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Here is a ChatGPT estimate of the number of Americans that completed high school in any given year, compared to the number of 20 year olds that year. As we see, before 1880 only about 5% of Americans completed high school. They had better things to do. During the early Public School movement in the 1890s, this rises, and rises more in the 1920s. By 1950, following the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which ended full-time work for under-18s, more than half of Americans were finishing High School. While this might look like Americans were quite uneducated, almost illiterate, actually it was the opposite. This is from the Underground History of American Education. At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-levelacademic tests before being inducted. The years of maximum mobilization were 1942to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inductedand those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them werejudged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percentliteracy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate amongvoluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worryanybody. WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million menwere tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draftpool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier asliterate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginningof WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean Wargroup received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school withmore professionally

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on March 8, 2026.) Last month, I warned that gasoline prices could rise to perhaps $10 a gallon. I made comparisons to the Oil Crisis of 1973, especially the apparent decline in the dollar’s value (as expressed by the number of dollars it took to buy an ounce of gold) that preceded the Oil Crisis that erupted in October of that year. The “price of gold,” or in other words the exchange rate between the floating fiat dollar and what served as its benchmark of value for nearly two centuries previous, had risen from $35/oz. in 1970 to around $100/oz. in mid-1973. It took three times more dollars to buy an ounce of gold; and pretty soon, it took three times more dollars to buy a gallon of gas as well. But when I was outlining the eerie similarities between 1973 and today (including a Federal Reserve that did not seem to be doing anything inflationary), I didn’t expect that we would actually have another Arab Oil Embargo. In response to the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia said that he would not ship oil to Israel’s allies in the conflict, including the United States. Oil prices soared in response.  The embargo was lifted in March of 1974. But, oil prices never went back down. They were about $3.50/barrel before the Oil Crisis, and $11.50/barrel afterwards – almost exactly the 3x that you could have predicted beforehand by the number of dollars it took to buy an ounce of gold.  Then they went up further, to nearly $40/barrel in 1980. Of course Washington blamed the Iranian Revolution of 1979, just as it had blamed the Arab Oil Embaro six years earlier. Nothing was their fault, just those darn Muslims. But you

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on February 6, 2026.) When I look at how things are going, I keep coming to the conclusion that we might see $10 per gallon gasoline at your local pump pretty soon – maybe in 2027. It would cost $200 for a 20-gallon fillup. It might not happen, but if it did, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Basically, it would feel like a replay of the Oil Crisis of 1973. The basic reason for this is just the same as in 1973. Our currency, the dollar, is losing value. Already the penny is being disappeared, and I think the nickel is not far behind. It takes more and more dollars to buy things. We had a burst of “inflation” following the wild money-printing of the Covid period, in 2020-2021, which combined with “supply chain” and other issues to drive prices higher. But, if you look on YouTube, or in our own experience and that of those we know, many Americans seem to be experiencing another, maybe even bigger inflationary burst as prices rise again. Except for gasoline. It’s still at a level that we first saw in 2008, eighteen years ago. Gasoline prices are very politically sensitive. We can’t really have a public discussion about the price of a Big Mac, or apartment rent, or healthcare costs, because every situation is different. Gasoline prices are about the only price that is about the same everywhere, and every American knows what it is. It becomes a focal point for “inflation” that is affecting everything we buy. Every politician around the world wants to avoid having a discussion about the “inflation” that is one of the characteristics of our time. President Donald Trump, in 2025, leaned hard on OPEC oil producers to increase their production to near

A friend asked me about the “future of supply side economics.” The connotation, I think, was that after fifty years now, since the early days of the 1970s, we have done what could be done. Low Taxes and Stable Money. Rather, I see economics today — not just “supply side economics” but the entire field of study — as basically an unexplored continent. This is because, of the thousands of professional academic and other economists out there, almost none are doing anything to explore this vast continent. They are just bickering about the same stuff they’ve been bickering about for the past 100 years, most of it irrelevant. The great insight of the “supply side economists,” which as we know are really just “economists” in the Classical Tradition, was basically that everything matters. We have always known this, of course. AI, or regulations on car emissions, or regulations on bank lending, or immigration, or self-driving cars — all this matters. But, some things matter more than others. So you focus your attention, first and foremost, on the things that matter most, which is usually Low Taxes and Stable Money. But, you can also focus some attention on all the other things that matter. Today, I might say that Immigration matters more than taxes and money. August 11, 2016: The Gigantic Importance of Supply-Side Economics There are some economists who do focus on some narrow topic, like fisheries management or rent controls or the effects of minimum wage laws. But, the big macroeconomists ignore all of this, because it doesn’t fit into their mathematical models. One outcome of the misuse of math in economics, since the 1870s, is that it implies that nothing matters, unless it is represented by a letter variable. The very use of the equal sign, by definition

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on January 15, 2026.) Iran has been experiencing quite a bit of disorder recently. The reasons for this are “complicated” – Iran has many foreign enemies, and the situation smells like an attempted “color revolution” – but the government of Iran has also been making quite a mess of things all by itself, recently and for a long time now. It’s no surprise that even the most patriotic Iranians might be very dissatisfied today. The reason for this, as promoted on social media, is supposedly the “Islamists,” although Iran has been Islamic since the seventh century. The more likely reason is that Iran is also suffering a moderate hyperinflation, while also raising already-high taxes to intolerable levels. Iran’s currency, the rial, used to be fairly reliable. In 2003, it was about 8,000 rials to the dollar; and in 2011, it was about 10,000. A little slippage, but nothing too bad. But soon afterwards, the rial broke down. By 2019, it took 42,000 rials to buy a dollar. Then capital controls put foreign exchange on lockdown. In early 2026, it reportedly takes over 1.4 million rials to buy a dollar on the black market. Today’s rial is worth only about 1/140th of what it was worth in 2011.  According to the Iranian website Bonbast.com, the black market rate has moved from 800,000 to 1,400,000 (+75%) just since June 2025. The official “inflation rate” was 42.5% in December 2025, from a year earlier – but even this is considered a whitewashed government fiction. If I was an Iranian citizen, I would be rather unhappy about this. But it gets worse. The extreme inflation no doubt arises from Iran’s budget deficit of 5.5% of GDP in 2025, continuing a long series of deficits. Naturally, the government wants to resolve this, with higher

(This item originally appeared at Forbes.com on December 12, 2025.) In 2019, I was involved in a crypto project that aimed to provide a usable basis of large-scale commerce in an environment where existing fiat currencies were failing badly. Of course, I was in support of a 100% gold system – which has always worked in the past. And, people agreed that this was a good idea “theoretically,” and “eventually.” But, the perception at the time was that there should be some kind of intermediate step. For example, if a country had a regular gold-based currency today, then the value of the currency would be fixed to gold. In other words, foreign exchange rates with the other major fiat currencies would be terribly volatile, and also, would introduce a lot of trade and finance difficulties. Yes, you don’t want to follow those fiat currencies into the oblivion they deserve. But, you don’t want to beat yourself to death with forex chaos in the interim period either. The solution, in that 2019 project, was to have a currency with 40% Gold and 60% US Dollars, a proxy for the whole global fiat currency space, since all the major currencies (USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, others) tend to stay pretty close to one another to reduce forex volatility. In the future, maybe that 60% of fiat would devalue away to dirt, and you would be left with an effective gold-only currency. But for now, having one foot in both worlds seemed like the best solution. Recently, the BRICS consortium unveiled its plan for a similar solution, rather boringly called the “unit.” It is to be composed of 40% gold, and 60% of a basket of the domestic fiat currencies of the participating governments, including China, India, Brazil, Russia and so forth. For one thing, this allows the