goes with it. What you call liquidity very often dries up when you most need it. So be honest with yourself (and clients) about what counts, when.

To repeat:

FT/ST = V^λ x C x (DD/ Lᵥ)

I could do a whole thing where I assign a p-value and measure the exponent, but you’re already wondering if you should stop and so am I.

The point here is that you, your clients, and I live in financial time that speeds up and slows down as volatility (V^λ) hits our exposure (C, Concentration), and our exposure tests how capable we are to handle our debt deadlines (DD) with our suddenly very stress-tested liquidity (Lᵥ).

When Time speeds up, it can go well or poorly based on how you’ve aligned your ratios. Lots of Liquidity (i.e. a stable job) means you could take on loads of Debt Deadlines to overexpose yourself to one Concentration. That is exactly how I got rich… leveraging my job to take on debt to buy houses right as the shortage of them made their prices volatile (and exponential) to the upside. When V^λ struck, my C was high, because I’d increased my DD by lowering my Lᵥ.

Most people shouldn’t do that, and don’t want to. They want safety when V^λ hits, so they will want low C and a low DD over a high L. That’s what my grandfather did.

Of course, some people want one equation but are married to someone who wants the other, and that’s when you should call people who are experts in marital finance so another Big-D isn’t inserted into the equation.

Two Final Thoughts

1. I would value your feedback on this, since I think many people smarter than me will have their own insights, thoughts, feelings, or stones to throw. Hurl away.

2. I promise never to write like this again. What is the word? Obtuse? Stodgy? Turgid. No… I’ve got it… BORING! That’s it! In Part 3, we’ll talk about how to speed up or slow down time for yourself, which is kind of super-hero adjacent.

They’ve responded eagerly to the distinction between Fast Time & Slow Time in my book, because it can help clients who just rewatched The Big Short stop panicking.

They’ve also asked some good questions about the concept. How does it work? What are the signs? Are we in Fast Time now? Is Slow Time boring?

This is my attempt to present the theory in its fullest form.

Though there were precedents, it took Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler to fully theorize academic Psychology’s insights for economics. Then, great writers like Morgan Housel and Daniel Crosby translated those theories into workable actions.

To date, no one has done this for Historiography (academic theories of history). The most common use of the past in the real world is “law office history,” a repository of stories to make a case. The most common audience of academic historians is other historians. But history is, at its core, a discipline about humans and time.

So is finance.

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Time Change

Time is relative.

We know this because in 8^th grade Mrs. McGrath said so… because the textbook said so… because Einstein said so. She then turned on an animated PBS video to explain it because, more than likely, Mrs. McGrath didn’t really get it, either.

We know it’s true. It still doesn’t make sense.

Mrs. McGrath’s video explained that two clocks in two places showed different times because of gravity. In 1971, someone put a clock on an airplane to prove it. In 2014, Paramount put a Matthew McConaughey into space to prove it more.1

Time is “the dimension where change unfolds,” and that change is more (or less) rapid in different space under different forces.2 Enter mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, who suggested that markets had “trading time,” which speed up or slow down under volatility.3

Imagine I put a clock on a phone and that phone on your wrist. I know, this is Dick Tracy level tech, but let us dream together.

Now, I put another clock on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange

Your futuristic spy clock-phone-watch is going to follow normal time.

But the clock on the stock exchange ticks only when the S&P 500 has a normal minute of historical returns. A unit of time = a unit of average market activity. On most days, your watch-clock and this market-clock tell roughly the same time. They may stay synced for months.

But other days, the clock on the stock exchange is going to go nuts, leaping forward (or backward) an entire year. Your watch say it’s Friday at 5, but the market says it is next year (or, worse, last year). Welcome to Fast Time.4

Mastering the Art of Fast Time

Mandelbrot said that trading time is not smooth, but rough. A multi-decade market chart shows long waves. But double click and you’ll see jagged edges cutting into the waves. This roughness repeats when you magnify again. The jaggedness is multi-fractal: not the same pattern over and over, but a pattern of patterns. Those patterns contain clusters within clusters, crashes within crashes, booms within booms.5

The long, smooth chart of decades … the one financial advisors show clients … looks like Julia Child sprinkled powdered sugar across a tray of beignets. Perfection! Just look at the 7% annualized returns! Delicious!

Zoom in, and the fractal chart looks like my 6-year-old walked in without warning and dumped the sugar bag on the baking sheet, heaping mounds of sugar on some while others were barely touched. My daughter’s middle name is Volatility.6

The real returns (and losses) arrive when she does, as she dumps years’ worth of rewards or pain without asking permission, and then, driven by a logic entirely her own, runs off to play somewhere else.

