Prosperity New Year Quotes

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

For two years the battles raged across the lands, one side fighting for conquest, the other for freedom. Othium-powered weapons wreaked havoc on defending armies. The red fire was hard to resist, but the white light was stronger. Gradually the tide turned and the freedom fighters regained control of their lands and their cities. The stage was set for the final battle. The opposing forces met outside the Ackar city of Erbea in 1302 and the forces of good won the day. The alchemist escaped and was about to take his revenge at a wedding ceremony when he was bound by the white light. All that remained was his heart, or maybe his soul, encapsulated in a piece of red rock. Dewar the Third succeeded his father and the new king promised a time of peace and prosperity. History would call him the Peacemaker. Now, two hundred years on, a new Emperor seeks to rule the world, while an illegitimate son sets out on a path towards revenge and a thief begins to learn his trade. It is time for the alchemist to return.

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages. As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive. Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either. School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics. Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media--one of the technology's greatest achievements. The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla. Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation. Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.'" Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. "One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this" (he waved his hand), "us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?

Work for what you want, the pursuit of life.

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked sublime and prophetic. One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe---a woman---had asked at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given an utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these: "I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both. "I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, brining a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place---then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement---and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

The United States of America has had the world’s largest economy for most of our history, with enough money to feed and educate all our children, build world-leading infrastructure, and generally ensure a high standard of living for everyone. But we don’t. When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia. Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.

Happy Holidays Is it not this day to smile? Is it yet a time to give? Is this friend as old as good? Is my family so well? Santa is just on his way, Bringing gifts and love tonight, Have a prosperous New Year! And a happy day to last!

Mr. Hargraves who was superintendent of schools made a speech before the flight. He told about how the invention of the airplane was the greatest step forward man had made in a hundred years. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.

Not only are the new technologies exponential, digital, and combinatorial, but most of the gains are still ahead of us. In the next twenty-four months, the planet will add more computer power than it did in all previous history. Over the next twenty-four years, the increase will likely be over a thousand-fold.

in a hundred years. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.

None of his books had prepared him for his new insight. “The People” did not mean all those who speak your language, nor yet the chosen few branded with the fiery mark of genius. Neither birth nor the labor of your hands nor the privileges of education admit you to membership of the People. Only your soul can do that. And each of us fashions his soul himself, year in and year out. You must strive to temper and to cut and polish your soul so as to become a human being. And hence a humble component of your people. A man with such a soul cannot as a rule expect to prosper, to go far in his career, to get rich. Which is why for the most part “the People” is not to be found at the higher levels of society.

New year is the new way of inviting transformation, abundance and prosperity to life.

Henry I was, as one contemporary chronicler put it, “the man against whom no one could prevail except God himself.” The fourth son of William the Conqueror, he enjoyed an exceptionally long, peaceful, and prosperous reign of thirty-five years, in which royal authority in England reached new heights. After his father’s death in 1087, England and Normandy had been split apart. Henry ruthlessly reunited them.

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

The termination of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey forms a new epoch in the Roman History, at which a Republic, which had subsisted with unrivalled glory during a period of about four hundred and sixty years, relapsed into a state of despotism, whence it never more could emerge. So sudden a transition from prosperity to the ruin of public freedom, without the intervention of any foreign enemy, excites a reasonable conjecture, that the constitution in which it could take place, however vigorous in appearance, must have lost that soundness of political health which had enabled it to endure through so many ages.

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evils of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. I see that I hold sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both. I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place – then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement – and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Denial is not a solution. Governments naturally lie to maintain power. Eventually the deception perpetrated is believed by the government officials themselves. This encourages them to continue a failed policy until it’s too late. Ego plays a large part in it as well. It’s highly likely that our policy of foreign intervention will not be reversed and that world chaos will result as a new world order sets in—and it won’t be the New World Order that interventionists have promoted for so many years.

New years will keep coming in our lives as long as we live, but how do we manage to live with prosperity in that every new year and help others around us do the same. Isn’t that what we should plan and celebrate? So, let’s celebrate the inception of improved us, not the new year.

And Mallow laughed joyously. "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion. "But we,—we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources,—have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods,—techniques and methods the Empire can't follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any vital scientific advance. "With all their nuclear shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; hey could never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six stories high,—I saw them—where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their nuclear specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained a nuclear generator, he almost choked with indignation on the spot. "Why, they don't even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from generation to generation automatically and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out. "The whole war is a battle between these two systems; between the Empire and the Foundation; between the big and the little. To seize control of a world, they bribe with immense ships that can make war, but lack all economic significance. We, on the other hand, bribe with little things, useless in war, but vital to prosperity and profits. "A king, or a Commdor, will take the ships and even make war. Arbitrary rulers throughout history have bartered their subjects' welfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and conquest. But it's still the little things in life that count—and Asper Argo won't stand up against the economic depression that will sweep all Korell in two or three years.

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “’A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false-a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.”’ Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ’You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ’The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?

The new financier, the new plutocrat, had little of that sense of responsibility which once had sanctioned the power of England’s landed classes. He was a purely international figure, or so it seemed, and money was his language … Where did the money come from? Nobody seemed to care. It was there to be spent, and to be spent in the most ostentatious manner possible; for its new masters set the fashion … Society in the last pre-war years grew wildly plutocratic; the middle classes became more complacent and dependent; only the workers seemed to be deprived of their share in prosperity … The middle classes … looked upon the producers of England with a jaundiced, a fearful and vindictive gaze.

She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal. But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her—now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an early Methodist. Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to hers. He had looked forward to her learning the truth from others, and had acquiesced in that probability, as something easier to him than any confession. But now that he imagined the moment of her knowledge come, he awaited the result in anguish. His daughters had been obliged to consent to leave him, and though he had allowed some food to be brought to him, he had not touched it. He felt himself perishing slowly in unpitied misery. Perhaps he should never see his wife's face with affection in it again. And if he turned to God there seemed to be no answer but the pressure of retribution. It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller—he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly— "Look up, Nicholas." He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, "I know;" and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent.

George Westinghouse entered the Pittsburgh natural-gas business in 1884, after he drilled a well on the grounds of his thirty-two-room mansion in the city’s prosperous Homewood district. He was not the first, but by 1889, the company he’d formed to exploit natural gas was the largest producer in the nation. To take the lead in distributing a new source of energy, Westinghouse had to invent the necessary technology. He patented twenty-eight inventions in his first two years of effort,

As she looked into all the hopeful but weary eyes of the magical community, Brystal was reminded of her final moments with Madame Weatherberry, and she knew exactly what she wanted to say. "Hello, everyone," she said. "I can only imagine what you've all been through to get here - both in life and on the road. This historic day is possible thanks to a long history of brave men and women making tremendous sacrifices. And although the fight for acceptance and freedom may seem like it's over, our work isn't finished. The world will never be a better place for us until we make it a better place for all. And no matter what challenges await us, no matter whose favor we've yet to earn, we cannot allow anyone's hate to rob us of our compassion or dampen our ambition along the way." "The truth is," Brystal continued, "there will always be a fight, there will always be bridges to cross and stones to turn, but we must never forfeit our joy to the times we live in. When we surrender our ability to be happy, we become as flawed as the battles we face. And too many lives have already been lost for us to lose sight of what we're fighting for now. So let's honor the people who gave their lives for this moment to happen - let's cherish their memory by living each and every day as freely, as proudly, and as joyfully as they would have wanted us to. Together let's begin a new chapter for our community, so when they tell our story years in the future, the tale of magic has a happy and prosperous ending.

mesmerizing -- gold, red, orange, black -- the colors of the dragons that had promised so much: prosperity, love, good health, a second chance, a new start. The fire began to pop, the small sounds lost in the constant boom of firecrackers going off in the streets of San Francisco in celebration of the Chinese New Year. No one would notice another noise, another spark of light, until it was too late. In the confusion of the smoke and the crowds, the dragons and the box they guarded would disappear. No one would ever know what had really happened. The flame reached the end of the gasoline-soaked rope and suddenly burst forth in a flash of intense, deadly heat. More explosions followed as the fire caught the cardboard boxes holding precious inventory and jumped toward the basement ceiling. A questioning cry came from somewhere, followed by the sound of footsteps running down the halls of the building that had once been their sanctuary, their dream for the future, where the treasures of the past were turned into cold, hard cash. The cost of betrayal would be high. They would be brothers no more. But then, their ties had never been of blood, only of friendship --

In addition to legal assemblies such as the one at Thingvellir, major public rituals were part of the celebration of the three big festivals around which the Viking calendar turned. One of these was Winter Nights, which was held over several days during our month of October, which the Vikings considered to be the beginning of winter and of the new year generally. The boundary between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead was thin, and all sorts of uncanny things were bound to happen. At this festival, the divine powers were petitioned for the general prosperity of the people. The second critical festival was Yule at midwinter - late December and early January - Which, with the arrival of Christianity, was converted into Christmas. Offerings were made to the gods in hopes of being granted bountiful harvests in the coming growing season in return. The third major festival was called "Summer Time" (Sumarmál), and was held in April, which the Vikings considered to be the beginning of summer. When the deities were contacted during this festival, they were asked for success in the coming season's battles, raids, and trading expeditions. The exact time of these festivals differed between communities.

The problems which the integration of the unconscious sets modern doctors and psychologists can only be solved along the lines traced out by history, and the upshot will be a new assimilation of the traditional myth. This, however, presupposes the continuity of historical development. Naturally the present tendency to destroy all tradition or render it unconscious could interrupt the normal process of development for several hundred years and substitute an interlude of barbarism. Wherever the Marxist utopia prevails, this has already happened. But a predominantly scientific and technological education, such as is the usual thing nowadays, can also bring about a spiritual regression and a considerable increase of psychic dissociation. With hygiene and prosperity alone a man is still far from health, otherwise the most enlightened and most comfortably off among us would be the healthiest. But in regard to neuroses that is not the case at all, quite the contrary. Loss of roots and lack of tradition neuroticize the masses and prepare them for collective hysteria. Collective hysteria calls for collective therapy, which consists in abolition of liberty and terrorization. Where rationalistic materialism holds sway, states tend to develop less into prisons than into lunatic asylums.

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckon us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games. The

Come to Me with a teachable spirit, eager to be changed. A close walk with Me is a life of continual newness. Do not cling to old ways as you step into a new year. Instead, seek My Face with an open mind, knowing that your journey with Me involves being transformed by the renewing of your mind. As you focus your thoughts on Me, be aware that I am fully attentive to you. I see you with a steady eye, because My attention span is infinite. I know and understand you completely; My thoughts embrace you in everlasting Love. I also know the plans I have for you: plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Give yourself fully to this adventure of increasing attentiveness to My Presence.

I go to one of my favorite Instagram profiles, the.korean.vegan, and I watch her last video, in which she makes peach-topped tteok. The Korean vegan, Joanne, cooks while talking about various things in her life. As she splits open a peach, she explains why she gave up meat. As she adds lemon juice, brown sugar, nutmeg, a pinch of salt, cinnamon, almond extract, maple syrup, then vegan butter and vegan milk and sifted almond and rice flour, she talks about how she worried about whitewashing her diet, about denying herself a fundamental part of her culture, and then about how others don't see her as authentically Korean since she is a vegan. I watch other videos by Joanne, soothed by her voice into feeling human myself, and into craving the experiences of love she talks of and the food she cooks as she does. I go to another profile, and watch a person's hands delicately handle little knots of shirataki noodles and wash them in cold water, before placing them in a clear oden soup that is already filled with stock-boiled eggs, daikon, and pure white triangles of hanpen. Next, they place a cube of rice cake in a little deep-fried tofu pouch, and seal the pouch with a toothpick so it looks like a tiny drawstring bag; they place the bag in with the other ingredients. "Every winter my mum made this dish for me," a voice says over the video, "just like how every winter my grandma made it for my mum when she was a child." The person in the video is half Japanese like me, and her name is Mei; she appears on the screen, rosy cheeked, chopsticks in her hand, and sits down with her dish and eats it, facing the camera. Food means so much in Japan. Soya beans thrown out of temples in February to tempt out demons before the coming of spring bring the eater prosperity and luck; sushi rolls eaten facing a specific direction decided each year bring luck and fortune to the eater; soba noodles consumed at New Year help time progress, connecting one year to the next; when the noodles snap, the eater can move on from bad events from the last year. In China too, long noodles consumed at New Year grant the eater a long life. In Korea, when rice-cake soup is eaten at New Year, every Korean ages a year, together, in unison. All these things feel crucial to East Asian identity, no matter which country you are from.

My point is that while these revolution/war periods typically lead to a lot of human suffering, we should never, especially in the worst of times, lose sight of the fact that one can navigate them well—and that humanity’s power to adapt and quickly get to new and higher levels of well-being is much greater than all the bad stuff that can be thrown at us. For that reason, I believe that it is smart to trust and invest in humanity’s adaptability and inventiveness. So, while I am pretty sure that in the coming years both you and I and the world order will experience big challenges and changes, I believe that humanity will become smarter and stronger in very practical ways that will lead us to overcome these challenging times and go on to new and higher levels of prosperity.

The Great Society programs changed America. Forty million Americans were poor in 1960, but by 1969 that number had fallen to twenty-four million. That prosperity was shared by white and nonwhite people more fully than ever before. Black school attendance increased by four years; twice as many Black people found work in professional, technical, and clerical occupations; the Black unemployment rate fell 34 percent, and median Black family income rose 53 percent. In 1960, 55 percent of Black Americans lived below the poverty line; by 1968, the number was 27 percent. In the decade after 1965, infant mortality fell by one third thanks to new medical and nutritional programs. In 1960, 20 percent of Americans had no indoor plumbing; by 1970, that number had fallen to 11 percent.

These new taxes and the nationalization of finance meant the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded. They were only the most prominent of many good ideas to be proposed, and please feel free to add your own favorites, as certainly everyone else did in this moment of we-the-peopleism. And as all this political enthusiasm and success caused a sharp rise in consumer confidence indexes, now a major influence on all market behavior, ironically enough, bull markets appeared all over the planet. This was intensely reassuring to a certain crowd, and given everything else that was happening, it was a group definitely in need of reassurance. That making people secure and prosperous would be a good thing for the economy was a really pleasant surprise to them. Who knew?

Anti-voting lawmakers perhaps weren’t intending to make it harder for married white women to vote, but that’s exactly what they did by requiring an exact name match across all forms of identification in many states in recent years. Birth certificates list people’s original surnames, but if they change their names upon marriage, their more recent forms of ID usually show their married names. Sandra Watts is a married white judge in the state of Texas who was forced to use a provisional ballot in 2013 under the state’s voter ID law. She was outraged at the imposition: “Why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last forty-nine years?” Like many women, she included her maiden name as her middle name when she took her husband’s last name—and that’s what her driver’s license showed. But on the voter rolls, her middle name was the one her parents gave her at birth, which she no longer used. And like that, she lost her vote—all because of a law intended to suppress people like Judge Watts’s fellow Texan Anthony Settles, a Black septuagenarian and retired engineer. Anthony Settles was in possession of his Social Security card, an expired Texas identification card, and his old University of Houston student ID, but he couldn’t get a new photo ID to vote in 2016 because his mother had changed his name when she remarried in 1964. Several lawyers tried to help him track down the name-change certificate in courthouses, to no avail; his only recourse was to go to court for a new one, at a cost of $250. Elderly, rural, and low-income voters are more likely not to have birth certificates or to have documents containing clerical errors. Hargie Randell, a legally blind Black Texan who couldn’t drive but who had a current voter registration card used before the new Texas law, had to arrange for people to drive him to the Department of Public Safety office three times, and once to the county clerk’s office an hour away, only to end up with a birth certificate that spelled his name wrong by one letter.

