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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—

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

“Refreshingly unequivocal advice.” —Publishers Weekly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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