Market prices don’t really have “annualized returns” except in our imagination. Real change clusters in the cascades. Time measures the change, and time sped up.

There is one last layer to this. Once my daughter Volatility comes in the kitchen, she is more likely to come back. Entering once made her think “baking is fun!” and she tries again. Volatility follows volatility (and smoothness follows smoothness) because prices have a memory of their recent behaviors, contrary to standard Efficient Market theory. She gets in moods, my daughter, and she arrives with various levels of frequency: mild random (heads/tails coin flips that only exist in labs or casinos), slow random (she arrives as normally, so we can plan for her arrival), and wild random (we’re still cleaning up the mess but she’s back with new bags of sugar).7

(One side note about all this: the 2nd clock doesn’t have to be on the stock exchange. It can be anywhere there is financial life: your career, real estate, the family business. And my daughter can enter into all of those places, too. She’s sneaky like that.)

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Fast Time/Slow Time

Fast Time/Slow Time measures the distance between financial actions and outcomes. If Mandelbrot detailed the uneven tempo of markets, Fast Time/Slow Time describes the human experience of that tempo.

When volatility clusters around interconnected factors (Volatility enters the kitchen), time speeds up. The distance between actions and their consequences shrinks. The “normal” expected lag disappears.

In the volatility of Fast Time, consequences arrive faster than liquidity can absorb them, clustered together. A supply chain disruption here, a margin call there, and you missed payroll. Conversely, volatility can outrun your obligations to the upside. You were overexposed to one factor, perhaps a long position that meets its fate in months rather than years, and suddenly “Number Go Up” saved you from looming payments or cash crunches.

Slow Time comes when volatility stays modest and allows you to meet obligations on schedule. The distance between your financial actions and their outcomes stays far apart. Or, conversely, things go so slow that time doesn’t bail you out. Your ratio of obligations to liquidity increases with no way out because the upside isn’t getting to you fast enough. This is the point I made in my book about Kim Basinger, the blonde who bought Braselton, GA and went bankrupt. Plenty of people go broke slowly, but nobody makes movies about it.

Fast Time for Me, not Thee?

Back to Einstein’s two clocks. Time is relative.

Financial Time is, too.

The same externalities do not hit everyone’s career path, asset allocation, or marital harmony with equal force, in the same way a hurricane can wipe out Floridians and give Virginians a pleasant breeze.

If you live in Iran right now, everything is Fast Time. But what about the rest of the world?

Take someone whose job is in HR with a 4% mortgage. They are probably in Slow Time, just annoyed at the price of gas. Maybe they cut the Disney trip short by a day, but they still go. They’re worried by the news, but more upset when that snake Becca’s kid makes varsity cheer because she’s on the PTA, but their kid didn’t.

Now take someone whose house was on the spring selling market because they lost their job in HR, woke up to find we struck the Ayatollah with a missile, interest rates rocketed ever upward, buyers stopped looking at houses, and they are falling behind on mortgage payments. The outcomes arrive faster than new actions can outmaneuver them.

Now, suddenly, it’s Fast Time, and the more people the volatility strikes, the Faster Time gets. Those affected now affect each other, and cascade in a single direction. Varsity cheer becomes the least of our concerns.

The more people who enter Fast Time, the faster time gets for everyone else. Each effect feeds into the cause, call this whatever your academic discipline will (feedback loop, recursive causality, autocatalysis).

The more people who hit Fast Time, the more likely it is to hit you.

This ends Part 1 of a multi-part essay.

Your thoughts, challenges, queries, suggestions, and stones to throw would be greatly appreciated.

Behavioral Economists would hardly be surprised. After all, people are crazy.

Behavioral Economics, aka Behavioral Finance,2 was the app update to economics. Traditional economics had blind spots, treating human beings as perfectly rational when we clearly are not. Some people insure against UFOs.

These thinkers found the blind spots. Their exciting new theory explained why we did weird things with money: loss aversion (risking big losses to avoid small ones), mental accounting (hoarding credit card points for vacation instead of treating all money the same), or prospect theory (the Aliens).

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published the first paper in 1971 and their seminal work in 1979. Richard Thaler burst on the scene in the 1980s. Nobel Prizes and best selling books followed, so that by 2011 every smart person had to say they read Thinking Fast and Slow whether or not they finished it or even bought it. From there, we were all nudged and prompted into “choice architectures” that automatically enrolled us in retirement plans. Everything got “framed” as goals, not balance sheets. Generations were saved from their irrational selves.