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. "I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both. "I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, brining a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place---then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement---and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

In due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone. I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England. In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilot-house.

Our ability to believe in supernatural agents may well have begun as an accidental by-product of a hypersensitive agency detection device, but once early humans began believing in such agents, the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members. Like those subjects in the cheating studies and trust games, their gods helped them to suppress cheating and increase trustworthiness. Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow. This is why human civilization grew so rapidly after the first plants and animals were domesticated. Religions and righteous minds had been coevolving, culturally and genetically, for tens of thousands of years before the Holocene era, and both kinds of evolution sped up when agriculture presented new challenges and opportunities. Only groups whose gods promoted cooperation, and whose individual minds responded to those gods, were ready to rise to these challenges and reap the rewards.

Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological breakthroughs – it was a purely mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination. Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money enables people to compare quickly and easily the value of different commodities (such as apples, shoes and divorces), to easily exchange one thing for another, and to store wealth conveniently. There have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a standardised piece of imprinted metal. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes. Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early twentieth century.

We are not talking just about dollars and cents. We are talking about lives. Consider one chilling example: drug-resistant infections. As America’s breakthroughs in antibiotics recede into the past, bacteria are evolving to defeat current antibiotics. For more and more infections, we are plunging back into the pre-antibiotic era. In the United States alone, two million people are sickened and tens of thousands die each year from drug-resistant infections—mostly because private companies see little incentive to invest in the necessary research, and the federal government has failed to step in.87 Though federal funding for the National Institutes of Health ramped up in the mid-1990s, it has fallen precipitously since, cutting the share of young scientists with NIH grants in half in roughly six years.88 As one medical professor lamented recently: “In my daily work in both a university medical school and a public hospital, it’s a rare month that some bright young person doesn’t tell me they are quitting science because it’s too hard to get funded. . . . A decade or two from now, when an antibiotic-resistant bacteria or new strain of bird flu is ravaging humanity, that generation will no longer be around to lead the scientific charge on humanity’s behalf.”89

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history—and history was thrusting them aside. Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckon us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Today there is much talk about democratic ideals in the outside world. But not in Germany! For here in Germany we had more than enough time-fifteen years-to acquaint ourselves with these democratic ideals. And we ourselves had to pick up the legacy left behind by this democracy. Now we are being credited with many a truly astounding war aim, especially by the English. After all, England is quite experienced in issuing proclamations of objectives in warfare as it has waged the greatest number of wars the world over. Truly astounding are the war aims announced to us today. A new Europe will arise. This Europe will be characterized by justice. This justice will render armament obsolete. This will lead to disarmament at last. This disarmament in turn will bring about an economic blossoming. Change and trade will spring up-much trade-free trade. And with the sponsorship of this trade, culture shall once more blossom, and not only culture will benefit, but religion will also prosper. In other words: we are heading towards a golden age! Well, we have heard of this golden age before. Many times precisely the same people attempted to illustrate its virtues to us who are now flooding us with descriptions of its benefits. The records are old ones, played once too often. We can only pity these gentlemen who cannot even come up with a new idea to trap a great people. For all this they had already promised us in 1918. Then, too, England’s objectives in the war were the creation of this “new Europe,” the establishment of a “new justice,” of which the “right to selfdetermination of the peoples” was to form an integral part. Back then already they promised us justice to render obsolete-for all time-the bearing of any sort of weaponry. Back then already they submitted to us a program for disarmament-one for global disarmament. To make this disarmament more evident, it was to be crowned by the establishment of an association of nations bearing no arms. These were to settle their differences in the future-for even back then there was no doubt that differences would still arise-by talking them to death in discussion and debate, just as is the custom in democratic states. There would be no more shooting under any circumstances! In 1918, they declared a blessed and pious age to come! What came to pass in its stead we all lived to see: the old states were destroyed without even as much as asking their citizenry. Historic, ancient structures were severed, not only state bodies but grown economic structures as well, without anything better to take their place. In total disregard of the principle of the right to self-determination of the peoples, the European peoples were hacked to pieces, torn apart. Great states were dissolved. Nations were robbed of their rights, first rendered utterly defenseless and then subjected to a division which left only victors and vanquished in this world. And then there was no more talk of disarmament. To the contrary, armament went on. Nor did any efforts materialize to settle conflicts peacefully. The armed states waged wars just as before. Yet those who had been disarmed were no longer in a position to ward off the aggressions of those well armed. Naturally, this did not herald economic prosperity but, to the contrary, produced a network of lunatic reparations payments which led to increasing destitution for not only the vanquished, but also the so-called victors themselves. The consequences of this economic destitution were felt most acutely by the German Volk. International finance remained brutal and squeezed our Volk ruthlessly. Adolf Hitler – speech in the Sportpalast Berlin, January 30, 1940

Usually adolescent rebels are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. As Mark Twain famously put it, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one’s self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. One opposes it to discover its logic and validity for one’s self. And by failing to defeat it, one comes to it, and to greater maturity, through experience rather than mere received wisdom. Of course, every new generation alters the adult authority it ultimately joins. But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past. The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. Baby boomers, already rather inflated from growing up in the unparalleled prosperity of postwar America, were inflated further by an adult authority that often backed down in the face of their rebellion. It doesn’t matter, for example, that there was honor in America’s acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgement of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority—and, thus, adult authority—despite the good it achieved.

I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out “I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their friend, in ten years’ time enriching them with all he has, and passing tranquilly to his reward. “I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both. I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice

CAN WE TRUST ANYTHING THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? In 2008, the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, saved the Times from bankruptcy. When that guy saves your company, you dance to his tune. So it’s worth mentioning that Slim’s fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally. That is, unless the Times is some bizarre exception to the normal pattern of corruption—which you can read about at this very minute in the Times. If a tobacco company owned Fox News, would we believe their reports on the dangers of smoking? (Guess what else Slim owns? A tobacco company!) The Times impugns David and Charles Koch for funneling “secret cash” into a “right-wing political zeppelin.”1 The Kochs’ funding of Americans for Prosperity is hardly “secret.” What most people think of as “secret cash” is more like Carlos Slim’s purchase of favorable editorial opinion in the Newspaper of Record. It would be fun to have a “Sugar Daddy–Off” with the New York Times: Whose Sugar Daddy Is More Loathsome? The Koch Brothers? The Olin Foundation? Monsanto? Halliburton? Every time, Carlos Slim would win by a landslide. Normally, Slim is the kind of businessman the Times—along with every other sentient human being—would find repugnant. Frequently listed as the richest man in the world, Slim acquired his fortune through a corrupt inside deal giving him a monopoly on telecommunications services in Mexico. But in order to make money from his monopoly, Slim needs lots of Mexicans living in the United States, sending money to their relatives back in Oaxaca. Otherwise, Mexicans couldn’t pay him—and they wouldn’t have much need for phone service, either—other than to call in ransom demands. Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”3

But employee ownership is not just about sharing. It is also, in practice, often about giving. Such schemes depend on someone, usually the proprietor, deciding at some point to transfer ownership of some or all of a company to its employees. And it is this aspect of the ideal, I think, that has the greatest significance for my story. Of all the things I have given, it is arguable that the shares in my company that I gave away had the greatest financial value. In fact, I have rarely thought of this transfer of ownership as a gift, and I would be wrong if I did. The staff had a right to share in the company. Without them, the company would not have been so prosperous (and I am certain that Xansa would never have reached anything like the financial heights it eventually did if it hadn’t been powered by the fuel of staff ownership). But while I never doubted that aspect of the transfer, I did sometimes struggle with a more abstract issue: the fact that transferring ownership also means, ultimately, transferring control. That was the real challenge: surrendering power. Anyone can adjust to having a bit less money; ceding control of an enterprise that really matters to you is, by contrast, painfully counterintuitive. Who in their right mind would entrust an organisation that they have built up against all the odds, through years of tears, toil and sweat, to someone else? What if they mess it up? What if they don’t really understand what it is that you have created? What if they take it in some dangerous new direction, or manage it in a less idealistic way? Yet without that surrender, the most important part of the transaction is lost. A feudal grandee can be as generous as he likes with his wealth and property, but as long as he remains the grandee then his dependants are not empowered: they are merely well-fed. Empowering them means letting go: in other words, ceasing to be the grandee. I have struggled all my life with an instinct to hang on to the things that matter most to me, to control and protect them myself. Yet the art of surrender is, I am convinced, a key to many kinds of success - and fulfilment. And many lives are limited by a failure to master it.

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “ ‘A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false—a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.’ ” Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ‘The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?

1 My son, forget not thou my Law, but let thine heart keep my commandments. 2 For they shall increase the length of thy days and the years of life, and thy prosperity. 3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them on thy neck, and write them upon the table of thine heart. 4 So shalt thou find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man. 5 Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own wisdom. 6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy ways. 7 Be not wise in thine own eyes: but fear the Lord, and depart from evil. 8 So health shall be unto thy navel, and marrow unto thy bones. 9 Honor the Lord with thy riches, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase. 10 So shall thy barns be filled with abundance, and thy presses shall burst with new wine. 11 My son, refuse not the chastening of the Lord, neither be grieved with his correction. 12 For the Lord correcteth him, whom he loveth, even as the father doeth the child in whom he delighteth. 13 Blessed is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. 14 For the merchandise thereof is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof is better than gold. 15 It is more precious than pearls: and all things that thou canst desire, are not to be compared unto her. 16 Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and glory. 17 Her ways are ways of pleasure, and all her paths prosperity. 18 She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her, and blessed is he that retaineth her. 19 The Lord by wisdom hath laid the foundation of the earth, and hath established the heavens through understanding. 20 By his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew. 21 My son, let not these things depart from thine eyes, but observe wisdom, and counsel. 22 So they shall be life to thy soul, and grace unto thy neck. 23 Then shalt thou walk safely by thy way: and thy foot shall not stumble. 24 If thou sleepest, thou shalt not be afraid, and when thou sleepest, thy sleep shall be sweet. 25 Thou shalt not fear for any sudden fear, neither for the destruction of the wicked, when it cometh. 26 For the Lord shall be for thine assurance, and shall preserve thy foot from taking. 27 Withhold not the good from the owners thereof, though there be power in thine hand to do it. 28 Say not unto thy neighbor, Go and come again, and tomorrow will I give thee, if thou now have it. 29 Intend none hurt against thy neighbor, seeing he doeth dwell without fear by thee. 30 Strive not with a man causeless, when he hath done thee no harm. 31 Be not envious for the wicked man, neither choose any of his ways. 32 For the froward is abomination unto the Lord: but his secret is with the righteous. 33 The curse of the Lord is in the house of the wicked: but he blesseth the habitation of the righteous. 34 With the scornful he scorneth, but he giveth grace unto the humble. 35 The wise shall inherit glory: but fools dishonor, though they be exalted.

In Andhra, farmers fear Naidu’s land pool will sink their fortunes Prasad Nichenametla,Hindustan Times | 480 words The state festival tag added colour to Sankranti in Andhra Pradesh this time. But the hue of happiness was missing in 29 villages along river Krishna in Guntur district. The villagers knew it was their last Sankranti, a harvest festival celebrated to seek agricultural prosperity. For in two months, more than 30,000 acres of fertile farmland would be acquired for a brand new capital planned in collaboration with Singapore. The Nara Chandrababu Naidu government went about the capital project by setting aside the Centre’s land acquisition act and drawing up a compensation package for land-owning and tenant farmers and labourers. Many are opposed to it, and are not keen on snapping their centuries-old bond with their land and livelihood. In Penumaka village, Nageshwara Rao, 50, fears the future as he does not possess a tenancy certificate that could have brought some relief under the compensation package. “The entire village is against land-pooling but we hear the government is adamant,” Rao says, referring to municipal minister P Narayana’s alleged assertion that land would be taken with or without the farmers’ consent. Narayana is supervising the land-pooling process. “Naidu says he would give us Rs 50,000 per year in lieu of annual crops. We earn that much in a month here,” villager Meka Koti Reddy says. To drive home the point, locals in Undavalli village nearby have put up a board asking officials to keep off their lands that produce three crops a year. Unlike other parts of Andhra Pradesh, the water-rich land here is highly productive yielding 200 varieties of crops. Some farmers are also suspicious about the compensation because Naidu is yet to deliver on the loan-waiver promise. They are now weighing legal options besides seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to retain their land. While the villagers opposing land-pooling are allegedly being backed by Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR Congress Party, those belonging to the Kamma community — the support base for Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party — are said to be cooperative.  It is also believed that Naidu chose this location over others suggested by experts to primarily benefit the Kamma industrialists who own large swathes of land in Krishna and Guntur districts. But even the pro-project villagers cannot help feel insecure. “We are clueless about where our developed area would be. What if the project is not executed within Naidu’s tenure? Is there a legal recourse?” Idupulapati Rambabu of Mandadam says. This is despite Naidu’s assurance on January 1 at nearby Thulluru, where he launched the land-pooling process, asking farmers to give land without any apprehension. He said the deal in its present form would make them richer than him in a decade. “We are not building a mere city but a hub of economic activity loaded with superior infrastructure that is aimed at generating wealth. This would be a win-win situation for all,” Naidu tells HT. As of now, villages like Nelapadu struggling with low soil fertility seem to be winning from the package.

In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, aerospace, consumer electronics, and automobiles, where they are far ahead of most Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies. Unlike Southeast Asia, the Koreans have moved into these sectors not primarily through joint ventures where the foreign partner has provided a turnkey assembly plant but through their own indigenous organizations. So successful have the Koreans been that many Japanese companies feel relentlessly dogged by Korean competitors in areas like semiconductors and steel. The chief advantage that large-scale chaebol organizations would appear to provide is the ability of the group to enter new industries and to ramp up to efficient production quickly through the exploitation of economies of scope.70 Does this mean, then, that cultural factors like social capital and spontaneous sociability are not, in the end, all that important, since a state can intervene to fill the gap left by culture? The answer is no, for several reasons. In the first place, not every state is culturally competent to run as effective an industrial policy as Korea is. The massive subsidies and benefits handed out to Korean corporations over the years could instead have led to enormous abuse, corruption, and misallocation of investment funds. Had President Park and his economic bureaucrats been subject to political pressures to do what was expedient rather than what they believed was economically beneficial, if they had not been as export oriented, or if they had simply been more consumption oriented and corrupt, Korea today would probably look much more like the Philippines. The Korean economic and political scene was in fact closer to that of the Philippines under Syngman Rhee in the 1950s. Park Chung Hee, for all his faults, led a disciplined and spartan personal lifestyle and had a clear vision of where he wanted the country to go economically. He played favorites and tolerated a considerable degree of corruption, but all within reasonable bounds by the standards of other developing countries. He did not waste money personally and kept the business elite from putting their resources into Swiss villas and long vacations on the Riviera.71 Park was a dictator who established a nasty authoritarian political system, but as an economic leader he did much better. The same power over the economy in different hands could have led to disaster. There are other economic drawbacks to state promotion of large-scale industry. The most common critique made by market-oriented economists is that because the investment was government rather than market driven, South Korea has acquired a series of white elephant industries such as shipbuilding, petrochemicals, and heavy manufacturing. In an age that rewards downsizing and nimbleness, the Koreans have created a series of centralized and inflexible corporations that will gradually lose their low-wage competitive edge. Some cite Taiwan’s somewhat higher overall rate of economic growth in the postwar period as evidence of the superior efficiency of a smaller, more competitive industrial structure.

