Deirdre McCloskey Wants Old Liberalism Back: ‘Equality of Permission’: In ‘Equality of Permission,’ McCloskey returns to familiar ground: free markets, individual dignity, and the dangers of statism. What makes it distinctive is the force and flair of her argument. (Joakim Book, October 13, 2026, Daily Economy)
My book argues for a substantial restoration of this first, Scottish, Smithian, and individual liberty. Alone. It argues against a state-directed, collectivist, and faux-predictable pursuit of an unattainable utopia, a top-down social engineering advocated widely in the French Enlightenment, which promises, through what it calls its numerous nice-sounding but coerced ‘policies,’ to serve a general will.
The latest Distribution of Household Income report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that average inflation-adjusted household income in the US grew for every fifth of the income distribution between 1979 and 2023, both before and after means-tested transfers and federal taxes. The richest fifth of households saw their incomes grow the fastest, but households in the bottom and middle fifths also enjoyed substantial gains. Among households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, average real annual income rose by 50 percent before means-tested transfers and federal taxes and 108 percent after.
The Left/Right is united by hating the hand that feeds them.
The Wonder of Consumer Surplus: Is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country a good measure of economic wellbeing? No, it’s not (David R. Henderson, 10/08/26, Defining Ideas)
And what exactly is consumer surplus? The idea itself is straightforward. The consumer surplus that you get when you buy an item is the maximum amount you would have been willing to pay for the item minus what you actually pay. So, for example, if you would have been willing to pay $50 for a shirt, but actually pay $30, your consumer surplus on that purchase is $20. Another way of saying that is that the consumer surplus is a measure of the consumer’s gain from a particular trade.
Why consumer surplus matters
One of the hardest ideas for non-economists to accept is that both sides gain from trade. The good news is that when I gave examples in class, most students got the point quickly.
Indeed, one of my students gave an example that I hadn’t previously considered but that I have since used in speeches to illustrate the concept of consumer surplus. It goes like this: You go to a store and find a shirt with a price tag of $50. You try it on and decide you like it. You go to the cash register to pay. The salesperson points out something you hadn’t noticed: the shirt is on sale for 40 percent off and so the price is actually $30. My student pointed out that a minimum estimate of your consumer surplus is $20 because you would have been willing to pay $50 but instead paid only $30. Of course, that’s a minimum estimate because you probably would have been willing to pay at least somewhat more than $50. How do we know? Because you probably weren’t indifferent between buying the shirt at $50 or keeping your money.
Once you understand and really appreciate consumer surplus, you can start looking around and appreciating what you have.
Life in The Grim Old Days: Chelsea Follett’s new history shows how wretched life was before the industrial revolution, but our escape from it began long before the steam engine. (Robert Zubrin, 4 Oct 2026, Quillette)
Here’s how it was: Because most children died in infancy, a woman needed to give birth many times, and sooner or later one of those births would almost certainly kill her. If somehow you survived infancy, childhood diseases would probably kill you, and if they didn’t, the education you got would be either no school or a nightmare school. If you made it to adulthood, the lack of transport would limit your marriage prospects to the people in your village, to whom you were probably related, and with whom you were therefore condemned to produce genetically questionable offspring (as you probably were yourself). You lived in a one-room shack filled with filth, or in a tenement in a town whose streets were filled with filth, and so the air stank and the water was unsafe to drink, which is why you were sick most of the time. You had just a few stinking lice-infested rags for clothes, and lice in your hair too, so you itched all the time. The food was of low quality and limited variety, and generally available in inadequate quantities. But even if on rare occasions you got something good to eat, you would not enjoy it much because, by the time you reached adulthood, most of your teeth were gone. You worked from dawn to dusk, but, exhausted as you were, you might not get much sleep because you shared your home with livestock, and even if they were well behaved and made little noise, you needed to be alert at night because there were no police, and you were living in a criminal-infested combat zone. After the development of printing, there were books, but even if you could read and afford them, you would not have much time to read because you worked all day and it was dark at night. Then, if you survived all this to live long enough to face old age, things really went downhill.
Getting Rich Slowly: So you want to be a millionaire? Take your time—and don’t forget to compound. (David R. Henderson, 9/17/26, defining ideas)
My former co-blogger Bryan Caplan recently posted an interesting table showing the net worths of households at each age range. Not surprisingly, the older you get, up to age 74, the higher your net worth. What would surprise many people who hear how strapped families are for funds is that 25 percent of the households whose head was between age 55 and 74 had net worths (in 2022 dollars) of over $1 million. How did they do it? Did they have high-paying jobs? Although Bryan doesn’t present data on incomes, the answer is that a high income is neither necessary nor sufficient for becoming rich. In 1999, economists Dwight R. Lee and Richard B. McKenzie wrote a book showing how following seven simple rules, starting early in life, could get you to $1 million or more late in life. When I talk to people who are dispirited about their financial prospects, I try to buck them up by telling them these rules and, occasionally, buying them a used copy of the Lee/McKenzie book titled Getting Rich in America: Eight Simple Rules for Building a Fortune and a Satisfying Life. (Why eight rather than the earlier mentioned seven? I’ll explain later.) In my Wall Street Journal review of the book, I stated that their book is “is the how-to handbook for becoming the millionaire next door.”
Becoming a millionaire in Zimbabwe is hard. Becoming a millionaire in the United States is relatively easy, as I’ll show.
In 2025, a family with two adults and two children was classified as in poverty if their annual income was less than $32,649, the bureau said. The official poverty rate for children fell to a historic low of 13.4% in 2025.
Here’s the thing: if that family works 80 hours a week at McDonalds their income is over $50k
Despite persistent cost-of-living pressures, workers maintained historically high savings habits. The average employee 401(k) contribution rate remained steady at a record 9.6 percent in the second quarter.
Michael Shamrell, vice president of thought leadership at Fidelity Investments, told CBS News that most 401(k) millionaires achieved their balances through long-term consistency rather than market timing.
“It’s not that they have reached that — it’s how they did it,” Shamrell said. “What was their behavior? One is just saving for a long time.”
In “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes dreamed of this moment. He wrote in 1930, “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure.” Hobbymaxxing is born from an innocent desire for an enriching life offline and outside of work. But Gen Z’s hobbying obsession may have evolved too far, so that these activities are no longer considered leisure but additional jobs.
Around 31 percent of U.S. families were considered upper-middle class in 2024, according to an analysis from the public policy think tank American Enterprise Institute.