Behavioral-Econ is now 55 years old. No less than 35 universities offer graduate degrees in the field. Just this week, the Behavioral Economics Guide 2026 began the move toward “Behavioral Economics 3.0,” a quest to integrate history (lived experience), biology, and AI into explaining why we do what we do. Before they go much farther, the historian in me feels compelled to offer a warning.

Behavior Economics has developed two blind spots of its own.

Mad Max and the Federal Reserve

Behavioral Econ showed that people treat rare events as more likely than they truly are (terrorist attacks, hyperinflation, actors and TV stars winning the presidency). Those things rarely happen.

Fools think with fear. Scholars think with Excel. We know the probabilities.

The opening essay of Behavioral Economics Guide 2026 skewers Henry Wallich, a 1970s-era Fed Governor, whose childhood experiences with German hyperinflation left him relentlessly hawkish. Wallich treated his lived experience with inflation as more important than the data presented to him. Nancy Teeters, his colleague, offers the supposed voice of modern reason: “Henry Wallich was our real problem.”3

But Wallich was right and Teeters was wrong.

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Fashionable revisionist history says the Fed didn’t need to take rates to 19% to crush inflation. Yet for a decade, every time inflation abated and the Fed eased policy, prices rose even higher.4

And who can forget the Whip Inflation Now campaign? Am I right?

Government-buttons, bowling ball bags, and even WIN branded footballs pushed Americans to fight 1974’s “Public Enemy #1,” rising prices. McDonald’s ran a Happy Meal ad showing how good fighting inflation tasted. A young Alan Greenspan remembered thinking, “This is unbelievably stupid.”

Mad Max became the most profitable film of all time in 1980 (a record it held for nearly 20 years) by portraying the end of the world as we know it. Having read nearly every piece of financial advice published in the 1970s-80s, I can tell you everyday Americans gave up believing prices would normalize. Financial strategies got ever weirder. “Get rich in real estate” gurus exploded onto the scene with a race to see who could buy houses for as close to $0 down as possible. The social contract was under immense strain. The impossible was coming into focus.

When one sees inflation, one cannot unsee it: the social chaos, the political crises, the fat tail risk that whips society into frenzies. The reigns of power get offered to failed painters and school teachers.

Wallich understood that confident Keynesians were playing with inflationary fire, like children who didn’t understand they might burn down the barn.

Behavioral Economists argue that people are crazy because we put lived experience above data.

But lived experience is data, the previous results from an experiment applying a strategy against uncertainty in real time. N = 1, sure, but not 0.

There are times when the most rational thing to do is not to optimize for the likely, but to protect against the overwhelming scale of the unlikely. Those who’ve seen the bad event know this, and behave accordingly.

Humans, not wrongly, sometimes understand that it is the impact of the event, not its likelihood, that matters. If the aliens come, insurance does you no good. If the layoffs do, an overabundance of cash may be sub-optimal, but is it crazy?

To quote Nassim Taleb,

“The market is like a large movie theater with a small door. And the best way to detect a sucker is to see if his focus is on the size of the theater rather than that of the door.”

Blindspot #1: dismissing the scale of the improbable.

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Behavioral Finance and History’s Longest Bull Market

Blindspot #2: Behavioral Economics has no working theory of time.5 Or, if they do, it seems to be that things always work when given enough of it.

The old religion professed faith in a sane, Intelligent Investor who could beat Mr. Market, a manic depressive of high-highs and low-lows. The lascivious Ben Graham wrote these scriptures. Warren Buffett spread the good news.

But the new gods destroyed faith in savvy individuals, replaced by trust in a long-term rational market that rewarded patience and balance. Nearly all behavioral financial advice boils down to avoiding impulsive behavior and investing for the long term.

Why?

Because, from 1982 until early this morning, we lived through the longest bull market in human history. For the entire lives of Behavioral Finance scholars, the stock market has gone up and to the right, and the few times it did not strategies like 60/40 stock/bond splits offset the dips. Pity those who hedged their bets too much while values soared. They got Left Behind with Nicholas Cage (side note: did you know he starred in that? I didn’t).

Yet faith in markets to perpetuate what they have done for only a relatively short period is the irrationality of a discipline rooted in studying the irrational.

Markets, in this telling, are logical distributions of chance that cluster around a bright future.