She would wait until she wandered around this room filled with people she knew and loved, until she had wished every last one of them a new year filled with hope and dreams and yearning. She would not wish any of them success or prosperity or wealth because the magic was in the dreaming. She knew that now. America had taught her that. How wise, to talk about the pursuit of happiness and not of happiness itself.

After the Second and Third Avenue Els were torn down, East Side property owners had prospered as brownstones, loft buildings, and tenements were replaced by high-rise offices and apartment buildings. The area east of Central Park between 59th and 96th Streets, known as the Upper East Side, became home to fashionable boutiques, luxury restaurants, and expensive furniture houses. With thousands of well-educated young professionals moving there, the neighborhood contained the greatest concentration of single people in the entire country.3 Even though the number of cars registered in the United States grew by 47 percent in the 1950s, New York City’s economy still relied on the subway in the early 1960s. During the 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. rush hour, 72 percent of the people entering the CBD traveled by subway, which could move people far more efficiently than automobiles. Each subway car could carry approximately one hundred people, and a ten-car train could accommodate a thousand. Since trains could operate every two minutes, each track could carry thirty thousand people per hour. By comparison, one lane of a highway could carry only about two thousand cars in an hour.4 Although Manhattan and the region were dependent on the rail transit system, 750,000 cars and trucks were entering the CBD on a typical weekday, three times more than had been the case thirty years earlier. Many New Yorkers expected the city to accommodate the growing number of cars. For example, the Greater New York Safety Council’s transportation division claimed that Americans had a fundamental freedom to drive, and that it was the city’s obligation to accommodate drivers by building more parking spaces in Manhattan. The members argued that without more parking, Manhattan would not be able to continue its role as the region’s CBD because a growing number of suburbanites were so highly conditioned to using their cars.5 In

Africa, I believe, is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes—for better and for worse, perhaps even dramatically, depending on the country. Places endowed with stable governments, with elites that are accountable and responsive to the needs of their fellow citizens, and with relatively healthy institutions, will put themselves in a position to thrive on the strength of robust Chinese demand for their exports and fast-growing investment from China and from a range of other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. Inevitably, most of these African countries will be democracies. Other nations, whether venal dictatorships, states rendered dysfunctional by war, and even some fragile democracies—places where institutions remain too weak or corrupted—will sell off their mineral resources to China and other bidders, and squander what is in effect a one-time chance to convert underground riches into aboveground wealth by investing in their own citizens and creating new kinds of economic activity beyond today’s simple extraction. The proposition at work here couldn’t be more straightforward. The timeline for resource depletion in many African countries is running in tandem with the timeline for the continent’s unprecedented demographic explosion. At current rates, in the next forty years, most African states will have twice the number of people they count now. By that same time, their presently known reserves of minerals like iron, bauxite, copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and more, will be largely depleted. Those who have diversified their economies and invested in their citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at prosperity. Those that haven’t, stand to become hellish places, barely viable, if viable at all.

A dramatic ageing of the population. Its effects will start being felt in 2005 (from the retirement of numerous groups). Since the government did not foresee and reform the retirement system paid out of each year’s taxes, we know it is already too late. There will not be sufficient funds to furnish allocations and healthcare to seniors and ever higher taxes will be levied on those who are working. The result will necessarily be a generalised lowering of purchasing power and therefore of economic growth based on consumption. The ageing of the population will also rapidly lead — it is already happening — to another frightening effect: a loss of technological skills. There are not enough young minds. 2)  The massive immigration of new battalions from the Third World to palliate these gaps, so desired by the UN, is an imposture. These migrants are unskilled and need social services themselves. They are mouths to feed, not the brains needed in a post-industrial society. Germany wanted to import more than 30,000 engineers that it needs (already), but got only 9,000 Indians. The immigration-colonisation (of which the entire cost is already more than 122 billion euros a year), which will not stop growing, added to the steadily increasing birth rate of the foreigners — most of them, as everyone knows, are not able to earn a good education — will be one more brake on economic prosperity. The current masses of ‘youths’ from Africa and North Africa will for the most part have a choice only between unemployment supported by welfare payments or participation in the parallel and criminal economy. The professional value of the workforce is going to experience a dramatic decline as soon as 2010.

More fundamentally, productivity gains from automation may always be somewhat limited, especially compared to the introduction of new products and tasks that transform the production process, such as those in the early Ford factories. Automation is about substituting cheaper machines or algorithms for human labor, and reducing production costs by 10 or even 20 percent in a few tasks will have relatively small consequences for TFP or the efficiency of the production process. In contrast, introducing new technologies, such as electrification, novel designs, or new production tasks, has been at the root of transformative TFP gains throughout much of the twentieth century.

Planters were more than willing to play their role in the drama. Enfranchised by the creation of a popularly elected territorial legislature, they achieved far more power than they ever had under Spanish or even French rule, and they were quick to turn it on the free people of color. In 1806, within three years of American accession, the planter-dominated legislature contained the growth of the free black population, severely circumscribing the rights of slaves to initiate manumission. Thereafter slaves could be freed only by special legislative enactment. That done, the legislature struck at the privileges free people of color had enjoyed under Spanish rule, issuing prohibitions against carrying guns, punishing free black criminals more severely than white ones, and authorizing slaves to testify in court against free blacks but not whites. In an act that represented the very essence of the planters' contempt for people of color, the territorial legislature declared that 'free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves equal to whites, but on the contrary . . . they ought to yield to them on every occasion and never speak or answer them but with respect.' With planters now in control, the free people's position in the society of the lower Mississippi Valley slipped sharply. Claiborne slowly reduced the size of the black militia, first placing it under the control of white officers and then deactiviting it entirely when the territorial legislature refused to recommission it. The free black population continued to grow, but - with limitations on manumission and self-purchase - most of the growth derived from the natural increase and immigration. The dynamism of the final decades of the eighteenth century, when the free black population grew faster than either the white or slave population, dissipated, prosperity declined, and the great thrust toward equality was blunted as the new American ruler turned its back on them. In the years that followed, as white immigrants flowed into the Mississippi Valley and the Gulf ports grew whiter, American administrators found it easier to ignore the free people of color or, worse yet, let the planters have their way. Occasionally, new crises arose, suddenly elevating free people to their old importance. In 1811, when slaves revolted in Pointe Coupee, and in 1815, when the British invaded Louisiana, free colored militiamen took up their traditional role as the handmaiden of the ruling class in hopes that their loyalty would be rewarded. But long-term gains were few. Free people of color were forced to settle for a middling status, above slaves but below whites. The collapse of the free people's struggle for equality cleared the way for the expansion of slavery. The Age of Revolution had threatened slavery in the lower Mississippi Valley, as it had elsewhere on the mainland. Planters parried the thrust with success. As in the Upper and Lower South, African-American slavery grew far more rapidly than freedom in the lower Mississippi Valley during the post-revolutionary years. The planters' westward surge out of the seaboard regions soon connected with their northward movement up the Mississippi Valley to create what would be the heartland of the plantation South in the nineteenth century. As the Age of Revolution receded, the plantation revolution roared ahead, and with it the Second Middle Passage.

With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus. Both of them made fine watches, and they both had many customers. People dropped into their stores, and their phones rang constantly with new orders. Over the years, however, Hora prospered, while Tempus became poorer and poorer. That’s because Hora discovered the principle of hierarchy.… The watches made by both Hora and Tempus consisted of about one thousand parts each. Tempus put his together in such a way that if he had one partly assembled and had to put it down—to answer the phone, say—it fell to pieces. When he came back to it, Tempus would have to start all over again. The more his customers phoned him, the harder it became for him to find enough uninterrupted time to finish a watch. Hora’s watches were no less complex than those of Tempus, but he put together stable subassemblies of about ten elements each. Then he put ten of these subassemblies together into a larger assembly; and ten of those assemblies constituted the whole watch. Whenever Hora had to put down a partly completed watch to answer the phone, he lost only a small part of his work. So he made his watches much faster and more efficiently than did Tempus.

There are many Christians who reverence the faith of Islam and yet regard the Mahdi merely as a commonplace religious impostor whom force of circumstances elevated to notoriety. In a certain sense, this may be true. But I know not how a genuine may be distinguished from a spurious Prophet, except by the measure of his success. The triumphs of the Mahdi were in his lifetime far greater than those of the founder of the Mohammedan faith; and the chief difference between orthodox Mohammedanism and Mahdism was that the original impulse was opposed only by decaying systems of government and society and the recent movement came in contact with a mighty civilisation and the machinery of science. Recognising this,I do not share the popular opinion, and I believe that if in future years prosperity should come to the peoples of the Upper Nile, and learning and happiness follow in its train, then the first Arab historian who shall investigate the early annals of that new nation, will not forget, foremost among the heroes of his race, to write the name of Mohammed Ahmed .

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day? The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865. When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals. The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles. But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork. As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck. The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies. According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year. Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune. Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage. Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate. You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup. Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year. Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth. So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

Tibetans also discovered a niche that was almost uniquely their own: collecting medicinal herbs. Herbs were commonly used in both Chinese and Tibetan medicine, and many of the more valuable were found on the Tibetan plateau. Beimu, an alpine lily used to treat coughs, grew at altitudes of more than 10,000 feet, and Tibetan nomads were perfectly situated to collect it. Most lucrative was Cordyceps sinensis, a prized ingredient in traditional medicine, believed to boost immunity, stamina, and lung and kidney function. Tibetans call it yartsa gunbu, meaning “summer grass, winter worm,” or simply bu, “worm,” for short. The worm is actually a fungus that feeds on the larvae of caterpillars. In the past, the worm was commonplace enough that Tibetans would feed it to a sluggish horse or yak, but the Chinese developed a hankering for it that sent prices soaring. Chinese coaches with gold-medal ambitions would feed it to athletes; aging businessmen would eat it to enhance their sexual potency. At one point, the best-quality caterpillar fungus was worth nearly the price of gold, as much as $900 an ounce. Tibetans had a natural monopoly on the caterpillar fungus. Non-Tibetans didn’t have the local knowledge or the lung capacity to compete. The best worm was in Golok, northwest of Ngaba. Nomadic families would bring their children with them, sometimes taking them out of school because their sharp eyesight and short stature allowed them to more easily scan the ground for the worm amid the grasses and weeds. The season ran for approximately forty days of early spring, the time when the melting snow turned the still-brown hills into a spongy carpet. The families would camp out for weeks in the mountains. In a good season, a Tibetan family could make more in this period than a Chinese factory worker could earn in a year. The Communist Party would later brag about how their policies had boosted the Tibetan economy, but the truth was that nothing contributed as much as the caterpillar fungus, which according to one scholar accounted for as much as 40 percent of Tibetans’ cash earnings. Unlike earnings from mining and forestry, industries that came to be dominated by Chinese companies, this was cash that went directly into the pockets of Tibetans. The nomads acquired the spending power to support the new shops and cafés. The golden worm was part of a cycle of rising prosperity.

The Great War reduced western Europe to a shambles but proved to be a boon to American farmers. Desperate for basic agricultural products, war-ravaged countries turned to the US market, sending prices of cotton, corn, wheat, beef, and other commodities soaring. Between 1914 and 1918, the price of a bushel of corn rose from fifty-nine cents to $1.30, a bushel of wheat from $1.05 to $2.34, and hogs from $7.40 to $16.70 per hundred pounds.1 To meet the demand, farmers acquired more land, expanded their herds of livestock, and invested in new equipment, taking out loans on easy credit to bankroll their purchases. In the years following the armistice of 1918, however—as European nations recovered from the catastrophe—US farm exports plunged so dramatically that one scholar describes the market collapse as a “price toboggan.”2 By 1921, the price of “wheat, corn, beef and pork [had] all plummeted by nearly one-half.”3 Farmers, who had enjoyed unprecedented prosperity just a few years earlier, now faced financial ruin, defaulting on equipment loans, tax payments, and mortgages.

The Global Biodiversity Assessment Report [213] listed the following things as unsustainable: private property, single-family homes, paved roads, ski runs, golf courses, logging, plowing, hunting, dams, fences, paddocks, grazing, fish ponds, fisheries, drain systems, pipelines, pesticides, fertilizer, cemeteries, sewers, and so on.

Twenty years ago, the people of the world came together in an unprecedented step to form a new international order. Since the first global election, war among participating jurisdictions has been eradicated, and prosperity and trade have spread.

When spring triumphed and new life burst forth in nature, our ancestors ascended the hill of our homeland to ignite flares. They did this in hopes of a bountiful harvest and a prosperous year, as a blessing and tribute for their toil upon the earth. From vantage points where they could survey the earthly realms, they used the spring flame’s fire to forge a connection with the celestial regions—domains beyond their sight, with the sky, infinity, and eternity, and with the forces at work there. They understood that from these realms, every renewal of life must originate.

This is what the LORD says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

The universal Church touched every corner of western Europe and practically all aspects of life from politics to market behavior, but it was not a monolithic institution. Very much the opposite: Because it channeled and encompassed practically all spiritual life, the Church, by necessity, had to be a big tent. It contained multitudes: poor, illiterate priests in isolated rural parishes with secret wives and broods of children, who rarely saw their uninterested parishioners; charismatic Dominican preachers capable of attracting crowds of thousands in towns and cities; places like the brand-new castle church of Wittenberg, built in Renaissance style and packed with holy relics in expensive gilded cases; towering Gothic cathedrals, already centuries old, dominating the skylines of the continent’s prosperous urban centers and serving as headquarters for rich, powerful bishops who pulled political strings from London to Leipzig; leaky-roofed monasteries, housed by a few elderly monks in threadbare robes begging for donations to fix a tumbledown refectory; university theologians steeped in the brutally dense works of Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham who spent their time teaching students and arguing about scholastic philosophy; devout laywomen, reading books of hours in the privacy of their prosperous homes; sword-swinging Hospitaller Knights, soldier-monks in armor and black habits, beheading Muslim sailors on the decks of galleys under a blue Mediterranean sky. The Church was all of these things: corrupt and saintly, worldly and mystical, impossibly wealthy and desperately impoverished.

There is never a better time than the present to improve your state of being, to walk into the best of what you & that potential of yours have to offer. Darling listen, you possess limitless potential. You can be & do anything you want. Remind yourself this now & everyday – “There is always more of me to call upon.” I want you to enter in 2022 with a positive & fearless attitude. Let you resolve to co-create & lead your life from front allowing it to bring a fresh bout of excellence to your life. I am praying for a better 2022 for you & the world. I sincerely wish & hope for an end to covid & some of our other difficulties in the New Year. Wishing you more happiness, wellness, prosperity & fulfilment in the coming year & always. Blessings!

