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Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.

Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year

these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.

looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.

that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement.

The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.

As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.

New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.

Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.

The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.

But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.

The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973

and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.

the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.

With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right

Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.

But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them

Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.

It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control

The four-week moving average of claims, a less volatile measure than the weekly figures, decreased to 260,500 from 265,000

Last week included the 12th of the month, which coincides with the period the Labor Department surveys employers to calculate monthly payroll data. The average was little changed from the 259,500 during the comparable period in March.

In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself.

All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.

Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House.

What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars.

In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”

On June 17, 1971 — exactly one year before the Watergate break-in — Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam.

“You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting. “Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions.

“Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said. “Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

Though Ellsberg was already under indictment and charged with espionage, the team headed by Hunt and Liddy broke into the office of his psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement.

“You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman on June 29, 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”

In a July 3, 1971, conversation with Haldeman, he said: “The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a Garment [White House counsel Leonard Garment] and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire [presidential speechwriter William Safire], and, by God, they’re exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.”

In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.”

John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and confidante, met with Liddy at the Justice Department in early 1972, when Mitchell was attorney general. Liddy presented a $1 million plan, code-named “Gemstone,” for spying and sabotage during the upcoming presidential campaign.

In Nixon’s third war, he took the weapons in place — the Plumbers, wiretapping and burglary — and deployed them against the Democrats challenging his reelection.

Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party;

Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention.

Mitchell approved a $250,000 version, according to Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager. It included intelligence-gathering on the Democrats through wiretaps and burglaries.

They discussed a secret $350,000 stash of cash kept in the White House, the possibility of using priests to help hide payments to the burglars, “washing” the money though Las Vegas or New York bookmakers, and empaneling a new grand jury so everyone could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Finally, they decided to send Mitchell on an emergency fundraising mission.

On Oct. 10, 1972, we wrote a story in The Post outlining the extensive sabotage and spying operations of the Nixon campaign and White House, particularly against Muskie, and stating that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event. The story said that at least 50 operatives had been involved in the espionage and sabotage, many of them under the direction of a young California lawyer named Donald Segretti; several days later, we reported that Segretti had been hired by Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary. (The Senate Watergate committee later found more than 50 saboteurs, including 22 who were paid by Segretti.)

A favored dirty trick that caused havoc at campaign stops involved sweeping up the shoes that Muskie aides left in hotel hallways to be polished, and then depositing them in a dumpster.

In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, Patrick Buchanan and another Nixon aide wrote: “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.”

“I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman in April 1971. According to Haldeman’s 1994 book, “The Haldeman Diaries,” the president also wanted to have Kennedy photographed in compromising situations and leak the images to the press.

On Sept. 8, 1971, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all the likely Democratic presidential candidates, as well as Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”

The arrest of the Watergate burglars set in motion Nixon’s fourth war, against the American system of justice. It was a war of lies and hush money, a conspiracy that became necessary to conceal the roles of top officials and to hide the president’s campaign of illegal espionage and political sabotage, including the covert operations that Mitchell described as “the White House horrors” during the Watergate hearings: the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the Ellsberg break-in, Liddy’s Gemstone plan and the proposed break-in at Brookings.

In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the arrests at the Watergate, Haldeman warned Nixon that “on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.”

Haldeman said Mitchell had come up with a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation.

Nixon approved the scheme and ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

On March 21, 1973, in one of the most memorable Watergate exchanges caught on tape, Nixon met with his counsel, John W. Dean, who since the break-in had been tasked with coordinating the coverup. “We’re being blackmailed” by Hunt and the burglars, Dean reported, and more people “are going to start perjuring themselves.” “How much money do you need?” Nixon asked.

“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied. “And you could get it in cash,” the president said. “I, I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.”

Mitchell later denied approving the plan. He testified that he told Magruder: “We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it.” By his own account, he did not object on the grounds that the plan was illegal.

Nixon’s final war, waged even to this day by some former aides and historical revisionists, aims to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the president’s record. Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal.

In his 1978 memoir “RN,” Nixon addressed his role in Watergate: “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.” Twelve years later, in his book “In the Arena,” he decried a dozen “myths” about Watergate and claimed that he was innocent of many of the charges made against him. One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times.

