Among my Christmas present books was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power, a powerful read. This passage spoke to me:

“A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware but Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War 1 but we are still paying out the pensions. … ”

The more I think about the broad sustainability issues I wrote about in the Economics of Enough, the more important I believe paying attention to the long run to be. Hence the new project we just launched at the Bennett Institute on improving measures of natural and social capital. My goodness, we – certainly all the western countries – have been destroying both, and it looks like the bills are starting to come due.

Another extraordinary essay in We Were Eight Years in Power is about the incarceration of African-American men: “The US now accounts for less than 5% of the world’s inhabitants – and about 25% of its incarcerated inhabitants.” The rise and fall of crime in the 20th century was a common, broad pattern to many countries. Only in the US did the rate  of imprisonment climb as crime fell – other countries saw their crime rate fall without creating a prison state.

The book is great – he’s an outstanding essayist.

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