The post brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace

From Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Page 37.

Harris' abortive effort inspired other attempts at newspaper publication: for example, the Boston News-Letter, published in 1704, generally regarded as the first continuously published American newspaper. This was followed by the Boston Gazette (in 1719) and the New-England Courant (in 1721), whose editor, James Franklin, was the older brother of Benjamin. By 1730, there were seven newspapers published regularly in four colonies, and by 1800 there were more than 180. In 1770, the New York Gazette congratulated itself and other papers by writing (in part):

'Tis truth (with deference to the college)
Newspapers are the spring of Knowledge,
The general source throughout the nation,
Of every modern conversation.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Reverend Samuel Miller boasted that the United States had more than two-thirds the number of newspapers available in England, and yet had only half the population of England.

In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books. (One book they apparently always had time for was Noah Webster's American Spelling Book, for it sold more than 24 million copies between 1783 and 1843.) Franklin's reference to pamphlets ought not to go unnoticed. The proliferation of newspapers in all the Colonies was accompanied by the rapid diffusion of pamphlets and broadsides. Alexis de Tocqueville took note of this fact in his Democracy in America, published in 1835: "In America," he wrote, "parties do not write books to combat each other's opinions, but pamphlets, which are circulated for a day with incredible rapidity and then expire." And he referred to both newspapers and pamphlets when he observed, "the invention of firearms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace."

Ideological blinders

Fascinating. From How School Choice Turns Education Into a Commodity by Jason Blakeley. Discussions about education can be exasperating because there is such a multiplicity of goals, assumptions and variability of knowledge.

Those who are engaged with the issue (i.e. those with children whose education they care about) can be passionate in their arguments regardless of how well founded the argument might be. Likewise, those who are at a distance (without children or post-education children) can be equally passionate though often in quite a different fashion - passionate from an ideological angle or passionate out of self-interest (being part of the education process themselves). Regardless, passion is not often a condition which facilitates polite exchanges or dispassionate consideration of issues.

All these problems (disagreement about goals, differing assumptions, low or uneven domain knowledge) are on display in Blakeley's article. He has an unacknowledged ideological argument to make and that ideology (and its associated portfolio of unexamined assumptions) informs the entire article to the exclusion of counterpoints. Blakeley is arguing against parental freedom and school choice. He wishes for all students to be compelled to attend the public schools of their area regardless of the performance of those schools.

Which is unfortunate because it comes across as strident, doctrinaire and ill-informed about an issue that is of great interest and concern and deserves to be argued better.

It is a meager article but these two passages were the one's that leapt out to me. They serve as a demonstration of just how radically people can differ on the most basic of things.

The first point to consider when weighing whether or not to marketize the public school system is that markets always have winners and losers. In the private sector, the role of competition is often positive. For example, Friendster, the early reigning king of social networks, failed to create a format that people found as useful and attractive as Facebook. The result was that it eventually vanished.

When businesses like Friendster fail, no significant public damage is done. Indeed, it is arguably a salutary form of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” which is a feature of market innovation. But should all goods in a society be subjected to the forces of creative destruction? What happens to a community when its public schools are defunded or closed because they could not “compete” in a marketized environment?

There is so much on display here in these 137 words.

Let us, as a courtesy, ignore that the opposite of public schools is not necessarily private schools. There is, of course, an infinite continuum of alternatives: religious schools, home schooling, autonomous public schools, non-profit charter schools, etc. Blakeley is undermining the integrity of his argument by casting it as a straw man argument of public school versus commercial private schools.

Blakeley's first argument against this straw man is the complaint that markets "always have winners and losers". That sounds straight-forward but what is he actually claiming? There is a fallacy of equivocation. Is he arguing that not all institutions are permanent or is he arguing that market enabled education is zero-sum?

The first interpretation seems a non sequitur. Of course market-based schools are not permanent. Neither are public schools. Populations increase and decrease; densities shift from one part of the city to another; even cities can come close to disappearing (East St. Louis, IL, Trenton, NJ, Gary, IN, etc.). Chicago Public Schools has closed hundreds of schools. The fact that market-based companies come and then go seems irrelevant if public schools also come and go.