Even now, there are old Nixon hands and defenders who dismiss the importance of Watergate or claim that key questions remain unanswered.

By August, Nixon’s impending impeachment in the House was a certainty, and a group of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater banded together to declare his presidency over. “Too many lies, too many crimes,” Goldwater said. On Aug. 7, the group visited Nixon at the White House. How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked. “I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”

In his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin, a revered constitutionalist respected by both parties, posed a final question: “Why was Watergate?” The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.”

Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes — and what they reveal — will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.

By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself.

Over the next several hours, militants rampaged through around two dozen Israeli towns—killing, looting, burning, kidnapping, and reportedly raping civilians. They managed to penetrate as far as Ofakim, 20 miles into Israel. They effectively controlled several main roads, on which they gunned down passing traffic. It took the IDF 6 hours to begin seriously engaging the militants. 18 hours after the incursion began, fighting was taking place in 22 spots. It took over 48 hours before the last of the major clashes with this first wave of the militants’ incursion was over and the militants neutralized.

In total, as of the morning of October 11th, over 1,200 Israelis are confirmed killed, almost 3,000 wounded (hundreds critically), and somewhere between 100 and 150 kidnapped, including whole families with toddlers and senior citizens.

For months, Netanyahu has been cautioned that his divisive “governance reforms” represented a reckless gamble with the country’s national security. He received numerous private (and then public) warnings from every major security chief that his policies were eroding IDF preparedness and provoking Israel’s enemies to test its readiness. Netanyahu ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed every one of these warnings. He and his acolytes have systematically castigated those who voiced concern as disloyal “agents of the deep state” or, worse, “leftist traitors.”

The events of October 7th represented a colossal intelligence failure. With or without substantial Iranian assistance, it is now clear that Hamas had been preparing the attack for over a year. Astonishingly, it apparently did so without major leaks. The few tell-tale signs of an impending attack that did surface appear to have been ignored.

Taken by surprise, and made to fight for their lives in understaffed outposts, the IDF was operationally incapable of adequately responding to the militants’ land maneuver. Unarmed civilians were left to fend for themselves for long hours, with horrific consequences.

What will make October 7th uniquely egregious in the eyes of many Israelis (perhaps most) is the fact that events of this sort were not only reasonably foreseeable but were repeatedly foreseen and repeatedly ignored by Israel’s current leadership.

at least 950 Palestinians have been killed in retaliatory IAF air strikes.

As long as Israel faces immediate danger, all hands will be on deck and party politics largely put aside.

As long as the emergency continues, therefore, Netanyahu won’t have to face the pressure of public protests against his program to weaken the Israeli judiciary.          

But in the longer term, it is difficult to see how Netanyahu, the great political survivor, will survive the events of October 7th. His reputation as “Mr. Security” is in tatters and it is impossible to see how it could possibly recover.

Analysts keen to convey the magnitude of October 7th to American audiences have already tagged it Israel’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Neither label adequately captures the day’s true significance.

A more accurate name might be something like “Israel’s civic Yom Kippur.” Why? Because the very existence of the State of Israel was supposed to guarantee that a day like this would never happen. In the Yom Kippur War of October 1973—when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault—Israel lost some 2,700 soldiers, but it managed to effectively protect its civilian population. No Israeli towns or villages were ever breached. The social contract was honored, albeit at a terrible price.

On October 7, 2023, it was primarily civilians who were killed, maimed, and kidnapped. This was the day when the IDF wasn’t there to defend the people it was created to protect. This was the day when—livestreamed on social media—distraught family members saw their loved ones carried away, like livestock, into Hamas captivity in Gaza. This was the day when—in a horrifying echo of the Holocaust—defenseless Jewish mothers, citizens of a sovereign Jewish State, tried to keep their babies from crying as armed men lurked outside, listening to ascertain whether anyone was alive inside the home, before setting it on fire.

many Israelis, already mistrustful of their elected representatives and worn out by internal divisions, may have finally lost faith in their national leaders or, worse, in the core institutions of their nation state. Where was the army when murderous gunmen broke into our homes deep inside Israel itself?

Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel appeared broken, internally torn, and internationally isolated. Yet, it proved itself remarkably resilient. Can Israel gather itself again from the terrible blow it sustained on October 7th? I have no doubt that it can.

At some point, too, the public might look up and notice that subsidizing EVs is having no effect on climate or CO2.

the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Arab oil embargo in the latest edition of New Atlantis: “The worst effect was on U.S. energy policy. Whereas the embargo lasted about five months, the toll on U.S. policy has lasted five decades and counting.”

the 50-year-old fuel-economy regime devolved into a convoluted set of political trade-offs serving—as the Biden administration recently admitted—no legitimate cost-benefit goal. Boondoggles from synfuels to corn ethanol were launched in the 1970s to honor the false god of energy independence, though thanks to the still-functioning genius of the free-market system the U.S. nevertheless blundered into true energy security with the help of fracking.

The words “energy transition” are redundant. The energy economy is always transitioning. The transitions are additive. Wind, hydro and biomass all existed before fossil fuels arrived

Energy’s uses are unlimited. This is why, unless the world improbably adopts a carbon tax, the effect of green-energy subsidies (aside from enriching their backers) is largely to stimulate increased energy consumption rather than reduce CO2. This effect is already apparent in the numbers.

another ’70s legacy: our least-useful professors invoking big-oil stereotypes in pursuit of political goals.

Witness a New York Times op-ed this week combining adventurous antitrust reasoning with tired anti-Exxon tropes, claiming a proposed oil merger represents a “direct threat to democracy” by somehow blocking a solution to climate change that voters apparently crave even though it doesn’t exist.

Exxon controls less than 3% of the world’s oil and gas, most of which are in the hands of governments. The U.S. is responsible for less than 15% of global CO2 emissions.

What older Americans remember as the oil crisis was a product of domestic price controls, imposed by people in the Nixon administration who knew better.

Along the way, the country did manage to remove lead from gasoline and mandate catalytic converters, which improved air quality, showing that rational, economical policy outcomes are still possible amid the vast politicized waste that “energy policy” has otherwise become in the last 50 years.

the model’s calculations took into account trends in pollution levels, population growth, the amount of natural resources and the overall quality of life on Earth. The model’s predictions for the worsening quality of life and the dwindling natural resources have so far been unnervingly on target.

“At around 2020, the condition of the planet becomes highly critical. If we do nothing about it, the quality of life goes down to zero. Pollution becomes so seriously it will start to kill people, which in turn will cause the population to diminish, lower than it was in the 1900. At this stage, around 2040 to 2050, civilised life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist.”

Alexander King, the then-leader of the Club of Rome, evaluated the program’s results to also mean that nation-states will lose their sovereignty, forecasting a New World Order with corporations managing everything.

“Sovereignty of nations is no longer absolute,” King told ABC. “There is a gradual diminishing of sovereignty, little bit by little bit. Even in the big nations, this will happen.”

After the Scopes Trial of 1925, though, evangelicals turned inward

Many white evangelicals tilted toward the right in the 1950s and 1960s – nascent Cold War fears of godless communism and Billy Graham’s public friendship with Richard Nixon doubtlessly contributed

but a counter-movement of progressive evangelicals arose in the late 1960s in opposition to the Vietnam War and in favor of racial reconciliation and women’s equality. Their signature document, the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, was drafted in November 1973, and many evangelicals relished the opportunity to vote for one of their own, Jimmy Carter, in 1976.

The real catalyst for the formation of the religious right was the attempt to defend against Internal Revenue Service attempts to rescind the tax exemption of racially segregated institutions, especially Bob Jones University and Jerry Falwell’s segregated Liberty Christian Academy in the 1970s. Their anger at the federal government for challenging their tax status drove them into the waiting arms of activists like Weyrich,

In the ensuing decades, evangelicals became the most reliable constituency of the Republican Party, much the way that labor unions once sustained the Democratic Party

But the price of evangelicals’ betrayal of their biblical commitments was fearsome. When Reagan rejigged the tax codes to favor the wealthy, most evangelicals fell silent, despite the biblical warnings against the corruptions of wealth and injunctions to care for the indigent.

hen George W. Bush launched two vanity wars that would not meet even the barest criteria for just warfare, criteria honed by Christian thinkers over centuries, evangelicals, with rare exceptions, registered no objections and even cheered the invasions.