Purser has shown his face, sir. He has examined his domain and declared it secure and will bring his slops aboard this day. His name is Roberts and he informs me he is an attorney-at-law by trade, but making only a poor living in the legal business, took to the sea some ten years ago and is most satisfied with his new way of life. He told me that Portsmouth must have fifty attorneys, at a minimum, plying their trade and seeking clients and only a very few of them prospering, which surprised me greatly, sir. One does not conceive of a poor lawyer of whatever sort.

Happy Lunar New Year! It's time to channel your inner dragon and breathe fire into your goals. Let's kick off this year with a fire of confidence, fierce determination, and unstoppable energy. Here's to embracing change, chasing dreams, and devouring all the delicious dumplings along the way. Wishing you a year filled with laughter, prosperity, and unforgettable adventures. Let's make this Year of the Dragon one to remember! Dragon energy, activate!

In the past, the states best able to manage events beyond their borders have been those best able to avoid the temptation to overreach. Great powers remain great in large measure because they posses wisdom to temper active involvement in foreign interventions - to remain within the limits of a national strategy that balances ambition with military resources. The first principle of the strategic art states simply that the greatest weight of resources be devoted to safeguarding the most vital interests of the state. If a vital interest is threatened, the survival of the state is threatened. Generally, the most vital interest of a liberal democracy include, first and foremost, preservation of the territorial integrity of the state. The example of the attacks on New York and Washington should send a message to those of similar ambitions that the surest way to focus the wrath of the American people against them would be to strike this country within its borders again. The second strategic priority is the protection of the national economic welfare by ensuring free and open access to markets for vital materials and finished goods. Other important but less vital interests should be defended by the threat of force only as military resources permit. Outside the limits of U.S. territory, the strategic problem defining the geographic limits of U.S. vital interests becomes complex. While the United States may have some interests in every corner of the world, there are certain regions where its strategic interests, both economic and cultural, are concentrated and potentially threatened. These vital strategic "centers of gravity" encompass in the first instance those geographic areas essential to maintaining access to open markets and sources of raw material, principally oil. Fortunately, many of these economically vital centers are secure from serious threat. But a few happen to be located astride regions that have witnessed generations of cultural and ethnic strife. Four regions overshadow all others in being both vital to continued domestic prosperity and continually under the threat of state-supported violence. These regions are defined generally by an arc of territories along the periphery of Eurasia: Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and north East Asia. For the past several centuries, these regions have been the areanas of the world's most serious and intractable conflicts. Points of collision begin with the intersection of Western and Eastern Christianity and continue southward to mark Islam's incursion into southeastern Europe in the Balkans. The cultural divide countries without interruption across the Levant in an unbroken line of unrest and warring states from the crescent of the Middle East to the subcontinent of South Asia. The fault-line concludes with the divide between China and all the traditional cultural competitors along its land and sea borders. Other countries outside the periphery of Eurasia might, in extreme cases, demand the presence of U.S. forces for peacekeeping or humanitarian operations. But it is unlikely that in the years to come the United States will risk a major conflict that will involve the calculated commitment of forces in a shooting war in regions outside this "periphery of Eurasia," which circumscribes and defines America's global security.

in recent decades, leaders have come to see the economic clout that trade produces as more than merely a purse for military prowess: they now understand prosperity to be a principal means by which countries measure and exercise power. The strategic importance of trade is not new, but it has grown in recent years and strongly reinforces the economic case for expanding trade. Over 40 years ago, the economist Thomas Schelling observed, “Broadly defined to include investment, shipping, tourism, and the management of enterprises, trade is what most of international relations are about. For that reason trade policy is national security policy.

As it did 50,000 years ago, the world now constantly opens up, acquiring endless levels of complexity. How can we flourish in such a constantly reinvented world? How can we retool our civilization and our education system to understand and prosper in this extraordinary new world? The key is to do what our ancestors did: immerse ourselves in the arts. This, of course, is what many have suggested through the centuries.

America had become an ice cream society in the last years of the twenties, thanks in large part to Prohibition. Bars and fine lounges in hotels sold ice cream, because they could no longer sell liquor, and dairy bars began to crop up all over the country. It was an incredible era. The straitlaced Cal Coolidge, who assured the nation that his fiscal probity had brought prosperity here to stay, moved the White House to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the summer and celebrated the Fourth of July by parading around in a cowboy costume. Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the Yankees for the stupefying figure of $70,000 a year. Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris. Al Jolson sang in the first talking pictures. And—wonder of wonders—in 1929 the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant! Big

We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”15

Those who are attracted to Dole’s vision of life in Russell, Kansas, need to spend a little time here. It turns out there’s a reason ambitious people like Dole have been fleeing the place in droves: while its mythical counterpart grows in stature, the actual Russell has been slowly withering. A bleak local economic history could be written from inside any store on Main Street. For example, the biggest and oldest store—a department store called Bankers, for which Dole modeled clothes—opened in 1881, ten years after Russell was founded, beside the new tracks laid by the Union Pacific Railroad. It prospered through the oil boom of the 1920s and the farming boom of the 1940s, reaching its apogee in the 1950s, when it stocked three full floors of dry goods. Since then the store’s business has gradually waned so that it now occupies barely one floor, some of which is given over to the sale of Bob Dole paraphernalia. Where once there were gardening tools there are now rows of Dole buttons, stickers, T-shirts, and caps. The oldest family-owned business in Kansas will probably soon close for lack of business and of a family member willing to live in Russell. “I’d manage the place,” says one of the heirs, who lives in Kansas City, “but only if you put it on a truck and moved it to another town.

A great thank you to my family, friends and to those who supported me through this year of 2016. I also want to give a massive thanks to all those who are diligently spreading my work like a wild fire all over the globe. May God continue to bless you and give you more ability to spread your wings like never before. I love and I wish you all a great Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Havana could almost be thought of as three separate cities. It is comprised of Old Havana, which is the central part of the city, Vedado, which was the expansion of the central part, and now the newer outlying suburban areas that extend beyond the earlier boundaries. Although the epidemic of 1649 killed many and sickened a third of the city’s population, during the Colonial years Havana remained larger than either Boston or New York City. During this era, at different times the French and British invaded Havana. The Battle of Havana was a military action which lasted from March to August of 1762, as part of the Seven Years' War. The British occupied and ruled the city for just one year before trading Cuba for Florida. When Spain regained control in 1763, it took steps to prevent Britain from returning, by sturdily fortifying the city with massive stone walls and castles. In the 19th Century, the city prospered and became a center for the arts, fashion and wealth. Theaters, fashion houses and mansions were built and Havana became known as “The Paris of the Antilles.

To make up for the projected billion-dollar-a-year shortfall created by the many new tax cuts he helped to deliver, something had to give. So for savings, the legislators turned to the one institution that had distinguished North Carolina from many other southern states—its celebrated public education system. The assault was systematic. They authorized vouchers for private schools while putting the public school budget in a vise and squeezing. They eliminated teachers’ assistants and reduced teacher pay from the twenty-first highest in the country to the forty-sixth. They abolished incentives for teachers to earn higher degrees and reduced funding for a successful program for at-risk preschoolers. Voters had overwhelmingly preferred to avoid these cuts by extending a temporary one-penny sales tax to sustain educational funding, but the legislators, many of whom had signed a no-tax pledge promoted by Americans for Prosperity, made the cuts anyway.

Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.4 The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents.5 Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation; and many working Americans didn’t like the idea of their tax dollars going to people who could work, but chose not to. By the time of his 1972 reelection campaign, Nixon had abandoned the Family Assistance Plan, and universal income guarantee programs have not been seriously discussed by federal elected officials and policymakers since then.* Avoiding

It seems no one is guaranteed a job anywhere anymore. These are troubled times for workers. The creeping sense that no one’s job is safe, even as the companies they work for are thriving, means the spread of fear, apprehension, and confusion. One sign of this growing unease: An American headhunting firm reported that more than half of callers making inquiries about jobs were still employed—but were so fearful of losing those jobs that they had already started to look for another.5 The day that AT&T began notifying the first of forty thousand workers to be laid off—in a year when its profits were a record $4.7 billion—a poll reported that a third of Americans feared that someone in their household would soon lose a job. Such fears persist at a time when the American economy is creating more jobs than it is losing. The churning of jobs—what economists euphemistically call “labor market flexibility”—is now a troubling fact of work life. And it is part of a global tidal wave sweeping through all the leading economies of the developed world, whether in Europe, Asia, or the Americas. Prosperity is no guarantee of jobs; layoffs continue even amidst a booming economy. This paradox, as Paul Krugman, an MIT economist, puts it, is “the unfortunate price we have to pay for having as dynamic an economy as we do.”6 There is now a palpable bleakness about the new landscape of work. “We work in what amounts to a quiet war zone” is the way one midlevel executive at a multinational firm put it to me. “There’s no way to give your loyalty to a company and expect it to be returned anymore. So each person is becoming their own little shop within the company—you have to be able to be part of a team, but also ready to move on and be self-sufficient.” For many older workers—children of the meritocracy, who were taught that education and technical skills were a permanent ticket to success—this new way of thinking may come as a shock. People are beginning to realize that success takes more than intellectual excellence or technical prowess, and that we need another sort of skill just to survive—and certainly to thrive—in the increasingly turbulent job market of the future. Internal qualities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability are taking on a new valuation. A

On the 30th of March, 1820—some months after this strange religious revolution—the first party of Christian missionaries arrived at the islands from Massachusetts. They were well received. They found a people without a religion, and their work was easy. Other missionary parties followed from time to time, and found the field alike profitable to the cause in which they labored and to themselves individually. They acquired substantial possessions in their new home, controlled the government for the fifty or more years following, and their children are to-day among the most prosperous residents of the group. This is not said with a view to undervalue the services of the early missionaries to Hawaii, but to show that all missionary fields have not been financially unfruitful to zealous and provident workers.

While marriage rates for middle-class white women soared through the 1940s and 1950s, for black women, mid-twentieth century conditions were very different. Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. In the years directly after World War II, thanks to the return of soldiers, black marriage rates briefly increased further.66 However, as white women kept marrying in bigger numbers and at younger ages throughout the 1950s, black marriage rates began to decrease, and the age of first marriage to climb.67 By 1970, there had been a sharp reversal: Black women were not marrying nearly as often or as early as their white counterparts. It was nothing as benign as coincidence. While one of the bedrocks of the expansion of the middle class was the aggressive reassignment of white women to domestic roles within the idealized nuclear family, another was the exclusion of African-Americans from the opportunities and communities that permitted those nuclear families to flourish. Put more plainly, the economic benefits extended to the white middle class, both during the New Deal and in the post-World War II years, did not extend to African-Americans. Social Security, created in 1935, did not apply to either domestic laborers or agricultural workers, who tended to be African-Americans, or Asian or Mexican immigrants. Discriminatory hiring practices, the low percentages of black workers in the country’s newly strengthened labor unions, and the persistent (if slightly narrowed68) racial wage gap, along with questionable practices by the Veterans Administration, and the reality that many colleges barred the admission of black students, also meant that returning black servicemen had a far harder time taking advantage of the GI Bill’s promise of college education.69 Then there was housing. The suburbs that bloomed around American cities after the war, images of which are still summoned as symbols of midcentury familial prosperity, were built for white families. In William Levitt’s four enormous “Levittowns,” suburban developments which, thanks to government guarantees from the VA and the Federal Housing Association, provided low-cost housing to qualified veterans, there was not one black resident.70 Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families.

A farmer’s crops weren’t doing well. He had tried everything he could with the land and soil he had, but no matter what he did, year after year, his harvest grew smaller, his bounty less plentiful. So, he up and moved, searching for a new land, a new beginning. After a long journey, he came upon the most ideal, freshest, nutrient-rich soil on earth. Living there in prosperity, he felt the urge to plant something to pass onto future generations so they could see what he was blessed with. He tilled the soil, and with tender love and care, he planted an acorn. He watched as the tree broke the soil, making its way upward. Young, healthy, and free. Year after year, he saw it expand, stretching its branches in all directions, letting it be, never pruning it, never tending to it. Under its own direction, it took off, soaring upward and outward, becoming the mighty oak seen from all directions. “People traveled from far and wide to admire the tree, wanting one for themselves. They all asked the farmer, ‘What did you do to grow such a majestic oak tree?’ “His answer, always the same. ‘I don’t do a thing, I just let it grow on its own.’ “Most turned away, perplexed by his explanation, convinced he was hiding something from them. Others, however, listened, reproducing the same results. “Time passed and eventually the farmer was no longer, but the tree remained a steadfast fixture on the farmer’s land. Eventually, more people moved into the area. They were different from the man. They considered themselves to be more educated, more advanced than a simple farmer. They disliked his gigantic symbol of individual success. “So they hatched a plan. They conspired with each other and decided to stop making it about the tree. Why don’t they turn the people’s attention to the branches? Brilliant. So, year after year, they would rev up the citizens over a blemish on a branch. One was crooked, another’s bark was too thick, some had too many leaves, others didn’t have enough. The people who cared passionately about more foliage fought with those who wanted less. Citizens who wouldn’t stand for crooked branches ganged up on those who only wanted them to be straight. All the while, the elites stood back, stirring the pot, and achieving their plan to eliminate the tree. Every once in a while a side would win, and a branch would be cut off. Others would chop one off from spite and anger. As the years passed, branch after branch not escaping the scourge of the bickering groups, the tree finally was nothing more than a trunk. The people who were so used to fighting with each other gazed upon one another from either side of the pathetic, devoured symbol. They realized they had destroyed the once extraordinary, grand oak. But it was too late. The elites got what they wanted.

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “’A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condi- tion is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false-a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.”’ Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ’You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.

The peace which Kulin Ban purchased by yielding to Rome was not of long duration, for he could not compel his people to observe its terms. On his death (1216) the Pope appointed a Roman Catholic Ban, and sent a mission to convert the Bosnians. The churches of the country, however, increased the more, and spread into Croatia, Dalmatia, Istria, Carniola and Slavonia. Some six years later the Pope, despairing of converting the Bosnians by other than forcible methods, and encouraged by the success of his crusade in Provence, ordered the King of Hungary to invade Bosnia. The Bosnians deposed their Roman Catholic Ban and elected a Bogomil, Ninoslav. For years the war went on, with varying fortune. Ninoslav yielded to circumstances and became a Roman Catholic, but no change in their rulers affected the faith and confession of the great bulk of the people. The country was devastated, but whenever the invading armies withdrew, the churches were found still existing, and the industry of the people quickly restored prosperity. Fortresses were erected throughout the country “for the protection of the Roman Catholic Church and religion”; the Pope gave the land to Hungary, which long ruled it, but its people still holding to their faith, he at length called a crusade of “all the Christian world” against it; the Inquisition was established (1291), and Dominican and Franciscan brothers competed in applying its terrors to the devoted churches.