This irrelevance would seem to force us to conclude that Blakeley's objection is that market-based solutions are zero-sum. This is certainly one way of viewing the function of a market; a statist way. Free marketers would make a diametrically opposite claim: Market-based solutions are additive and productive - no-one loses. I think the issue here is that Blakeley (with his statist mindset) and free-marketers (with their unstated assumptions) are not communicating.

Free marketers take it for granted that there has to be competition and freedom to contract and enforcement of the law (including contract law). In this scenario, any agreement reached between customer and supplier has to axiomatically be net beneficial, otherwise they would not enter the agreement. The contract itself is a testament to mutuality.

To the statist mind, the concern is that the customer might not get everything they might want and that is viewed as a market failure. Of course, in a world of limited resources, that is nonsense. Neither the customer or the supplier gets everything they want, they only get as much as is acceptable to them. The statist mind is also concerned that there might not be real competition and that is a legitimate concern. In the medium term, all competitive systems tend to coalesce around an oligopolistic or monopolistic structure. In the long term, competition will always lead to displacement of formerly dominant companies (Western Electric, Bell Telephone, General Motors, Standard Oil Company, etc.).

Blakeley's first objection, that there are winners and losers, is moot whichever interpretation you accept. Schools open and close under both private or public structures. Competitive markets are the very opposite of zero-sum - competitive markets ensure that everyone gains.

Blakeley's next objection is equally mystifying: "When businesses like Friendster fail, no significant public damage is done." When businesses fail, people lose their jobs, capital is destroyed, savings are wiped out, pensions are lost, tax bases are eroded. The list of public damage when companies fail is extensive. Ask Detroit whether there is no public damage when companies fail.

The final mystifying position that Blakeley takes is "But should all goods in a society be subjected to the forces of creative destruction? What happens to a community when its public schools are defunded or closed because they could not “compete” in a marketized environment?"

It seems as if Blakeley has argued himself into the position that schools should not improve. Blakeley is presenting the argument that schools will not close if they are public schools but that they might close if they are market-based schools.

The first assumption is clearly wrong. Public schools close all the time in vast numbers for tangled reasons of poor performance, population shifts, public expectations or decline in number of school children.

Blakeley also seems to be taking the position that it is bad if a market-based school closes because it is unable to meet the expectations of their customers.

The charitable interpretation would be that Blakeley wants schools to improve but not because of competition for parental choices but through centrally directed edicts and regulations. That is at least a logically consistent interpretation. But still a failing one. There are some truly stellar public schools around the nation, exemplified by Boston Latin School in Boston and Stuyvesant HS and Bronx HS of Science in New York and many prosperous suburban school systems produce outstanding results. Public schools can be excellent. But they are almost always excellent because they are meeting the demands and expectations of their most engaged and committed parents.

At the same time, there are innumerable examples of failing public school systems that fail precisely because they are driven by sheltered administrators who are not responsive to public demands.

This entire exercise of untangling the unstated assumptions reveals just how much conclusions are driven by ideology. Blakeley appears to have an underlying belief that market-based competition is inherently bad, even if it leads to school improvement, and that public administration of schools is inherently good, even if it leads to bad schools.

If the goal is to have improving schools which meet the needs and expectations of parents, does it matter whether that improvement comes through market-based competition or through regulatory means and public governance? I think that is a perfectly fair argument based on the agreed goal and there are pros and cons on both sides.

But to simply assume out of existence the viability of market solutions (despite the evidence that they can work) and to assume that there is no evidence that public schools do fail is an insult to the audience.

Americans were too busy doing other things

From Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Page 34.

It is worth pausing here for a moment to say something of Thomas Paine, for in an important way he is a measure of the high and wide level of literacy that existed in his time. In particular, I want to note that in spite of his lowly origins, no question has ever been raised, as it has with Shakespeare, about whether or not Paine was, in fact, the author of the works attributed to him. It is true that we know more of Paine's life than Shakespeare's (although not more of Paine's early periods), but it is also true that Paine had less formal schooling than Shakespeare, and came from the lowest laboring class before he arrived in America. In spite of these disadvantages, Paine wrote political philosophy and polemics the equal in lucidity and vitality (although not quantity) of Voltaire's, Rousseau's, and contemporary English philosophers', including Edmund Burke. Yet no one asked the question, How could an unschooled stay-maker from England's impoverished class produce such stunning prose? From time to time Paine's lack of education was pointed out by his enemies (and he, himself, felt inferior because of this deficiency), but it was never doubted that such powers of written expression could originate from a common man.

