Jack Butler remembers the late Gordon Wood. A slice:
But Wood, who died in a car accident Sunday at 92, was far more than a chronicler of this country’s founding. He did more than any other academic, and perhaps more than anyone in the past 50 years, to sustain the memory and importance of the Revolution and its principles.
Wood was born in Concord, Mass., where one of the first battles of the American Revolution was fought. He became known to the world in 1969 with his first book, “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.” It won the Bancroft Prize, one of the history profession’s highest honors.
With 1991’s “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” Wood achieved a popular renown unusual for an academic. His thesis, defended in careful, scholarly and erudite fashion, is also right there in the title and spelled out early and plainly in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Our revolution “did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.”
Also remembering Gordon Wood is AEI president Robert Doar.
“Gordon Wood on what the Declaration meant for America.”
Here at Cafe Hayek, I featured many passages from Gordon Wood’s books as “Quotations of the Day.”
GMU Econ alum David Hebert is correct:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others argue that tariffs and industrial policy can restore America’s strength. In reality, diversified supply chains and open markets provide greater resilience than economic nationalism.
Earlier today, in the case of California v. Mullin, the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a decision striking down the Trump Administration’s $100,000 fee on applications for H-1B visas (which are used by tech firms, research institutions, and other organizations to hire immigrant workers and researchers with a variety of specialized skills). Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that the plan is illegal because it usurps Congress’s power to tax.
Eighty-four years is a good, healthy life in America. How much progress has been made in reducing poverty over one person’s lifespan?
A lot, according to new research from Richard Burkhauser of the Civitas Institute and Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute. They have assembled the longest poverty data series that accounts for taxes, transfer payments and health insurance, stretching 84 years from 1939 to 2023.
It provides some astonishing good news. Over that entire time span, no matter what baseline they chose, the absolute poverty rate fell by at least three-quarters. When including the value of health insurance, poverty fell by up to 97 percent.
The transformation was especially massive for African Americans. In 1939, 93.3 percent of Black children were in poverty. By 2023, it was 5.7 percent.
The story most Americans are familiar with would credit the reduction to the modern welfare state after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the War on Poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address.
Burkhauser and Corinth’s research allows this claim to be tested. They find that poverty was already in rapid decline from 1939 to 1963, before the federal government’s war against it began. That decline was almost entirely due to rapid economic growth causing incomes to rise.
It’s a common refrain: The middle class is hollowing out; Americans overall are increasingly falling short financially while a few are getting exceedingly rich. There’s even a scoreboard of inequality. We’ve persuaded ourselves that many families can no longer achieve the American middle-class dream the way their parents once did. It’s a political hot button, too — both parties claim to be fighting to preserve Middle America.
But there’s another, much better way the middle class can shrink — when everyone moves up and gets richer. A nation can become so much richer that the ranks of the poor, the working class and the middle class all thin out. The “hollowing out” message requires a curious definition of progress: By its logic, if everyone’s income doubles, the same number of families fail to reach the middle class as in the past.
Thinking about the middle class in this way obscures progress because it mixes inequality with people’s living standards, and those are two different things. In a recent report, we measured class using constant, inflation-adjusted thresholds. The “core” middle class shrank, but so did the classes below the middle — the poor, the near poor and the lower middle class.
In 1979, 36 percent of families were in the middle class. At first, it looks ominous that by 2024, a smaller number — 31 percent — could claim that status. But it’s worrisome only if you overlook that over the same period, the upper middle class grew to 31 percent of families from 10 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Americans falling short of the middle class — once more than half — dropped to 35 percent of all families.
The traditional middle class shrank because so many families became better off over time, not because more people fell short. At the same time, inequality rose, too. The higher up the income ladder a family reached, the more disproportionate the improvement. Rather than the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, rich and poor alike grew richer — albeit at much different rates.
One objection we received to these analyses is that they would have looked very different if we had considered wealth rather than income. That’s because income reflects the remuneration people receive in a year while wealth — assets owned less debts owed — reflects resources accumulated over time. But our forthcoming research finds that the share of families whose wealth earned them upper-middle-class status increased, just as the income numbers indicate, while the proportion of families whose wealth fell short of the middle declined.
What is being abandoned is the principle that legitimate production creates legitimate ownership. Jeff Bezos did not find his wealth lying in a field. Musk did not inherit a pile of cash. Nor did these men steal their fortunes from others. Their fortunes were built through sustained judgment, risk, and entrepreneurial effort in markets where consumers voluntarily chose to spend (or not to spend) their money. (Or at least mainly so; see below.) The causal chain from effort to wealth is visible and traceable. Yet the popular conclusion is that the endpoint of that chain is somehow provisional, held subject to democratic revision whenever a current majority finds the accumulation distasteful.
A free society cannot function on such logic. Once you establish that democratic majorities may vote to claw back wealth they find excessive, you have crossed a line we had refused to cross before. The same moral grammar that justifies a wealth tax on ten-figure fortunes also justifies, with equal coherence, a wealth tax on seven-figure ones. The argument rooted in “too much” has no natural stopping point, because “too much” is always defined by whoever is doing the taking.
This discomfort is not eased by acknowledging that some large fortunes benefited from government-granted privileges and cronyism.