Our questioning—again echoing Ghazali—of the likely impact of development efforts (“prosperity,” in his formula) also flew in the face of received wisdom. For years, the notion had prevailed that the best way to sway Afghan “hearts and minds” was by giving away stuff: blankets, bags of wheat, wells for drinking water, schoolrooms. Among the conditions fueling extremism, commentators and policy makers often repeat, is economic malaise, aggravated by demographic shifts or such externals as drought. Foreign assistance is seen as a palliative to those ills. Evolving U.S. military doctrine even referred to “money as a weapon system.” But examination of extremist leaders’ sociological backgrounds casts doubt on these presumptions. Studies by such analysts as Andrew Wilder have found that in Afghanistan, infusions of development resources often exacerbated local conflict rather than reducing it, by providing new prizes for opposing groups to fight over.6

This idea goes back to one of the classical theories of political sociology, the theory of modernization, formulated by Seymour Martin Lipset. Modernization theory maintains that all societies, as they grow, are headed toward a more modern, developed, and civilized existence, and in particular toward democracy. Many followers of modernization theory also claim that, like democracy, inclusive institutions will emerge as a by-product of the growth process. Moreover, even though democracy is not the same as inclusive political institutions, regular elections and relatively unencumbered political competition are likely to bring forth the development of inclusive political institutions. Different versions of modernization theory also claim that an educated workforce will naturally lead to democracy and better institutions. In a somewhat postmodern version of modernization theory, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went so far as to suggest that once a country got enough McDonald’s restaurants, democracy and institutions were bound to follow. All this paints an optimistic picture. Over the past sixty years, most countries, even many of those with extractive institutions, have experienced some growth, and most have witnessed notable increases in the educational attainment of their workforces. So, as their incomes and educational levels continue to rise, one way or another, all other good things, such as democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and secure property rights, should follow. Modernization

In the Christmas season of 1822, Clement Clarke Moore, a prosperous New York scholar and landowner, wrote a series of verses in a lively anapestic rhythm for the amusement of his daughters.13 Legend has it that they were inspired by the portly figure of his fur-clad sleigh driver as he returned home from a shopping trip through the snowy streets. The poem appeared anonymously in the Troy Sentinel a year later under the title “Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”:

If you don't discover your passions, purpose and power, then you will pursue the roles assigned by other people's scripts. You will lose the success and potential afforded by new opportunities if you don't know your own priorities and preferences. Your strength is in your uniqueness. If you lose yourself just to get along with others, then you have nothing original to offer this new year of progress and prosperity. Stay true to yourself. Where there is a vision, there is always a provision

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

the United States and in western Europe, the compromise between the plutocrats and everyone else worked. Economic growth soared and income inequality steadily declined. Between the 1940s and 1970s in the United States the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else shrank; the income share of the top 1 percent fell from nearly 16 percent in 1940 to under 7 percent in 1970. In 1980, the average U.S. CEO made forty-two times as much as the average worker. By 2012, that ratio had skyrocketed to 380. Taxes were high—the top marginal rate was 70 percent—but robust economic growth of an average 3.7 percent per year between 1947 and 1977 created a broadly shared sense of optimism and prosperity. This was the golden age of the American middle class, and it is no accident that our popular culture remembers it so fondly. The western Europe experience was broadly similar—strong economic growth, high taxes, and an extensive social welfare network.

There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. “Good government” drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Familles with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families, became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the “rights culture” this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations.

It seemed impossible that a modern airport, full of prosperous and purposeful travellers, was only kilometres away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned, months later, that they were survivors, of course, those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty, famine, and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week, week after week, year after year. As the kilometres wound

great institution and are helping to maintain it to share our prosperity.” On January 5, 2012, 98 years later, embittered individuals who identified with the Occupy Wall Street movement were in the 111th day of a protest that began in Zuccotti Park in New York City’s Wall Street financial district. These protestors were expressing what they perceived as economic unfairness and inequality resulting from corporate greed. The group’s mantra, “We are the 99 percent,” reflected cynicism and distrust for business, financial, and governmental systems that they viewed as sacrificing the interest of the country’s 99 percent in favor of the wealthiest 1 percent. Where had we come in a century? Dov Seidman, founder, chairman, and CEO of LRN, a company that helps businesses develop and maintain effective corporate governance, suggests, “This crisis of trust in our basic institutions is so troubling precisely because the lack of trust is in so many cases well deserved. Broken promises, obfuscation, spin, concealment, all have created a suspicion—often unfortunately true—

The NASDAQ Composite Index, containing mostly technology shares, soared from 500 in April 1991 to 1,000 in July 1995, surpassing 2,000 in July 1998, and finally peaking at 5,132 in March 2000. The stock market boom reinforced consumer confidence, which also reached new highs, and provided a strong impetus for investment, especially in the booming telecom and high-tech sectors. The next few years confirmed suspicions that the numbers were unreal, as the stock market set new records for declines. In the next two years, $8.5 trillion were wiped off the value of the firms on America’s stock exchange alone—an amount exceeding the annual income of every country in the world, other than the United States. One

Life expectancy rose only modestly between the Neolithic era of 8500 to 3500 BC and the Victorian era of 1850 to 1900.13 An American born in the late nineteenth century had an average life expectancy of around forty-five years, with a large share never making it past their first birthdays.14 Then something remarkable happened. In countries on the frontier of economic development, human health began to improve rapidly, education levels shot up, and standards of living began to grow and grow. Within a century, life expectancies had increased by two-thirds, average years of schooling had gone from single to double digits, and the productivity of workers and the pay they took home had doubled and doubled and then doubled again. With the United States leading the way, the rich world crossed a Great Divide—a divide separating centuries of slow growth, poor health, and anemic technical progress from one of hitherto undreamed-of material comfort and seemingly limitless economic potential. For the first time, rich countries experienced economic development that was both broad and deep, reaching all major segments of society and producing not just greater material comfort but also fundamental transformations in the health and life horizons of those it touched. As the French economist Thomas Piketty points out in his magisterial study of inequality, “It was not until the twentieth century that economic growth became a tangible, unmistakable reality for everyone.”15 The mixed economy was at the heart of this success—in the United States no less than in other Western nations. Capitalism played an essential role. But capitalism was not the new entrant on the economic stage. Effective governance was. Public health measures made cities engines of innovation rather than incubators of illness.16 The meteoric expansion of public education increased not only individual opportunity but also the economic potential of entire societies. Investments in science, higher education, and defense spearheaded breakthroughs in medicine, transportation, infrastructure, and technology. Overarching rules and institutions tamed and transformed unstable financial markets and turned boom-bust cycles into more manageable ups and downs. Protections against excessive insecurity and abject destitution encouraged the forward-looking investments and social integration that sustained growth required. At every level of society, the gains in health, education, income, and capacity were breathtaking. The mixed economy was a spectacularly positive-sum bargain: It redistributed power and resources, but as its impacts broadened and diffused, virtually everyone was made massively better off.

Many complex elements contributed to the Great Depression of 1929. However, most economists believe that the two main causes of the Depression were the immensely uneven distribution of wealth during the previous decade and the extensive speculation in stock that took place in the latter half of the decade. The decade preceding the Depression was a time of tremendous prosperity and became known as the “Roaring Twenties.” However, prosperity was not for everyone. The number of wealthy people in the country was less than a tenth of a percent of the total population yet they controlled most of the money in the country. In a well-functioning economy, demand must equal supply. But in 1929 wealth was so unevenly distributed that the supply of products far exceeded the demand for them. People may have wanted the products at the time but they couldn’t afford them. If supplies keep building and demand lessens, the economy can collapse. One way to balance the equation is to allow people to buy products over time. By the end of the Roaring Twenties, over 60 percent of all automobiles and 80 percent of all radios had been purchased on credit. With this new influx of money into the market, the economy was booming at the end of the 1920s. Stock speculation became rampant. Profits as high as 3,400 percent could be made in less than a year and people could buy on margin. In other words, they only had to put down 10 percent cash when buying a stock. Because of this, everyone was buying stocks. The poor were equal players with the rich. This buying spree pushed the market to new highs. In 1928 alone the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose from 191 to 300. There were warning signs as minor recessions occurred in the spring of 1929. Investors became nervous. In October people started selling their shares of stock. As the market started dropping, more and more people sold stock, margins were called, and by October 1929 there was panic selling. Stock prices dropped so fast that many rich people became poor in a matter of hours.

To paraphrase the insightful words of the late Irish politician James Larkin, when tackling the issues facing a nation going through monumental changes, having just discarded the shackles of 700 years of colonialism: It is not so much the bread on the table, but also the rose. What Larkin was saying is still poignant and relevant today, almost a century later, that there is a deep yearning in all of us that goes beyond the practicalities of providing one’s daily bread. There is a profound hunger for decency and beauty in such a seemingly graceless age.

Surprisingly straightforward in their clarity and simplicity, Lietaer and Dunne point out that money is a human invention. Our current monetary system was designed some 300 years ago, during an era that knew nothing of natural limits and had a completely different set of objectives and priorities. It’s a tool that should be serving us, rather than being our master. And since it is a man-made construct, it can be re-thought, re-imagined, and redesigned.

The situation was similar in the Soviet Union, with industry playing the role of sugar in the Caribbean. Industrial growth in the Soviet Union was further facilitated because its technology was so backward relative to what was available in Europe and the United States, so large gains could be reaped by reallocating resources to the industrial sector, even if all this was done inefficiently and by force. Before 1928 most Russians lived in the countryside. The technology used by peasants was primitive, and there were few incentives to be productive. Indeed, the last vestiges of Russian feudalism were eradicated only shortly before the First World War. There was thus huge unrealized economic potential from reallocating this labor from agriculture to industry. Stalinist industrialization was one brutal way of unlocking this potential. By fiat, Stalin moved these very poorly used resources into industry, where they could be employed more productively, even if industry itself was very inefficiently organized relative to what could have been achieved. In fact, between 1928 and 1960 national income grew at 6 percent a year, probably the most rapid spurt of economic growth in history up until then. This quick economic growth was not created by technological change, but by reallocating labor and by capital accumulation through the creation of new tools and factories. Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy.

The Warburg family is the most important ally of the Rothschilds, and the history of this family is at least equally interesting. The book The Warburgs shows that the bloodline of this family dates back to the year 1001.[28] Whilst fleeing from the Muslims, they established themselves in Spain. There they were pursued by Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and moved to Lombardy. According to the annals of the city of Warburg, in 1559, Simon von Cassel was entitled to establish himself in this city in Westphalia, and he changed his surname to Warburg. The city register proves that he was a banker and a trader. The real banking tradition was beginning to take shape when three generations later Jacob Samuel Warburg immigrated to Altona in 1668. His grandson Markus Gumprich Warburg moved to Hamburg in 1774, where his two sons founded the well-known bank Warburg & Co. in 1798. With the passage of time, this bank did business throughout the entire world. By 1814, Warburg & Co had business relations with the Rothschilds in London. According to Joseph Wechsberg in his book The Merchant Bankers, the Warburgs regarded themselves equal to the Rothschild, Oppenheimer and Mendelsohn families.[29] These families regularly met in Paris, London and Berlin. It was an unwritten rule that these families let their descendants marry amongst themselves. The Warburgs married, just like the Rothschilds, within houses (bloodlines). That’s how this family got themselves involved with the prosperous banking family Gunzberg from St. Petersburg, with the Rosenbergs from Kiev, with the Oppenheims and Goldschmidts from Germany, with the Oppenheimers from South Africa and with the Schiffs from the United States.[30] The best-known Warburgs were Max Warburg (1867-1946), Paul Warburg (1868-1932) and Felix Warburg (1871-1937). Max Warburg served his apprenticeship with the Rothschilds in London, where he asserted himself as an expert in the field of international finances. Furthermore, he occupied himself intensively with politics and, since 1903, regularly met with the German minister of finance. Max Warburg advised, at the request of monarch Bernhard von Bülow, the German emperor on financial affairs. Additionally, he was head of the secret service. Five days after the armistice of November 11, 1918 he was delegated by the German government as a peace negotiator at a peace committee in Versailles. Max Warburg was also one of the directors of the Deutsche Reichsbank and had financial importances in the war between Japan and Russia and in the Moroccan crisis of 1911. Felix Warburg was familiarized with the diamond trade by his uncle, the well-known banker Oppenheim. He married Frieda Schiff and settled in New York. By marrying Schiff’s daughter he became partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Paul Warburg became acquainted with the youngest daughter of banker Salomon Loeb, Nina. It didn’t take long before they married. Paul Warburg left Germany and also became a partner with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York. During the First World War he was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, and in that position he had a controlling influence on the development of American financial policies. As a financial expert, he was often consulted by the government. The Warburgs invested millions of dollars in various projects which all served one purpose: one absolute world government. That’s how the war of Japan against Russia (1904-1905) was financed by the Warburgs bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co.[31] The purpose of this war was destroying the csardom. As said before, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James P. Warburg said: “We shall have a world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government

April 24 MORNING “And because of all this we make a sure covenant.” — Nehemiah 9:38 THERE are many occasions in our experience when we may very rightly, and with benefit, renew our covenant with God. After recovery from sickness when, like Hezekiah, we have had a new term of years added to our life, we may fitly do it. After any deliverance from trouble, when our joys bud forth anew, let us again visit the foot of the cross, and renew our consecration. Especially, let us do this after any sin which has grieved the Holy Spirit, or brought dishonour upon the cause of God; let us then look to that blood which can make us whiter than snow, and again offer ourselves unto the Lord. We should not only let our troubles confirm our dedication to God, but our prosperity should do the same. If we ever meet with occasions which deserve to be called “crowning mercies” then, surely, if He hath crowned us, we ought also to crown our God; let us bring forth anew all the jewels of the divine regalia which have been stored in the jewel-closet of our heart, and let our God sit upon the throne of our love, arrayed in royal apparel. If we would learn to profit by our prosperity, we should not need so much adversity. If we would gather from a kiss all the good it might confer upon us, we should not so often smart under the rod. Have we lately received some blessing which we little expected? Has the Lord put our feet in a large room? Can we sing of mercies multiplied? Then this is the day to put our hand upon the horns of the altar, and say, “Bind me here, my God; bind me here with cords, even for ever.” Inasmuch as we need the fulfillment of new promises from God, let us offer renewed prayers that our old vows may not be dishonoured. Let us this morning make with Him a sure covenant, because of the pains of Jesus which for the last month we have been considering with gratitude.

The villagers considered it lucky to make the New Year's first money transaction with her because she was a prosperous person.