It is also worth mentioning that the full title of Paine's most widely read book is Common Sense, Written by an Englishman. The tagline is important here because, as noted earlier, Americans did not write many books in the Colonial period, which Benjamin Franklin tried to explain by claiming that Americans were too busy doing other things. Perhaps so. But Americans were not too busy to make use of the printing press, even if not for books they themselves had written. The first printing press in America was established in 1638 as an adjunct of Harvard University, which was two years old at the time. Presses were established shortly thereafter in Boston and Philadelphia without resistance by the Crown, a curious fact since at this time presses were not permitted in Liverpool and Birmingham, among other English cities. The earliest use of the press was for the printing of newsletters, mostly done on cheap paper. It may well be that the development of an American literature was retarded not by the industry of the people or the availability of English literature but by the scarcity of quality paper. As late as Revolutionary days, George Washington was forced to write to his generals on unsightly scraps of paper, and his dispatches were not enclosed in envelopes, paper being too scarce for such use.

The men who make Utopias proceed upon a radically false assumption as to what constitutes a good life.

H/T Marginal Revolution.

From Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1916 by Bertrand Russell.

A great many of the impulses which now lead nations to go to war are in themselves essential to any vigorous or progressive life. Without imagination and love of adventure a society soon becomes stagnant and begins to decay. Conflict, provided it is not destructive and brutal, is necessary in order to stimulate men’s activities, and to secure the victory of what is living over what is dead or merely traditional. The wish for the triumph of one’s cause, the sense of solidarity with large bodies of men, are not things which a wise man will wish to destroy. It is only the outcome in death and destruction and hatred that is evil. The problem is, to keep these impulses, without making war the outlet for them.

All Utopias that have hitherto been constructed are intolerably dull. Any man with any force in him would rather live in this world, with all its ghastly horrors, than in Plato's Republic or among Swift's Houyhnhnms. The men who make Utopias proceed upon a radically false assumption as to what constitutes a good life. They conceive that it is possible to imagine a certain state of society and a certain way of life which should be once for all recognized as good, and should then continue for ever and ever. They do not realize that much the greater part of a man’s happiness depends upon activity, and only a very small remnant consists in passive enjoyment. Even the pleasures which do consist in enjoyment are only satisfactory, to most men, when they come in the intervals of activity. Social reformers, like inventors of Utopias, are apt to forget this very obvious fact of human nature. They aim rather at securing more leisure, and more opportunity for enjoying it, than at making work itself more satisfactory, more consonant with impulse, and a better outlet for creativeness and the desire to employ one’s faculties.

The sentence I have bolded is, I think, the crux. Totalitarian statists are also stasists - nothing changes.

In reality, not only does the definition of utopia differ between individuals but it also differs for an individual over time. Utopia for a fifteen year old boy looks dramatically different than utopia for that same person as a fifty year old man. If you acknowledge that every person defines utopia differently from one another and differently over time, then the coercive totalitarian project disappears. It is simply not achievable.

With that disappearance you can begin to focus on the real challenge, creating participatory systems which have the greatest probability of allowing the most number of people to achieve their transitory goals most frequently, over the longest durations of time. Much, much harder but also much more noble.

Russell's passage sheds light on the mind of the tragedy and disaster of the pathologically altruistic. The pathologically altruistic are those individuals who are uncomfortable letting others live their lives as they see fit but who wish to impose the donor's view of what the "beneficiary" should want onto the beneficiary. An imposition that usually fails to account for the beneficiaries's actual definition of utopia and which ignore the details of the circumstances constraining the beneficiary. It is why so many of these pathologically altruistic endeavors so often go astray. The pathologically altruistic are so often also both statists and stasists.