But the future of the market was, and is, unknowable. Saying that the clear lesson of history is to trust the long term “rational” market outcomes is, well, wrong. The returns from institutions depend on the quality of those institutions, and for much of history the promise of compound returns were Gnostic gospels at best.

Ask the roughly 100,000 freed slaves who took the promised 6% returns from the Freedman’s Bank, chartered by Congress and advertised not-so-subtly as government guaranteed. It wasn’t. Few saw any yield at all, and the 60,000 who couldn’t get their money out in time waited nearly a decade to get 62 cents on the dollar back: 38% losses. From a savings account!

There have been plenty of stretches where long-term investing failed. As I pointed out in my book,

“Simply buying a house and saving 10 percent in stocks around 1870 would have left you wiped out four separate times. A recent study covering 125 years showed that Americans saving a whopping 20 percent of their annual incomes in stocks would have failed to survive retirement nearly half of the time. The only savings rate that never failed was over 40%.”

I am NOT a doomer. In fact, I’ve been mocked for my optimism.

But if you eye roll my N = 1 argument for blind spot #1, I will raise you this: N = 40 years isn’t a sample size in my line of work. As a historian, that’s a rounding error.

Behavioral Finance clusters a few generations of long-term bull market growth and substitutes it for a theory of financial time.

By the 2010s, even Kahneman thought this way. Most naive stock pickers, he showed, sold winners but held on to losers, hoping prices would come back (the disposition effect). You should do the opposite because of the “well documented market anomaly that stocks that recently gained in value are likely to go on gaining at least for a short while.”6

Winners keep winning, so keep them. Losers lose; ditch ‘em. This is statistically true, and one of the best documented investment strategies in finance.

Except when it isn’t.

From the CFA Institute:

The Achilles heel of momentum, however, remains its crash risk. Momentum strategies are vulnerable to sharp reversals, particularly during market regime shifts. We document maximum drawdowns as large as –88%

Losing 88 cents of your dollar? Yikes.

Those who live through recessions, behavioral economists find, are less likely to invest in stocks, which scholars treats as a failure of rationality, since obviously the future of the stock market is always bright… eventually.

By treating the long term future as knowable, or at least mostly assured, those who hedge against alternate endings get labeled “irrational.” But they are not, at least not always. They are aware that you can’t predict the future nearly as neatly as you can point to the past.

One of example in Behavioral Economics Guide 2026 shows that Baby Boomers overpaid roughly $22 billion by choosing fixed rate mortgages instead of adjustable rate ones (ARMs) because the future rates would be lower. But someone choosing the exact same strategy (an ARM) in 1972 was desperately wishing they had locked in their mortgage rate before they took off. The paper estimates that fixed rate families were better off to the tune of $7,700 in 1972, but the same strategy in 1981 backfired by a whopping $25,000. Those 1980s homebuyers should have gotten an ARM. The logical person would rather protect against a $25k loss than chase a $7k gain.

What the referenced paper does not do is study what would have happened if rates had kept going up, especially up by a lot.

“Silly goose! This is America! Stocks go up and prices come down! We would NEVER let inflation stay above 10%!!!!”

But there were people in the early 1980s explicitly saying 10% inflation was fine and expecting it to last in perpetuity. Fed Governor Teeters stopped voting for rate increases after 1979 because she felt the medicine for high inflation was worse than the disease. Personal finance gurus like Sylvia Porter told people to make their peace with high prices because it was the new normal.

So Americans bought expensive hedges against rates going up, because it was conceivable that they would. The mistake is only clear in hindsight. They faced time going forward.

The unknowable future doesn’t have to compound at 7% or revert to anyone’s mean.

Behavioral finance’s great insight was that individuals substitute their own subjective lives for logic in decision making. But it then turns around and treats the recent past as the entire data set for predicting future outcomes, which are inherently not bound to that past. A person may be irrational to worry about a 10 Sigma event from the mean, but it is equally irrational to assume everything must hover near it forever.

The past does not get to tell the future what to do.

In history, the mean doesn’t pull. It has no gravitational force.

So what?

Fair question. A few quick closing thoughts

Not all behavioral economists are this way: I don’t think I’ve made a strawman, but there certainly are excellent behavioral economists and practitioners who think far more holistically about life and decision making. Here is one, and a retirement-specific book out next year by McQuarrie and Bernstein is excellent (preorder here).