When I was writing “Thy Kingdom Come” during the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency, I searched in vain for a single religious-right organization willing to condemn the use of torture.

In a word, they secularized, trading their fidelity to the Bible and their own heritage of social activism for what amounted to a mess of pottage, the illusion of political influence

Rather than echoing the biblical cries for justice and peace and equality, they settled for the claptrap of hard-right political orthodoxy and thereby became just another interest group, a political entity susceptible to the panderings of politicians.

Dean’s own forecast for the next four years is arguably much grimmer. He is not only convinced that Trump will be worse than Nixon in virtually every way—he thinks he’ll probably get away with it.

In Trump, Dean says he has observed many of his former boss’s most dangerous traits—obsessive vengefulness, reflexive dishonesty, all-consuming ambition—but none of Nixon’s redeeming qualities.

Unchecked, Dean worries, these neo-Nixonian instincts will only grow stronger once Trump enters the Oval Office—a place where every occupant since Nixon has found new ways to expand his authority and further his reach.

Hang on when Trump and his crew fully appreciate the extraordinary powers they will have—it is not only going to be thrilling, but dangerous.”

“I don’t think Richard Nixon even comes close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”

Yet, he’s profoundly pessimistic about the prospect of Trump facing any true accountability while in office. In the four decades since Nixon resigned, Dean says, the institutions that are meant to keep a president’s power in check—the press, Congress, even the courts—have been rendered increasingly weak and ineffectual by a sort of creeping partisan paralysis.

Dean believes the American electorate has become desensitized to political scandal. In the years immediately following Watergate, he said,  politicians were on high alert, and so was the public. But since then, that culture of vigilance has so eroded that it’s nearly impossible now to envision a sin so grave, or a revelation so explosive, that it would lead to the ouster of a sitting president.

“The Trump campaign is an interesting measure of how high the tolerance has gotten for a public figure’s misbehavior,” he said, citing the candidate’s now-infamous comments on the leaked Access Hollywood tape as just one example.

Dean says Trump will almost certainly weather whatever storms he faces during his presidency. “Unless Trump is a such a disaster that the public rises up and changes control of Congress in the mid-term elections, he is very safe.”

“By nature, I am an optimist,” he told me. “But Trump as president is going to be about surviving disaster.”

Specifically, the senator has become convinced that the push to register every young American for the draft, women included, is in fact a stalking horse for Big Government’s push to establish a system of compulsory national service.

One is the move (championed by Senator John McCain) to open the draft to women. The other aims to create a “National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service” that would “consider methods to increase participation in military, national, and public service in order to address national security and other public service needs of the nation.”

Today, more funding is made available to create additional Americorps jobs; tomorrow, 18-year-olds are being forced to man soup kitchens in the name of patriotism.

Dr. Dodes is a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Schachter is a former chairman of the Committee on Research Proposals, International Psychoanalytic Association. The letter was also signed by 35 other psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal.

In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.

One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times.

How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked.“I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.”

Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes — and what they reveal — will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation.

By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.

in the long run, “when pay setters set their own pay, there’s no limit,” unless “confiscatory tax rates” are imposed.

suggests that traditional liberal government policies on spending, taxation and regulation will fail to diminish inequality.

Conservative readers will find that Piketty’s book disputes the view that the free market, liberated from the distorting effects of government intervention, “distributes,” as Milton Friedman famously put it, “the fruits of economic progress among all people.

Piketty proposes instead that the rise in inequality reflects markets working precisely as they should: “This has nothing to do with a market imperfection: the more perfect the capital market, the higher” the rate of return on capital is in comparison to the rate of growth of the economy. The higher this ratio is, the greater inequality is.

we are in the presence of one of the watershed books in economic thinking.”

There are a number of key arguments in Piketty’s book.

One is that the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.

According to Piketty, those halcyon six decades were the result of two world wars and the Great Depression. The owners of capital – those at the top of the pyramid of wealth and income – absorbed a series of devastating blows. These included the loss of credibility and authority as markets crashed; physical destruction of capital throughout Europe in both World War I and World War II; the raising of tax rates, especially on high incomes, to finance the wars; high rates of inflation that eroded the assets of creditors; the nationalization of major industries in both England and France;

The six decades between 1914 and 1973 stand out from the past and future, according to Piketty, because the rate of economic growth exceeded the after-tax rate of return on capital. Since then, the rate of growth of the economy has declined, while the return on capital is rising to its pre-World War I levels.