27-year-old know nothings

Getting kind of tired of all the political snark but this is at least marginally clever.

You guys. I trolled my local CBS affiliate. They were asking about Trump's tax returns, so I quoted Hillary. The reporter has no idea. pic.twitter.com/rZhSRXNToG

— Jeff Halm (@jeffhalm) April 16, 2017

It would seem to bear out Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, Ben Rhodes, who described his manipulation of the main stream media. His explanation for why that was so easy?

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

It is even worse than Rhodes indicated. 27-year olds only experienced in very recent political campaigns.

No literary aristocracy emerged in Colonial America

From Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Page 34.

One significant implication of this situation is that no literary aristocracy emerged in Colonial America. Reading was not regarded as an elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all kinds of people. A thriving, classless reading culture developed because, as Daniel Boorstin writes, "It was diffuse. Its center was everywhere because it was nowhere. Every man was close to what [printed matter] talked about. Everyone could speak the same language. It was the product of a busy, mobile, public society." By 1772, Jacob Duché could write: "The poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar. . . . Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader."

Where such a keen taste for books prevailed among the general population, we need not be surprised that Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, sold more than 100,000 copies by March of the same year. In 1985, a book would have to sell eight million copies (in two months) to match the proportion of the population Paine's book attracted. If we go beyond March, 1776, a more awesome set of figures is given by Howard Fast: "No one knows just how many copies were actually printed. The most conservative sources place the figure at something over 300,000 copies. Others place it just under half a million. Taking a figure of 400,000 in a population of 3,000,000, a book published today would have to sell 24,000,000 copies to do as well." The only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today's America is the Superbowl.

The printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local

From Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Page 32.

Aside from the fact that the religion of these Calvinist Puritans demanded that they be literate, three other factors account for the colonists' preoccupation with the printed word. Since the male literacy rate in seventeenth-century England did not exceed 40 percent, we may assume, first of all, that the migrants to New England came from more literate areas of England or from more literate segments of the population, or both. In other words, they came here as readers and were certain to believe that reading was as important in the New World as it was in the Old. Second, from 1650 onward almost all New England towns passed laws requiring the maintenance of a "reading and writing" school, the large communities being required to maintain a grammar school, as well. In all such laws, reference is made to Satan, whose evil designs, it was supposed, could be thwarted at every turn by education. But there were other reasons why education was required, as suggested by the following ditty, popular in the seventeenth century:

From public schools shall general knowledge flow,
For 'tis the people's sacred right to know.

These people, in other words, had more than the subjection of Satan on their minds. Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page. "More than any other device," Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, "the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; . . . print made a greater impression than actual events. . . . To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning." In light of this, we may assume that the schooling of the young was understood by the colonists not only as a moral duty but as an intellectual imperative. (The England from which they came was an island of schools. By 1660, for example, there were 444 schools in England, one school approximately every twelve miles.) And it is clear that growth in literacy was closely connected to schooling. Where schooling was not required (as in Rhode Island) or weak school laws prevailed (as in New Hampshire), literacy rates increased more slowly than elsewhere.

Finally, these displaced Englishmen did not need to print their own books or even nurture their own writers. They imported, whole, a sophisticated literary tradition from their Motherland. In 1736, booksellers advertised the availability of the Spectator, the Tatler, and Steele's Guardian. In 1738, advertisements appeared for Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Pope's Homer, Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Dryden's Fables. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale University, described the American situation succinctly:

Books of almost every kind, on almost every subject, are already written to our hands. Our situation in this respect is singular. As we speak the same language with the people of Great Britain, and have usually been at peace with that country; our commerce with it brings to us, regularly, not a small part of the books with which it is deluged. In every art, science, and path of literature, we obtain those, which to a great extent supply our wants.

Flawed Index

Richard Florida is something of the Paul Ehrlich of urban planning. He has interesting ideas but few of them show well under the cold light of reality. Fun to talk about but not especially useful.

He has come out with a new Urban Crisis Index which has the feel, once again, of using ideas and numbers to pursue a predetermined agenda rather than an actual useful measure of how to improve things. The article is Mapping the New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida.