The roar of the Twenties was only the faintest of echoes in those vast and empty hills—a mocking echo to Hill Country farmers who read of Coolidge Prosperity and the reduction in the work week to forty-eight hours and the bright new world of mass leisure, while they themselves were still working the seven-day-a-week, dawn-to-dark schedule their fathers and grandfathers had worked; a mocking echo to Hill Country housewives who read of the myriad new labor-saving devices (washing machines, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators) that had “freed” the housewife. Even if they had been able to afford such devices, they would not have been able to switch them on since the Hill Country was still without electricity.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was created in 1934, and, together with other checks and balances (including class-action suits), it helped build a sense of professional ethics among managers, auditors, and other market participants, leading to the creation of a securities market of unprecedented size, with unprecedented participation. At the peak of the market in March 2000, the market capitalization of U.S. stocks (as measured by the Wilshire index) was $17 trillion, or 1.7 times the value of American GDP. Half of all U.S. households owned equities. The world has changed a great deal, however, over the past sixty years. New forms of deception have been developed. In the go-go environment of the nineties while market values soared, human values eroded, and the playing field became terribly unlevel once again, contributing to the bubble that burst soon after the beginning of the new millennium. The

Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush. When Bush took office in 2001, the federal budget ran a surplus, the national debt stood at a generational low of 56 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and unemployment clocked in at 4 percent—which most economists consider the practical equivalent of full employment. The government’s tax revenue amounted to $2.1 trillion annually, of which $1 trillion came from personal income taxes and another $200 billion from corporate taxes. Military spending totaled $350 billion, or 3 percent of GDP—a low not seen since the late 1940s—and not one American had been killed in combat in almost a decade. Each dollar bought 1.06 euros, or 117 yen. Gasoline cost $1.50 per gallon. Twelve years after the Berlin Wall came down, the United States stood at the pinnacle of authority: the world’s only superpower, endowed with democratic legitimacy, the credible champion of the rule of law, the exemplar of freedom and prosperity.1 Eight years later the United States found itself in two distant “wars of choice”; military spending constituted 20 percent of all federal outlays and more than 5 percent of the gross domestic product. The final Bush budget was $1.4 trillion in the red and the national debt was out of control. The nation’s GDP had increased from $10.3 trillion to $$14.2 trillion during those eight years, but a series of tax cuts that Bush introduced had reduced the government’s revenue from personal income taxes by 9 percent and corporate taxes by 33 percent. Unemployment stood at 9.3 percent and was rising; two million Americans had lost their homes when a housing bubble burst, and new construction was at a standstill. The stock market had taken a nosedive, the dollar had lost much of its former value, and gasoline sold for $3.27 a gallon.2 The United States remained the world’s only superpower, but its reputation abroad was badly tarnished.

That Hamilton adhered to a code of gentlemanly honor was confirmed in yet another sideshow of the Benedict Arnold affair: the arrest of Major John André, adjutant general of the British Army and Arnold’s contact, traveling under the nom de guerre John Anderson. As he awaited a hearing to decide his fate, he was confined at a tavern in Tappan, New York. Though seven years younger than André, Hamilton developed a sympathy for the prisoner born of admiration and visited him several times. A letter that Hamilton later wrote to Laurens reveals his nearly worshipful attitude toward the elegant, cultured André, who was conversant with poetry, music, and painting. Hamilton identified with André’s misfortune in a personal manner, as if he saw his own worst nightmare embodied in his fate: To an excellent understanding, well improved by education and travel, [André] united a peculiar elegance of mind and manners and the advantage of a pleasing person. . . . By his merit, he had acquired the unlimited confidence of his general and was making a rapid progress in military rank and reputation. But in the height of his career, flushed with new hopes from the execution of a project the most beneficial to his party that could be devised, he was at once precipitated from the summit of prosperity and saw all the expectations of his ambition blasted and himself ruined.55

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

Galen Rupp matriculated as a freshman at the University of Oregon in 2004 and was performing well. There was only one problem—Salazar didn’t have any faith that the head track-and-field coach was the right collegiate mentor for his young protégé. So Salazar and Cook helped orchestrate the firing of coach Martin Smith, a quirky leader who many of the Nike loyalists didn’t think was the right fit for Rupp. In this effort they came to loggerheads with Bill Moos, the university’s athletic director. Knight and Nike had had a long and mutually prosperous twelve-year run with Moos in which the school’s athletic budget grew from $18.5 million to $41 million. But he didn’t want to fire his head coach, who was objectively good at his job. Knight threatened to withhold funding for the construction of the school’s new basketball arena until both coach and director were gone. Less than a week after he led the team to a sixth-place finish at the NCAA indoor championships, Smith was replaced by former Stanford coach Vin Lananna, a devout “Nike guy.” Moos would retire a year later, saying, “I created the monster that ate me.” Knight then made a donation of $100 million—the largest donation in Oregon history—to the university.

Line 4 - Sales (Director) Throughout the Golden Path Program we have gotten to know the 4th line as the great ‘friendmaker’. This gift comes from a truly genuine heart, and an easy warmth with people and community. This is the kind of person that emerges through the Venus Sequence, as those 4th lines release some of their inner restrictions and fears. To have a 4th line Vocation is to be a spokesperson. Such gifts are given to us to serve the whole, and although the 4th line wound may feel reluctant to engage at this level, they do have to overcome the fear that they inherited in their very early years. When we say that the 4th line is the most natural salesperson of all the lines, it does not mean only in business. The open 4th line is always selling their heart. They are here to create more openness, to help others overcome their fears, and to be examples of open-hearted communication. Like the 4th line, the 3rd line can be hugely successful in a business context. However, the role and style of the 4th line is very different. Their role is more like the director of the movie. They have to work closely with people, which involves diplomacy, conviction, and focus. The 4th line knows what the movie should look like, and their one-pointed drive will ensure that everyone else comes into harmony around that direction. The 4th line is comfortable taking control and guiding others to work towards a collective vision or ideal. This is where the notion of sales comes in - the 4th line can diffuse difficulties through the sheer strength and goodwill of its character. The 4th line also has a strong theme of aloneness as a counterbalance to its communal warmth. The inner strength and commitment of these people is rooted in this ability to stand alone and remain committed to one’s ideal, despite the odds. If you have a 4th line Vocation, then you are here to influence humanity. You are here to use your considerable gifts to open people’s hearts. If you happen to be selling a specific idea or product, then at the deepest level it is really an excuse to share your spirit with others. Sometimes you may also be here to deliver a rousing message that shakes people out of their comfort zones, and brings them to a new place inside themselves. Since the 4th line is so good at convincing people about things, it is for a very good reason. When this reason is for a higher purpose, then your whole life moves onto a higher level. There is nothing more powerful or authentic than when one of us stands alone in the world and expresses the love in our heart - whatever creative form that may take.

It was difficult to tell, for example, which countries were now on Japan’s side and which were not. Putting together what we read in the newspapers and the bits and pieces of information (or misinformation) we had gleaned from leaflets and the like, we formed a total picture of Japan and the war situation in 1959. We knew that the Great Japanese Empire had become a democratic Japan. We did not know when or how, but clearly there was now a democratic government, and the military organization had been reformed. It also appeared as though Japan was now engaged in cultural and economic relations with a large number of foreign countries. The Japanese government was still working for the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the new army was still engaged in military conflict with America. The new army seemed to be a modernized version of the old army, and we supposed that it must have assumed responsibility for the defense of East Asia as a whole, China included. China was now a communist country under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung: there seemed little doubt but that Mao had come to power with the support of Japan. No doubt he was now cooperating with Japan to implement the co-prosperity sphere. Although there was nothing in the newpapers about this, it was only logical that the American secret service would have eliminated any mention of it in preparing the newspapers for us.

The basic math suggests everyone can be saved. Earth can carry about eleven billion humans in peace, prosperity, and harmony. The math looks like this: 1. Gaming affords a 20:1 increase in neural plasticity. 2. Immersive gaming ups that another 30:1. 3. Social Rewards systems another 10:1. 4. Roblux has already passed Twitter in popularity and time on the platform. 5. The trends all indicate Immersive Gaming will overtake Social Media in persons under 60 within ten years as the preferred communication vehicle. 6. Companion Ai affords marked improvements in new pattern uptake rates. 7. 99.9% of people are followers.

Dear Earth, I hear you whispering in my ear. The crisp breeze is telling me a story, and I am so intrigued. The breeze and the gentle wind are telling me that you all are lucky. I agree with them because you have a mother who cares deeply about you so much! You have four seasons, and Mother Nature takes her time to prepare you for the changes to come in such a gentle and comfortable way. I imagine her smiling as she gently pushes the leaves as they dance in the wind. She caresses the leaves while they slowly turn different colors as they change, falling calmly. Fall harvest prepares you for the winter days ahead as you peacefully sleep. Spring awakens you from your well-needed rest. You joyfully bloom with so much grace while the bees playfully enjoy the flowers and the birds sing as the sun rises. By the time summer comes, you are wide awake, enjoying the extended daylight. As fall peacefully tiptoes in, you prepare yourself for a new and prosperous year to come. Unlike you, all four seasons in my life are always heavier, year after year. Every day of my life is filled with uncertainties. I am free-falling, not knowing where I am going to end up. Although everything is closing in on me, I keep going. Most times, it is hard, but I try to keep a little hope and press on. However, when things do not work out accordingly, I replace hope with a higher perspective of fear and uncertainty. As I admire the soul of the earth and the Grandfather Tree, I am confident that I can try to believe again. We shall see. Longing to be the soul of the earth.

neoliberal capitalism. A self-obsessed, self-seeking form of capitalism that has normalised indifference, made a virtue out of selfishness and diminished the importance of compassion and care. A ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’, ‘hustle harder’ form of capitalism, that has denied the pivotal role both public services and local community have historically played in helping people prosper and has instead perpetuated the narrative that our destinies are solely in our own hands. It’s not that we weren’t ever lonely before. It’s that by redefining our relationships as transactions, recasting citizens in the role of consumers and engendering ever greater income and wealth divides, forty years of neoliberal capitalism has, at best, marginalised values such as solidarity, community, togetherness and kindness.4 At worst, it has cast these values summarily aside. We need to embrace a new form of politics – one with care and compassion at its very heart. The

Ask the Universe how to implement a belief structure that better promotes well-being and prosperity consciousness. When I did this, I received a magical lineup of a year of transformation, from landing a new job to landing a scholarship to the inaugural Survivor Wealth Conference hosted by FreeFrom, an organization that empowers survivors of violence with the healing, legal, financial, and business support needed for empowered independence.

In most parts of colonial Africa, slavery continued well into the twentieth century. In Sierra Leone, for example, it was only in 1928 that slavery was finally abolished, even though the capital city of Freetown was originally established in the late eighteenth century as a haven for slaves repatriated from the Americas. It then became an important base for the British antislavery squadron and a new home for freed slaves rescued from slave ships captured by the British navy. Even with this symbolism slavery lingered in Sierra Leone for 130 years. Liberia, just south of Sierra Leone, was likewise founded for freed American slaves in the 1840s. Yet there, too, slavery lingered into the twentieth century; as late as the 1960s, it was estimated that one-quarter of the labor force were coerced, living and working in conditions close to slavery.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR’s cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation’s great names. Then he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer. “If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy,” he said. Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door. “These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers,” FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith “in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails. “How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms?

For two years the battles raged across the lands, one side fighting for conquest, the other for freedom. Othium-powered weapons wreaked havoc on defending armies. The red fire was hard to resist, but the white light was stronger. Gradually the tide turned and the freedom fighters regained control of their lands and their cities. The stage was set for the final battle. The opposing forces met outside the Ackar city of Erbea in 1302 and the forces of good won the day. The alchemist escaped and was about to take his revenge at a wedding ceremony when he was bound by the white light. All that remained was his heart, or maybe his soul, encapsulated in a piece of red rock. Dewar the Third succeeded his father and the new king promised a time of peace and prosperity. History would call him the Peacemaker. Now, two hundred years on, a new Emperor seeks to rule the world, while an illegitimate son sets out on a path towards revenge and a thief begins to learn his trade. It is time for the alchemist to return.

Active demonization of the protest movement had already begun while it was still limited to Punjab. At the end of November, when the farmers’ march was finally stopped on the borders of Delhi, the rhetoric against them was ratcheted up. The BJP general secretary in Uttarakhand on 29 November 2020 called the protestors pro-Pakistan, pro-Khalistan and anti-national. Gujarat’s deputy chief minister called the farmers anti-national elements, terrorists, Khalistanis, Communists and pro-China people having pizza and pakodi. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Chouhan wrote an article blaming the protests on vested interests. Law and justice minister Ravishankar Prasad associated them with the mythical ‘tukde-tukde’ gang. The BJP vice president in Himachal Pradesh called the protests the work of anti-nationals and middlemen. The same day, the party’s spokesman in the state called the protestors miscreants who were the same people behind Shaheen Bagh. On 17 December, the BJP chief minister in Tripura, Biplab Deb, said Maoists were behind the protests, while Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed Opposition parties were using farmers to fuel unrest in the country because they were unhappy about the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. He also blamed communism and those who wanted to promote disorder and didn’t want to see India prosper. BJP national spokesman Sambit Patra called the farmers extremists in the garb of food-providers, another spokesman called them terrorists, and BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya called them anarchists and insurrectionists. On 17 January 2021, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh said the protests were backed by anti-national powers. A BJP MLA from Gujarat wrote to Amit Shah asking him to hang or shoot the protestors. Even in March 2021, the slander of calling the thousands of protestors fake farmers and terrorists continued. The New York Times reported that this demonisation cleaved to a pattern from Modi’s playbook: first the accusations of foreign infiltration, then police complaints against protest leaders, then the arrests of protesters and journalists, then the blocking of internet access in places where demonstrators gathered. All this was akin to India’s actions in Kashmir, and against the protestors of Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere

Look more closely at these prosperous ideopolises and the picture becomes even more familiar. The symbolic embodiment of all this innovative postindustrial economic activity was none other than Frederick Dutton’s countercultural hero, hymned now as the very embodiment of the New Economy. Youth radicalism became the language in which the winners assured us that they cared about our individuality and that all their fine new digital products were designed strictly to liberate the world. Remember? “Burn down business-as-usual,” screamed a typical management text of the year 2000 called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Set up barricades. Cripple the tanks. Topple the statues of heroes too long dead into the street.… Sound familiar? You bet it does. And the message has been the same all along, from Paris in ’68 to the Berlin Wall, from Warsaw to Tiananmen Square: Let the kids rock and roll!3 The connection between counterculture and corporate power was a typical assertion of the New Economy era, and what it implied was that rebellion was not about overturning elites, it was about encouraging business enterprise. I myself mocked this idea in voluminous detail at the time. But it did not wane with the dot-com crash; indeed, it has never retreated at all. From Burning Man to Apple’s TV commercials, it is all over the place today. Think of the rock stars who showed up for Facebook billionaire Sean Parker’s wedding in Big Sur, or the rock ’n’ roll museum founded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen in Seattle, or the transformation of San Francisco, hometown of the counterculture, into an upscale suburb of Silicon Valley. Wherever you once found alternative and even adversarial culture, today you find people of merit and money and status. And, of course, you also find Democrats.

Fall River, an old mill town fifty miles south of Boston. Median household income in that city is $33,000, among the lowest in the state; unemployment is among the highest, 15 percent in March 2014, nearly five years after the recession ended. Twenty-three percent of Fall River’s inhabitants live in poverty. The city lost its many fabric-making concerns years ago and with them it lost its reason for being. People have been deserting the place for decades.14 Many of the empty factories in which their ancestors worked are still standing, however. Solid nineteenth-century structures of granite or brick, these huge boxes dominate the city visually—there always seems to be one or two of them in the vista, contrasting painfully with whatever colorful plastic fast-food joint has been slapped up next door. Most of these old factories are boarded up, unmistakable emblems of hopelessness right up to the roof. But the ones that have been successfully repurposed are in some ways even worse, filled as they often are with enterprises offering cheap suits or help with drug addiction. A clinic in the hulk of one abandoned mill has a sign on the window reading, simply, “Cancer & Blood.” The effect of all this is to remind you with every prospect that this is a place and a way of life from which the politicians have withdrawn their blessing. Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failure you see on every corner in Fall River. This is a place where affluence never returns—not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country’s leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives, and professionals. Even the city’s one real hope for new employment opportunities—an Amazon warehouse that is in the planning stages—will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.15

The first is that we’re living in a time of astonishing progress with digital technologies—those that have computer hardware, software, and networks at their core. These technologies are not brand-new; businesses have been buying computers for more than half a century, and Time magazine declared the personal computer its “Machine of the Year” in 1982. But just as it took generations to improve the steam engine to the point that it could power the Industrial Revolution, it’s also taken time to refine our digital engines.