Don’t dismiss their fears: Probabilities don’t keep people up at night. Scale does. Acknowledge the rationality of the low probability, high impact worry. Maybe all those T-Bills help them manage the anxiety of a bad boss. And given the new government UAP files, perhaps we rethink Alien Abduction Policies. (I kid, I kid! They can’t payout while your agent is stuck inside the mothership!)

Sell downside protection, even when suboptimal: Yes, most hedges (lower performing assets, annuities, etc.) underperform bull markets. So?

Running with the bulls is exciting (in Pamplona or Wall Street), but have you ever tried running away from a bear?

Ponder that.

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Both pointed to a bold future. Neither got there. The crash was, and is, inevitable.

No, I’m not talking about Bitcoin’s value plummeting by half since October. I’m talking about it crashing to (near) $0… eventually.

Why Bitcoin Can’t Float to the Future it Made

In 1884, the French Army launched the airship La France. A battery turned two huge propellers for the first fully controlled human flight, 5 miles round trip, predating the Wright brothers by nearly twenty years.

In 1900, Count von Zeppelin sunk his fortune into a German version. It crashed. After repairs, the airship clocked 13 miles per hour, the fastest controlled human flight ever. The Count ran out of money, mortgaged his wife’s house, and by 1910 launched the first commercial airline in history. You could fly a “Zeppelin” to see grandma, and before World War I nearly 40,000 passengers had. By 1930, airships ran regular routes to Brazil, the US, and occasionally the North Pole (that’s true).

It is impossible to convey to you, dear reader, how exciting the airship future was. HG Wells capitalized on his War of the Worlds fantasy novel with 1908’s The War in the Air, in which America is invaded by Zeppelins (we lose). Some considered it his masterpiece.

Airships proved humans could fly. People rushed to gawk … and invest ... in tomorrow, today.

But there is a difference between a technology showing you the future and getting you there.

Zeppelins were not fit to purpose for the new world they created: easily blown off course, weighed down by air moisture, and an easy target for gunfire. Plus, they had a nasty habit of exploding into large hydrogen bombs.

La France flew first, when Orville Wright was just 13 years old. Zeppelins took off while he and his brother were still tinkering in a bicycle shop. The flying machine they took to Kitty Hawk in 1903 crashed nearly as often as it flew. But, with aerodynamic wings and a strong enough engine, they beat gravity at its own game.

In 1910, it was obvious people could soar through the sky, it just wasn’t clear how. By 1940 it was. Zeppelins became a cute thing people used to do. There were simply better ways to fly.

Bitcoin (BTC) will become the Zeppelin of the money future. It pointed the way. It cannot take you there.

Why? Because there are three historical precedents for cryptocurrency. All bode badly for Bitcoin.

History Lesson #1: Nobody Wants to Fly This Way

No one treats Bitcoin like money, just as no one uses dirigibles to go on vacation.

As I explained in my (clears throat, national bestselling book, cough), all American money was once self-issued. The US government did not create currency for nearly a century.

People made their own money. Just like “peer-to-peer” cryptos today, the authority for money was people’s trust in each other. The best, called banknotes, were printed by banks and (supposedly) backed by gold. The worst, called shinplasters, were printed by local people and businesses backed by whatever they offered you (other banknotes, goods from their store, silverware). Problem was, people regularly couldn’t pay and banks rarely had the gold. Just like today’s digital Dogecoin, values fluctuated wildly. If banks failed, business folded, or a person fled…your money could go to $0 overnight.

Then, in 1862, the federal greenback dollar arrived with two promises. By law, you could pay our debts and your taxes with it. Americans ditched their old money for the new, better version for one very simple reason: it worked.

We ran this experiment once before. Americans are not using Bitcoin like money because the money we already have works just fine. Bitcoin has failed the use-case argument.

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History Lesson #2: Bitcoin “Fought the Law and the … Law Won”

Those old, self-issued currencies existed under a weird patchwork of local and state rules. Some jurisdictions allowed small denominations, others did not. All required banks to redeem for gold on demand, but some let you put branches in locations so remote no one could find them to redeem anything. A banknote from one state had no legal guarantee in others. The same is true for BTC today, which operates under a dizzying array of state laws and even city ordinances.

Then, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act (1862), National Currency Act (1863) and National Banking Acts (1865, 1866), effectively creating one set of national money rules. Competitors to the greenback were driven out of existence.

The Clarity Act that the Senate will consider this fall does just that, creating one national cryptocurrency standard rather than many local ones. But crypto’s loadstar, Bitcoin, was birthed in and thrived beneath a lack of jurisdiction. Founder Satoshi Nakamoto’s promise was a peer-to-peer network “without the need for a trusted third party”: money without banks or banking law. No government oversight needed, just a way of selling and buying where the system itself was the authority for taking the money.