America today is beset by a New Urban Crisis. If the old urban crisis was defined by the flight of business, jobs, and the middle class to the suburbs, the New Urban Crisis is defined by the back-to-the-city movement of the affluent and the educated—accompanied by rising inequality, deepening economic segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing.

This crisis looks different across the country. The map below charts how America’s 350-plus metros stack up on my New Urban Crisis index—a composite metric my team and I developed. It accounts for measures of wage inequality and income inequality; overall economic segregation along income, educational, and occupational lines; and the unaffordability of housing. The index combines these factors on a scale of zero to one, where a higher coefficient indicates more inequality, segregation, and lack of affordability. Dark purple indicates metros where the New Urban Crisis is most severe, while light blue indicates where its impact is less harsh.

The three metrics betray the weak underpinning for this new "crisis". Only one of the three seems actually pertinent while two of the three are simply aspirational goals by central planners willing to overlook the interests and needs of citizens.

Wage inequality is real and is especially stark in cities, but does it have any real implication? Most of the research says no. Inequality is not in itself a problem. The real driver is lack of job opportunities that drives immiseration and poverty. Wage inequality can correlate with lack of job growth but that is incidental. Lack of jobs is the problem, not inequality per se.

Similarly with segregation. Florida is not talking about government enforced segregation, he is talking about elective segregation. Give people the freedom to choose where they wish to live and they will usually choose to live in configurations that meet a multitude of personal objectives (security, education, appreciation opportunity, convenience of transportation, like-educated people, like-class people, etc.) Everywhere, when given the freedom to choose, people cluster and many of those clusters are age, race, religion, class-based. Presumably because of its prior association with government enforced segregation, elective-clustering is despised by utopian determinists but it is not clear at all that there are any negative consequences to letting people choose where they wish to live.

The only one of the three metics which has some basis in reality, some causative negative consequence, is unaffordability of housing. Even here, the issue is simply one of time. There are consequences to rapid escalations in housing unaffordability but these are often functions of bubbles - they resolve themselves in the longer run. But indisputably, in the short run, rapidly rising housing unaffordability does exact negative consequences on some portion of the population.

Coincidentally, this is also the issue easiest to tackle. Unaffordability is simply a function of stringent zoning requirements which restrict what types of housing can be built and where. Such zoning is usually very rewarding to incumbent residents (it drives up the value of their properties) but punishing to new comers (by pricing them out of otherwise preferred locations.) We know what causes unaffordable housing costs (zoning restrictions) and we know what the solution is; remove such restrictions and increase the supply of housing. While this is the easiest problem to understand and solve, it is also usually, one of the most difficult to effect. Rich people like their zoning as it makes them richer and therefore fight tooth and nail to maintain it.

Back to Florida's Urban Crisis Index - two fake issues and one short term issue are the constituents of this new measure revealing a New Urban Crisis. I am skeptical.

It is interesting what is not on the list. Where is crime? Where is affordability (beyond just housing)? Where is mortality and morbidity? Where is longterm sustainability (financial fragility)? These are all real-life issues and hard metrics are available for all of them. I suspect that these actually represent a stronger base for any argument about a new urban crisis but they are missing. Why?

But all that is by-the-by. My following observation is inescapably going to come across as partisan and it is not quite intended to be that.

What struck me in Florida's article was that there was nary a mention of the fact that his Urban Crisis Index is highly correlated with governance. The great majority of the top 20 worst cities have not had competitive elections for fifty years and more. And this is the inescapably partisan-appearing element. Most of these cities have not had a Republican mayor in generations. New York is certainly an exception (and likely an exception that proves the rule). By-and-large, all these cities which are, according to Florida, most in crisis, are routinely and reliably Democrat.

There are a slew of policies associated with Democrats when it comes to cities, and most these cities have experimented or lived many or most these policies. Democrats tend to be supportive of high minimum wages, tight zoning control, extensive regulation, high taxes, hostile to many aspects of police law enforcement, supportive of generous public assistance programs, raced-based and gender-based affirmative action programs, controlled growth, anti-car, anti-school choice, pro-union, pro-government programs, etc.