“If the rate of return on capital remains permanently above the rate of growth of the economy – this is Piketty’s key inequality relationship,” Milanovic writes in his review, it “generates a changing functional distribution of income in favor of capital and, if capital incomes are more concentrated than incomes from labor (a rather uncontroversial fact), personal income distribution will also get more unequal — which indeed is what we have witnessed in the past 30 years.”

The Piketty diagnosis helps explain the recent drop in the share of national income going to labor (see Figure 2) and a parallel increase in the share going to capital.

Piketty’s analysis also sheds light on the worldwide growth in the number of the unemployed. The International Labor Organization, an agency of the United Nations, reported recently that the number of unemployed grew by 5 million from 2012 to 2013, reaching nearly 202 million by the end of last year. It is projected to grow to 215 million by 2018.

Piketty’s wealth tax solution runs directly counter to the principles of contemporary American conservatives who advocate antithetical public policies: cutting top rates and eliminating the estate tax.

Judge Jorge Zepeda indicted Mr. Davis on accusations that he provided Chilean intelligence officers with information on the two men. As commander of the military group, the ruling said, Mr. Davis directed a secret investigation into the political activities of American citizens in Chile and did not prevent their murders, “although he was in a position to do so, given his coordination with Chilean agents.”

how can people be unaware of this development, or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have.

defenses of extreme inequality almost always invoke the examples of movie and sports stars. But celebrities make up only a tiny fraction of the wealthy, and even the biggest stars earn far less than the financial barons who really dominate the upper strata

For example, according to Forbes, Robert Downey Jr. is the highest-paid actor in America, making $75 million last year. According to the same publication, in 2013 the top 25 hedge fund managers took home, on average, almost a billion dollars each.

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is.

defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

Perhaps the cruelest myth was that—in the long-ago words of the current U.S. secretary of state while addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971—U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were regularly committing “war crimes” and behaving in a “fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”

a brilliant psychological warfare campaign by this country’s enemies misinformed and divided the American people, with tragic consequences—a reflexive hostility, in many quarters, to the use of U.S. military power anywhere in the world—that still weaken the nation today.

Congress ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory

By resisting Communist insurgencies in the region the U.S. bought time for vulnerable targets such as Thailand and Indonesia to become stronger

the real tragedy is that on almost every major point of contention war protesters got the facts wrong. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a nationalist who would likely be a buffer against Chinese expansion if we supported him. This ignored Hanoi’s official biographies, which acknowledged Ho’s role as a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, his subsequent training in Moscow, followed by years traveling the world on behalf of the Communist International.

we would do well to clear away the myths that still adhere to that bloody conflict and understand why America got involved, what went wrong and what the consequences were.

We went to war because by ratifying the United Nations Charter in 1945 and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Seato) treaty a decade later, the U.S. pledged to oppose armed international aggression

to close the deficit and raise benefits to nearly half of average worker earnings, we would need to find an additional 5 percent of taxable payroll, or find the money elsewhere. If we lift the cap on the payroll tax without paying more benefits to those above it, that gets us 2.32 percent (or a bit less if we slightly increase benefits to the rich). Dedicating revenues from the estate tax at its 2009 levels to Social Security gets another half percent. A few other tweaks, like covering new public employees, add another 0.42 percent. The remainder can be found by raising the payroll tax by roughly 1 percentage point for both employees and employers.

Retirees today are shortchanged on Social Security because they have been shortchanged on wages for their entire working lives. The labor economist Richard B. Freeman points out that the hourly earnings of workers dropped by 8 percent from 1973 to 2005 while productivity shot up 55 percent or more. The United States is one of the few developed countries where workers are routinely cheated of a share in higher productivity.

And where has the money from the extra productivity gone? It’s gone right to the top, to the top few percent. If wages had been paid fairly based on productivity, there would have been enough money subject to the payroll tax to avoid even a modest shortfall.