Whatever the Clarity Act’s finalized details, that dream dies with its passage. The bill’s promoters say the law will increase public trust and buoy Bitcoin’s value. What advocates miss is that this first step to regulation is the beginning of the end, just as it was for banknotes and shinplasters 150 years before.

Bitcoin’s raison d’être is being voted down.

If Bitcoin is a protest against the power of the modern state, protestors are about to find out just how powerful that state really is. I’ve met two people who lost millions in crypto wallet hacks. Both went to the FBI to get their money back. How is that “subverting the government” thing going?

History Lesson #3: Farther, faster, cheaper, safer.

Planes won the air race because they were better at flying. Stablecoins (on-chain cryptocurrencies backed by another asset, usually Treasury Bills) will win the crypto race for the same reason: they are better at being money.

The future of cryptocurrency as a technology has finally come into focus. On-chain verifiability and “always on” 24/7 transferability (not waiting for banking hours) are the highest and best use.

That is why the real bull market for crypto currency may look like Eurodollars, as practitioner-theorist Nic Carter has explained.

Eurodollars arose in the 1950s for global businesses that preferred to trade in dollars but lacked access to US Banks. So foreign banks started holding dollar liabilities on their books to trade against, creating a vast offshore dollar credit system independent of the Federal Reserve and strengthening the dollar’s global reach. First met with skepticism, by 1973 their utility outweighed the novelty so that, today, most US dollars aren’t even in the United States.

Stablecoins can now do what Eurodollars once did, offer dollar-denominated liabilities for people outside the US to trade in de facto dollars. Bitcoin, whose value fluctuates wildly, does not.

Stablecoins are planes. Bitcoin is a Zeppelin.

That future is already here. Global communities, businesses especially, are increasingly adopting dollar backed stablecoins because they are superior to inflationary local currencies and more useful than Bitcoin. This is precisely why, even though stablecoins are just over 10% of the total crypto market, they conduct most of the transaction volume by far. Stripe, a payment company, started allowing settlement in stablecoins in 2024. Adopting that blockchain tool increases demand for the T-bills that back them. As US Treasury demand increases, the dollar system gets a new lease on life. Ironically, what started as an alternative to the inflationary fiat regime is actively supporting it.

The Bitcoin thesis was that it offered stability the inflationary US dollar did not, a better way to pay, and a global currency. But neither Americans nor global markets are acting like any of that is true.

Like Zeppelins, Bitcoin is energy inefficient in an expensive energy world. It takes too long (one hour to verify vs. just seconds for stablecoins). Transactions cost a lot ($5 vs. fractions of pennies for stablecoins). And Bitcoin may or may not adapt to the quantum computer future that could hack wallets. In all these ways, it is inferior to its competitors. But it does have a cool symbol: ₿.

Bitcoin’s value fluctuates only with inflows, and right now the money is running away. The AI boom is hoovering up both the investment capital that pushed air into the Bitcoin balloon and driving up the energy costs to mine more. The cost to unlock a new coin is between $60,000 and $95,000. The average new coin is minted at a 20% loss. Bitcoin zealots say, “this is great news! $60k must be the Bitcoin floor. Surely an asset cannot be worth less than the cost of new supply!”

That isn’t true, and it misses the point.

It isn’t that Zeppelins are too expensive to build. It’s that they aren’t good for much once built.

History bodes badly for Bitcoin. If it is a shinplaster, there is a gravitational pull toward $0. If a dollar substitute, it is not fit for purpose. Once the law picks a side, not everything will fly.1

We all get excited to see the Goodyear Blimp over a stadium, but we don’t use it to get to the game.

And that is what Bitcoin will be to your kids… a retro thing their grandparents got into, a holdover from the past that pointed to the future but couldn’t get you there.

Ponder That.

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“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.

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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.”

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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.

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“one of the funniest financial books I’ve ever read, not far behind Fred Schwed Jr.’s classic Where Are the Customer’s Yachts?” —Jason Zweig, Columnist, The Wall Street Journal

“I just could not put it down. Moore makes America's financial history jump off of the pages, bringing life to history, placing you right there—when great and terrible things were happening. The stories read like they could be fiction, but they are not.” —Kiplinger

“a serious and startling social history of wealth” that “rejects the pessimism of the anticapitalist left.” —The Wall Street Journal

“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.

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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.

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