Nowhere in the article is there either an acknowledgement that the cities in greatest urban crisis are cities with the deepest association with the Democratic Party or, put differently, that cities in the greatest urban crisis are those who have pursued most vigorously the policies most associated with the Democratic Party. That seems an incredible omission because it obscures an interesting question.

What is the direction of causal flow? Are cities in distress and they need these policies to alleviate that distress? OR Are cities in distress because they pursue these types of policies? I am strongly inclined towards the latter.

If you want to increase affordable housing, reduce regulation and zoning and the supply of housing will increase.

If you want to decrease inequality, foster a business environment that encourages job growth, principally by reducing regulations and tax burdens.

If you want to decrease people's clustering - well, there isn't much you can do there without subverting people's freedoms. Increasing school vouchers and transportable living vouchers (instead of public housing) are a couple of ways you can nudge that needle a little bit.

As a minor escape from the cloud of the charge of partisanship, I will say that I think the problem is not quite so much to do with partisan policies as it is to do with the absence of competition. I don't think the problem is primarily an absence of Republicans in city government (a contributor perhaps but not necessarily a primary driver.) All cities tend to end up with a primary party representing the status quo of vested interests and it doesn't really matter the name of the party.

The real issue, I suspect, is the absence of real political competition. If it is a single party, even with a portfolio of tried and failed policies, then the electorate can't really effect change. There have to be two parties competing with one another and with both having some real prospect of success. Without that threat of competition, there is very little accountability or evolution towards effectiveness.

Florida is pushing his new book and this article is just part of the publicity campaign. I think the Index is fatally flawed and designed to push a faux crisis. But there is a real issue out there in terms of the governance of our cities and even this flawed Index could have been the genesis for an interesting discussion and insight. Instead it comes across as the same old ideological mantra.

60 percent of the estates in Middlesex County between the years 1654 and 1699 contained books

From Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Page 31.

For the Americans among whom Franklin lived were as committed to the printed word as any group of people who have ever lived. Whatever else may be said of those immigrants who came to settle in New England, it is a paramount fact that they and their heirs were dedicated and skillful readers whose religious sensibilities, political ideas and social life were embedded in the medium of typography.

We know that on the Mayflower itself several books were included as cargo, most importantly, the Bible and Captain John Smith's Description of New England. (For immigrants headed toward a largely uncharted land, we may suppose that the latter book was as carefully read as the former.) We know, too, that in the very first days of colonization each minister was given ten pounds with which to start a religious library. And although literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, there is sufficient evidence (mostly drawn from signatures) that between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time. (The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.)

It is to be understood that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households, for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief that printing was "God's highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward." Of course, the business of the Gospel may be driven forward in books other than the Bible, as for example in the famous Bay Psalm Book, printed in 1640 and generally regarded as America's first best seller. But it is not to be assumed that these people confined their reading to religious matters. Probate records indicate that 60 percent of the estates in Middlesex County between the years 1654 and 1699 contained books, all but 8 percent of them including more than the Bible. In fact, between 1682 and 1685, Boston's leading bookseller imported 3,421 books from one English dealer, most of these nonreligious books. The meaning of this fact may be appreciated when one adds that these books were intended for consumption by approximately 75,000 people then living in the northern colonies. The modern equivalent would be ten million books.

Long generations

There are 42 women still alive who claim a federal pension for their husbands' service in the Spanish-American War, which concluded in 1898. pic.twitter.com/xIWqhi5RXC

— Richard Johnson (@richardmarcj) April 13, 2017

A function of long generations and late remarriages.

My neighbor down the street (probably in his early sixties) had a grandfather who fought in the Civil War. His family has a history of late marriages and in that particular case, his grandfather remarried late in life to a much younger woman. Still, it sounds shocking to say that I know someone whose grandfather fought in the Civil War.

My mother, who is still going strong, was the caboose in her family. When she was little, her grandmother lived with them. That grandmother was born before the Civil War. My children today can talk to their grandmother who can tell them stories from her grandmother from some 150 years ago.

And indeed, here by my desk, is a picture of my grandfather, Holcomb Bibb Latting, circa 1918, on his honeymoon and in his uniform as he prepares to be shipped out to Europe. Nearly a century ago. Looong generations.