Foreign-born people make up less than 13 percent of the country’s population in recent years, but between 1995 and 2005 more than 25 percent of all new engineering and technology companies had at least one immigrant cofounder, according to research by Wadhwa, Saxenian, and their colleagues.32 These companies in total had more than $52 billion in 2005 sales, and employed almost 450,000 people.

The emergence of scientific inquiry had already begun this process, but Weber’s emphasis on the role of Protestantism captures a significant factor. Prior to the Reformation, southern Europe was economically more advanced than northern Europe. During the three centuries after the Reformation, capitalism emerged, at first mainly in Protestant countries. In this cultural context, economic accumulation was no longer despised—it was taken as a sign of divine favor. Protestant Europe manifested a remarkable economic dynamism, moving it ahead of a Catholic Europe that had previously been more prosperous. Throughout the first 150 years of the Industrial Revolution, industrial development took place mainly in the Protestant regions of Europe and the Protestant-dominated regions of the New World, and by 1940 the people of Protestant countries were on average 40 percent richer than the people of Catholic countries. Martin Luther urged people to read the Bible, and Protestantism encouraged literacy and printing, both of which inspired economic development and scientific study (Becker and Wössmann, 2009). And Protestant missionaries promoted literacy far more than Catholic missionaries

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1880, Roosevelt won a seat in the New York assembly the next year. He spent the decade publishing a number of books, both about his adventures in the American West and on history. He adored Big Sky country; while in the Dakotas in the summer of 1886, he gave a Fourth of July address in Dickinson that weaved together his sundry passions. “Like all Americans,” he said, “I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads, and herds of cattle, too, big factories, steamboats and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

Even with displacement and massive data collection, productivity growth from new technologies can sometimes increase demand for workers and boost their earnings. But benefits for workers appear only when new technologies substantially increase productivity. Today, this is a serious concern because AI has so far brought a lot of so-so automation, with limited productivity benefits.

First footing is a tradition that the first person over the doorstep on the new year is meant to bring gifts that set the household up for good fortune in the coming year.” “Ah, okay, so what did you bring?” “A coin, bread, salt, coal, and a good whisky. For prosperity, food, flavor, warmth, and good cheer,

The gaudy, goofy 1920s, the dazzling “Coolidge-Hoover Prosperity,” the wild chasing of the dollar, the mania to get rich quick on the stock market, all the frenzy for the tinsel of life, all the swollen confidence of Americans that the immediate future was bright and paved with gold, had come to a precipitate end a few days before my boat docked in New York. The mighty stock market had crashed, wiping out the savings of millions and the fortunes of many. The Depression, which would become the worst in our history, had begun.

A long silence followed Dickinson’s address. Would no one answer? Finally, fubsy, garrulous John Adams rose. He spoke extemporaneously. There was no need for notes. He had made the same speech, more or less, for a year. Jefferson, perhaps used to a different style of oratory in Virginia, later said that Adams was “not graceful or elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but others would speak of “the magic of his eloquence,” his “genuine eloquence,” his “resistless eloquence”; it was even said that his speech was “higher than all “eloquence.” Calm, assured, Adams nevertheless began by wishing aloud for the deftness of the great orators of antiquity. Proceeding in a tone that he later characterized as courteous, he reiterated the proindependence case, an argument every bit as familiar as the one that Dickinson had just presented. Separation would be beneficial to America. The new nation could chart its own course. Peace and prosperity would be the great rewards of independence. Unlike Dickinson’s remarks, resonating with a fear of the unknown, Adams’s muted address rang with palpable contempt for the present while exulting in the possibilities of the future.16

For the overall economy, the official GDP numbers miss the value of new goods and services added to the tune of about 0.4 percent of additional growth each year, according to economist Robert Gordon.*

Here is what I believe is still the truth of our country, one that we do not acknowledge enough: do not underestimate the strides we have made. South Africa today is a very different country to the one we entered in 1994. It will be even better in 21 years’ time if we use these racist outpourings to build a better South Africa. But we need to take care, for we remain a tinderbox. If we do not quickly resolve the structural challenges facing South Africa – unemployment, inequality and poor educational outcomes – then these eruptions of race will take on a whole new hue. We will become a Zimbabwe, where the black poor will point at the prosperous whites, and act in a manner that will set light to the tinder. This is an urgent problem. Despite the progress made over the past two decades, South Africa remains a country of white haves and black have-nots. This is a problem we need to stare in the face if we are to begin to build this country. This is not a conversation to have in order to apportion blame. We are past that. It is a conversation to have in order for us to move faster to lift up the poorest of the poor, to bring hope into every home.

To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.” We can see this sequence in two of the most revered speeches in American history. In his famous inaugural address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened by acknowledging the current state of affairs. Promising to “speak the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” he described the dire straits of the Great Depression, only then turning to what could be, unveiling his hope of creating new jobs and forecasting, “This great nation . . . will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” When we recall Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, epic speech, what stands out is a shining image of a brighter future. Yet in his 16-minute oration, it wasn’t until the eleventh minute that he first mentioned his dream. Before delivering hope for change, King stressed the unacceptable conditions of the status quo. In his introduction, he pronounced that, despite the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, “one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” Having established urgency through depicting the suffering that was, King turned to what could be: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” He devoted more than two thirds of the speech to these one-two punches, alternating between what was and what could be by expressing indignation at the present and hope about the future. According to sociologist Patricia Wasielewski, “King articulates the crowd’s feelings of anger at existing inequities,” strengthening their “resolve that the situation must be changed.” The audience was only prepared to be moved by his dream of tomorrow after he had exposed the nightmare of today.

For many country folk, the railway was Paris. Its gleaming tracks brought tales of success, prosperity and realised dreams to the provinces, qualities with which the capital was increasingly seen as synonymous. For a countrywoman like Madeleine, short on money and luck, overworked, and whose future appeared only to offer more of the same, those dazzling steel tracks represented a chance. All at once, resignation turned to hope. Suddenly, Madeleine could see clearly. If she stayed in Bessines, her future was mapped out – and it was bleak. But if she boarded the train to Paris, anything was possible – perhaps even happiness. Jeanne and Widow Guimbaud were horrified when, not five years after Marie-Clémentine’s birth, Madeleine announced that her mind was made up: she was going to start a new life in Paris.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If

So many of us are hungry to restore a collective sense of pride in our nation. And we have what it takes to do so. Yet many people have become numb, even accepting, to the shockingly cruel rhetoric we sometimes hear from our neighbors and leaders. But we should remember there are more Americans who speak out against intolerance than those who spew it. Just because anger and fear are louder than kindness and optimism does not mean that anger and fear must prevail, or define a new American identity. The negativity that streams through our media and social feeds is a false—or at least incomplete—narrative. Every time harsh Tweets dominate news cycles, we can remind ourselves of Mary Poole’s empathy in Montana, or the compassion of Rebecca Crowder in West Virginia, or Bryan Stevenson’s adamant calls for justice in our courts. Countless acts of dignity are unfolding offline, away from earshot, and they matter. We already have what it takes to rise above divisiveness and the vitriol of a hurtful few and steer the country toward an even better “us.” Not so we can be great again, but so we can become an even stronger, safer, more fair, prosperous, and inclusive version of ourselves. Those who champion common-sense problem solving, and there are legions of us, are eager to keep fixing, reinventing, improving. In these pages, I tried to amplify our existing potential to eclipse dysfunction by recounting Mark Pinsky’s collaborative spirit, for example, and Michael Crow’s innovative bent, and Brandon Dennison’s entrepreneurial gumption, and Dakota Keyes’ steadfast belief in her young students, and in herself. They are reminders that the misplaced priorities of President Trump and his administration do not represent the priorities of the majority of Americans. And while there are heroes who hold office, members of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, have been complicit in the fracturing of trust that has plagued our political system for years now. In fact, I believe that the American people as a whole are better than our current political class.

They had not learnt the great lesson, that trade prospers best when it is left alone by law-makers. They were inexperienced in making laws, and charmed with their new power, thought it would be easy to make the world go rightly by making laws about everything. Continually the laws when made were found to have quite different results to what the law-makers had expected, and had to be repealed the next year.

The great expansion of public institutions in America began in the early years of the twentieth century, when progressive reformers championed the idea that we all benefit from public goods. Excellent schools, roads, parks, playgrounds, and transit systems were meant to knit the new industrial society together, create better citizens, and generate widespread prosperity. Education, for example, was less a personal investment than a public good, improving the entire community and ultimately the nation. This logic was expanded upon in subsequent decades—through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The “greatest generation” was bound together by mutual needs and common threats. It invested in strong public institutions as bulwarks against, in turn, mass poverty, fascism, and communism. Yet increasingly over the past three decades, “we’re all in it together” has been replaced by “you’re on your own.” Global capital has outsourced American jobs abroad. As I’ve noted, the very rich have taken home almost unprecedented portions of total earnings while paying lower and lower tax rates. A new wave of immigrants has hit our shores, only to be condemned by demagogues who forget we are mostly a nation of immigrants. Not even Democrats any longer use the phrase “the public good.” Public goods are now, at best, “public investments.” Public institutions have morphed into “public-private partnerships,” or, for Republicans, “vouchers.

If you look at history, you see that human flourishing exploded beginning about the time two things first appeared: the new American republic and free market capitalism. If you plot the history of human prosperity going back over a thousand years, what you see is a flat line hovering just above zero until the late eighteenth century; then the line turns upward, and it hasn’t turned back.

Happy New Year I am wishing you and the loved ones prosperity, more opportunities, good health, good relationship, good partner, good job and more years, more money, more blessings, more fun ,more peace and happiness. May the Lord grant you the desire of your heart , May all your hard work pay off and all your dreams come through.

Money, like the cosmos, has become relativistic and reversible at will. The three hundred years of Newtonian prosperity having come to an end, the new multiverse seems unable to repeat the miracle of a golden age of capitalism. It is now widely held that citizens are essentially owned by the state on which they depend. Slavery, in the form of servitude to governments, is making a comeback as money transactions become less trustworthy.

it becomes clearer that modern culture has derived its basis from Ancient Egypt, though the credit is not often given, nor the integrity of the practices maintained in the new religions. This is another important reason to study Ancient Egyptian Philosophy, to discover the principles which allowed their civilization to prosper over a period of thousands of years in order to bring our systems of government, religion and social structures to a harmony with ourselves, humanity and with nature.

Thus began the Shire-reckoning, for the year of the crossing of the Brandywine (as the Hobbits turned the name) became Year One of the Shire, and all later dates were reckoned from it.* At once the western Hobbits fell in love with their new land, and they remained there, and soon passed once more out of the history of Men and of Elves. While there was still a king they were in name his subjects, but they were, in fact, ruled by their own chieftains and meddled not at all with events in the world outside. To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained, though no tales of Men record it. But in that war the North Kingdom ended; and then the Hobbits took the land for their own, and they chose from their own chiefs a Thain to hold the authority of the king that was gone. There for a thousand years they were little troubled by wars, and they prospered and multiplied after the Dark Plague (S.R. 37) until the disaster of the Long Winter and the famine that followed it. Many thousands then perished, but the Days of Dearth (1158–60) were at the time of this tale long past and the Hobbits had again become accustomed to plenty. The land was rich and kindly, and though it had long been deserted when they entered it, it had before been well tilled, and there the king had once had many farms, cornlands, vineyards, and woods.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

Historical Setting A reference to “Jonah son of Amittai” in 2Ki 14:25 places the setting for the book of Jonah between 790 and 760 BC. Jonah therefore serves in the generation just before Amos and Hosea, at the beginning of classical prophecy in Israel. During the time of Jonah, the reign of Jeroboam II (793–753 BC) achieved unparalleled prosperity and military success in the history of Israel’s divided monarchy. The Arameans were the only hindrance to territorial expansion. Assyria, in a period of decline, was preoccupied with internal security. This background is important for it shows that the northern kingdom of Israel at this time was near the top, not the bottom, in the realm of international politics. This situation was a reversal from a century earlier when, under Shalmaneser III, the Assyrian Empire had extended its control into the west, exercising authority over Aram, Israel, Judah, and many others. The end of his reign, however, saw revolt by several Assyrian centers (including Nineveh) from 826–820 BC. His son, Shamshi-Adad V, subdued the rebellion, but Assyrian control over the west weakened considerably. Shamshi-Adad V died about 811 BC and left as heir to the throne his young son, Adadnirari III. Until the boy came of age the country was ruled by Shamshi-Adad’s widow, Sammuramat, who retained extensive control until her death. Adadnirari reigned until 783 BC. His city of residence and capital was not Nineveh, but Calah. He was succeeded by three sons: Shalmaneser IV, Ashur-Dan III and Ashurnirari V, respectively. This was a period of practical anarchy. Particularly notable is the series of rebellions between 763 and 758. These were led by disaffected officials who show evidence of usurping royal prerogatives. In such a political climate, a prophecy proclaiming the imminent fall of Nineveh would be taken quite seriously. With the accession of Tiglath-Pileser III in 745 BC, a new dynasty began that established Assyrian supremacy for a century. Tiglath-Pileser III was succeeded by Shalmaneser V, Sargon II and, finally, Sennacherib, who enlarged Nineveh and made it the capital of the Assyrian Empire more than 50 years after the time of Jonah. The importance of this information for the study of the book of Jonah is the understanding that at the time of Jonah, Assyria had not been a threat to Israel for a generation, and it would be no threat for a generation to come. In addition, when Jonah was sent to Nineveh, he was being sent not to the capital city of a vast empire but to one of the provincial centers of a struggling nation. Some would consider this evidence that the book of Jonah was written several centuries after the Assyrian Empire had come and gone by an author unfamiliar with the details of history. Preferably, it could suggest that God had chosen to send Jonah to Nineveh in anticipation of the role it would eventually play.

The majority of prosperous Florentine women did not breastfeed at all. Instead, their husbands made agreements with the spouses of the wet nurses who took over this task. Fathers were concerned that their wives’ milk might be polluted by having sex and, above all, by a new pregnancy. They wished however to become fathers again soon, as having several children increased their chances of having future heirs. It was important for men’s social status to have many legitimate offspring, whereas an intimate mother–child relationship in early years seemed to many of them to be of secondary importance. The rich fathers expected the parents of poorer families to abstain from sexual intercourse and inform them immediately if the wet nurse got pregnant again, which would result in the termination of the agreement.

Because the general prospects of the enterprise carry major weight in the establishment of market prices, it is natural for the security analyst to devote a great deal of attention to the economic position of the industry and of the individual company in its industry. Studies of this kind can go into unlimited detail. They are sometimes productive of valuable insights into important factors that will be operative in the future and are insufficiently appreciated by the current market. Where a conclusion of that kind can be drawn with a fair degree of confidence, it affords a sound basis for investment decisions. Our own observation, however, leads us to minimize somewhat the practical value of most of the industry studies that are made available to investors. The material developed is ordinarily of a kind with which the public is already fairly familiar and that has already exerted considerable influence on market quotations. Rarely does one find a brokerage-house study that points out, with a convincing array of facts, that a popular industry is heading for a fall or that an unpopular one is due to prosper. Wall Street’s view of the longer future is notoriously fallible, and this necessarily applies to that important part of its investigations which is directed toward the forecasting of the course of profits in various industries. We must recognize, however, that the rapid and pervasive growth of technology in recent years is not without major effect on the attitude and the labors of the security analyst. More so than in the past, the progress or retrogression of the typical company in the coming decade may depend on its relation to new products and new processes, which the analyst may have a chance to study and evaluate in advance. Thus there is doubtless a promising area for effective work by the analyst, based on field trips, interviews with research men, and on intensive technological investigation on his own. There are hazards connected with investment conclusions derived chiefly from such glimpses into the future, and not supported by presently demonstrable value. Yet there are perhaps equal hazards in sticking closely to the limits of value set by sober calculations resting on actual results. The investor cannot have it both ways. He can be imaginative and play for the big profits that are the reward for vision proved sound by the event; but then he must run a substantial risk of major or minor miscalculation. Or he can be conservative, and refuse to pay more than a minor premium for possibilities as yet unproved; but in that case he must be prepared for the later contemplation of golden opportunities foregone.

During the building of the railway, the people for the first time felt that the easy, carefree gains of the first years after the occupation existed no longer. For some years past the prices of goods and everyday necessities had been leaping upward. They leapt upward but never fell back and then, after a shorter or a longer period, leapt up again. It was true there was still money to be made and wages were high, but they were always at least twenty per cent less than real needs. This was some mad and artful game which more and more embittered the lives of more and more people, but in which they could do nothing for it depended on something far away, on those same unattainable and unknown sources whence had come also the prosperity of the first years. Many men who had grown rich immediately after the occupation, some fifteen or twenty years before, were now poor and their sons had to work for others. True, there were new men who had made money, but even in their hands the money played like quick-silver, like some spell by which a man might easily find himself with empty hands and tarnished reputation. It became more and more evident that the good profits and easier life which they had brought had their counterpart and were only pieces in some great and mysterious game of which no one knew all the rules and none could foresee the outcome. And yet everyone played his part in this game, some with a smaller some with a greater role, but all with permanent risk.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckon us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our

It is no coincidence that the new phase of American debt imperialism has also been accompanied by the rise of the evangelical right, who—in defiance of almost all previously existing Christian theology—have enthusiastically embraced the doctrine of “supply-side economics,” that creating money and effectively giving it to the rich is the most Biblically appropriate way to bring about national prosperity.

20 years of emptiness cannot define a lifetime of possibility. God's plan is to prosper, not to harm, and sometimes that means sending a new chapter of love, care, and affection to a family who has been living in the shadows of neglect. Love is a basic necessity, and God's desire is to provide an overflow of it, even in the most unexpected ways.

person who did them wrong. Quit feeding off that dead food. You can’t put poison in your spirit and live a faith-filled life. Let it go. That’s over and done. Feed on live food. The healthiest foods you can put in your spirit are God’s promises. “I am blessed and cannot be cursed. Whatever I touch will prosper and succeed. Thanks be to God who always causes me to triumph. This is going to be an abundant, bountiful, flourishing year.

This is what happened after mills were introduced in medieval England. As new machines were deployed and productivity rose, feudal lords exploited the peasantry more intensively. The working hours of labourers rose, with less time left to tend to their own crops, and their real incomes and household consumption fell.

And it wasn’t just the native-born children who felt the siren song of financial independence being sung in America. There was a steady flow of immigrants, although the number varied from year to year, climbing steadily after 1750, as word of America’s prosperity and opportunity spread. To raise the cost of their passage, these people were willing to accept a limited term of slavery as indentured servants. In 1767 Sir Henry Moore, royal governor of New York, explained that “as soon as the time stipulated in their indentures is expired, they immediately quit their masters and get a small tract of land, in settling which for the first three or four years they lead miserable lives, and in the most abject poverty. But all this is patiently borne and submitted to with the greatest cheerfulness, the satisfaction of being land holders smooths every difficulty and makes them prefer this manner of living to that comfortable subsistence which they could procure for themselves and their families by working at the trades in which they were brought up.

During an intense, six-year period under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City proved to itself, the nation, and the world that almost everything that was assumed about how urban streets operate was wrong. Real-world experience showed that reducing the number of lanes on carefully selected streets or closing them entirely not only provided pedestrian space and breathed new life into neighborhoods, but also actually improved traffic. Simply painting part of a street to make it into a plaza, bike, or bus lane not only made the street safer, it also improved traffic and increased bike and pedestrian foot traffic and helped local businesses to prosper.

Shakespeare was well off but scarcely a titan of finance. And it appears that no matter how prosperous he got, he never stopped being tightfisted. In the same year that he bought New Place, he was found guilty in London of defaulting on a tax payment of 5 shillings; the following year he defaulted again.

In challenging myself to not shop for an entire year, I was setting myself up either for failure or for the most prosperous year of my life, and I’m happy to say it was the latter. Throughout the entire journey, I was forced to slow down, discover my triggers to spend and to overconsume, and face and change my bad habits. I gave up the things marketers try to convince us we should want in life: the newest and greatest of everything, anything that can fix our problems, and whatever is in style. I exchanged it all for basic necessities and, after a year of not being able to buy anything new, realized that was all I needed. That was all anybody needed.

Agra-Etawah Toll Road Project: Transforming Uttar Pradesh's Infrastructure Landscape Spanning an impressive 124.52 kilometers, the Agra-Etawah Toll Road Project signifies a monumental stride in reshaping Uttar Pradesh's infrastructure network. Designed to significantly cut travel times and boost regional trade, this essential corridor between Agra and Etawah also promises to catalyze economic growth across the state. Amid India’s rapidly advancing infrastructure endeavors, the Agra-Etawah Toll Road stands as a beacon of modernization. At the helm of this ambitious initiative is Modern Road Creators, a leading name in highway and expressway construction. Their role in this project underscores India’s dedication to creating world-class infrastructure. A Marvel of Engineering Excellence Modern Road Creators’ involvement in the Agra-Etawah Toll Road highlights their expertise in delivering cutting-edge infrastructure solutions. From meticulous planning and advanced surveying techniques to flawless execution, every stage reflects their unwavering commitment to quality, precision, and operational excellence. Modern Road Creators: Pioneers of Progress Unmatched Infrastructure Expertise With extensive experience in transforming India’s landscape, Modern Road Creators bring unparalleled knowledge and skill to the Agra-Etawah project. Their dedicated team ensures adherence to the highest standards of safety, durability, and quality, setting a new benchmark for road construction in the region. Commitment to Sustainability Environmental stewardship is central to Modern Road Creators’ approach. By utilizing eco-friendly construction methods and sustainable practices, the Agra-Etawah project minimizes ecological impact while fostering a balance with nature. Shaping a More Connected Future As the Agra-Etawah Toll Road nears completion, it promises to transform the region into a more interconnected and economically vibrant hub. By championing innovation and integrity, Modern Road Creators are paving the way for a unified and prosperous future for Uttar Pradesh and beyond. Conclusion: Building India’s Future Modern Road Creators play a pivotal role in driving transformative projects like the Agra-Etawah Toll Road. Their contributions go beyond infrastructure, creating employment opportunities, strengthening communities, and accelerating India’s growth trajectory. As this project unfolds, its impact is poised to resonate for generations, reinforcing its place in India’s development journey. Key Project Highlights Length: Six-lane highway spanning 124.52 kilometers Total Road Coverage: 750 kilometers New Road Construction: 84.725 kilometers Bridges: Three major and 30 minor bridges Railway Structures: Seven railway bridges and seven overhead structures Noise Barriers: Stretching 3.08 kilometers Lighting: Road illumination over 44.68 kilometers Project Cost: ₹3,244 crore Concession Period: 24 years

In fact, a thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing abundantly clear: there is nothing automatic about new technologies bringing widespread prosperity. Whether they do or not is an economic, social, and political choice.

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Imagine two incidents of theft. In the first case, a bandit takes something valuable from someone else. Deprived of this important source of wealth, the victim and his family live a life of relative destitution, even as the thief and his family flourish, with nary a thought about the crime that served as the basis of their wealth, nor the fate of those they stole from. Eventually the perpetrator and his family forget about the theft altogether and come to view their wealth as legitimate. In the second case, a bandit also takes something precious from someone else, likewise leaving the victim and his family in a state of relative destitution, even as the robber and his family prosper. But in the second case, the bandit constantly acknowledges that his own prosperity was achieved at the victim’s expense. He explicitly and repeatedly recognizes the state of privation that the victim and his family live in as a result of the crime. He publicly praises the victim at every turn. Yet he nonetheless declines to return the stolen resources. Instead, he continues to actively leverage the seized assets in order to build his own wealth, but incessantly laments the poor state of the victim and his family, and the horror of the crime that was done to them, and insists that someone really ought to do something to help “those people” out. The second scenario describes the practice of land acknowledgments, which have grown increasingly popular in symbolic capitalist spaces in recent years (while the first scenario depicts how the people who do make land acknowledgments describe those who don’t; I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is worse). One stated purpose of land acknowledgments is to show respect to those who have been dispossessed. But of course, precisely as a function of that very dispossession, there are almost never people from the affected tribes “in the room” to receive these acknowledgments—particularly in symbolic capitalist spaces (where this practice is most pronounced). Instead, these acknowledgments typically consist of non-Indigenous people virtue signaling exclusively to other non-Indigenous people, who nod along approvingly, leading all in attendance to feel good about how enlightened they are … and then everyone gets on with business as usual.

Political developments in the former Soviet republics were set to benefit people of a nationalist persuasion. This was a completely natural state of affairs and typically occurs after the collapse of an empire. If you wanted your party to get more votes, you could gain electoral support by saying something along the lines of "Russian occupiers, get out of our land and go back to your Moscow." It was not that all local people turned out to hate Russians, just that the U.S.S.R. had for so long suppressed every manifestation of nationalism, trying to brainwash everybody with its hypocritical nonsense about the friendship of the peoples and how the fifteen republics were fifteen sisters. It was inevitable that the pendulum would swing in the opposite direction. Nationalism became all the rage. The years of having everything controlled from Moscow led to a wholesale rejection of anything that seemed like the legacy of empire. "We have finally broken free from the dictatorship of Russia, and anyone who lives in our country and looks to Russia is a fifth columnist and an enemy." That was the real geopolitical disaster, but it was only much later that everyone realized it. The new leaders, among whom Putin and his ilk were in the third or fourth tier, totally ignored the problem of Russians stranded outside the country. A huge number of conflicts could have been averted and lives saved if the government of the time had proposed even the most basic programs for the return of Russians to whatever was still Russian territory. Naturally, nobody would have been in any hurry to return there from the prosperous Baltic States, and in that respect other approaches would have been needed. But to the perplexed questions of those living in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and many other republics-Where do we belong now? What are we supposed to do?-there should have been some answer. It is extraordinary that even now, when the issue of "Russophobia" and the infringement of the rights of Russians has become practically the top priority on the Kremlin's agenda, everything remains on the level of barefaced, hypocritical demagoguery, behind which there is not the slightest constructive action. Somebody born into a Russian family outside Russia will be driven crazy negotiating their way through the bureaucratic machinery before obtaining citizenship of their own country. In 2008, I proposed a bill stipulating that anyone who had in their ancestry a Russian, or a representative of another of the indigenous peoples of Russia, would automatically be entitled to citizenship on presentation of any document confirming that national identity. It might be the birth certificate of a grandparent. There was nothing revolutionary about the suggestion. It was analogous to laws that exist in Germany and Israel. Neither that proposal nor dozens of similar ones were accepted. The current regime prefers endlessly to talk about oppressed Russians while doing nothing to help them.

The Soviet Union was amazingly effective at producing propaganda and telling lies, but what was needed here was the ability to build houses in a hurry, and that it was something it could barely do and certainly couldn't do well.... The question most puzzling even to my ten-year-old self was why the authorities were lying like this when everybody around me knew the truth. What kind of pathetic attempt at deception was this? If you are going to lie, you should at least be expecting to benefit from it in some way. You claim to be sick and you don't have to go to school; that at least makes sense. But what was the point of these lies? Describing the way the Soviet Union worked, Vasily Shukshin, a Russian writer, memorably said, "Lies, lies, lies . . . Lies as redemption, lies as atonement for guilt, lies as a goal achieved, lies as a career, as prosperity, as medals, as an apartment . . . Lies! The whole of Russia was covered with lies, like a scab." An excellent description of the situation. If the Chernobyl disaster had never happened, I would probably have heard less talk of politics. It would certainly have been less personal, and my political views would have been slightly different. But things happened as they did, and many years later, when I was a grown man, I watched the newly appointed acting president of Russia, forty-seven-year-old Vladimir Putin, on television, far from sharing any enthusiasm about the country's new "energetic leader," I kept thinking, He never stops lying, just as it was in my childhood.

Early on, there was even a hope that online communications could generate a new public sphere, one where people from even more diverse backgrounds than in local politics could freely interact and exchange opinions. Unfortunately, online democracy is not in line with the business models of leading tech companies and the AI illusion. In fact, it is diametrically opposed to a technocratic approach, which maintains that many important decisions are too complex for regular people. The vibe in the corridors of most tech companies is that men of genius are at work, striving for the common good. It is only natural that they should be the ones making the important decisions. When approached this way, the political discourse of the masses becomes something to be manipulated and harvested, not something to be encouraged and protected.

The previous eight years had piled up one tall mountain of shit. The only reason we sqeeked back into power was because our new [...] kept promising a turn to peace and prosperity. The American people wouldn't have settled for anything less. They thought they'd been through some pretty tough times already and it would've been political suicide to tell them that the toughest ones were actually up ahead.

The first free vote in East Germany for almost sixty years was held on 18 March 1990. The SED received 16 per cent. This respectable outcome probably reflected its true support – time-serving apparatchiks combined with inveterate idealists – even throughout the long years of dictatorship. The CDU, whose Western leader Helmut Kohl had become a hero to the East German masses for his promotion of reunification and promises of rapid prosperity, got 40 per cent. The SPD paid for its ambivalence on both these issues with a disappointing haul of around 22 per cent. Support for the ‘third way’ dissidents of ‘New Forum’, ‘Democratic Awakening’ and so on, who just months previously had seemed so influential, had dwindled quickly. Their votes amounted to no more than 6–7 per cent of the total. In April, a CDU-dominated government, led by Eastern CDU chairman Lothar de Mazière, took power. Reunification was inevitable. Only the terms remained a matter of speculation.

Emilio Lomelí lived in Polanco. She’d seldom been in that part of town. It was a neighborhood that had been for a number of years now the favorite destination for upper-crust Jewish families, American and British diplomats, and a growing contingent of affluent Mexicans who wanted to enjoy the delicatessens, European-style bakeries, and coffee shops not far from Chapultepec Park. This was the kind of place where you could order corned beef and red wine to be delivered to your home, or stop at Frascati’s for paella. Women attended fashion-show luncheons and charity benefits. Everything was new in this area: there was no sign of moldy colonial palaces and old tezontle. Everything was beautiful. It was a pageant of prosperity, so far removed from the neighborhood where Maite had grown up that she might as well be a tourist on another planet.

Not all advice comes from a place of wanting you to succeed. Some people fear your progress or success because it highlights their own limitations.