Interview: America Is Broken—Walter Isaacson Wants to Fix It
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- At the 12:25 mark — “All men are created equal — a lot to unpack. What do we mean? It’s clear that people are not equal. We vary in talents and traits, but are all equal participants…”
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No way we can make the changes needed unless we have a common understanding of “variability.” Variation is the gap between the ideal (a more perfect Union) and the actual state of affairs.
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In a biblical context, perfection means that all needs are met. As more needs are met, less harm is caused to people by unmet needs. Consequently, continuous improvement becomes a moral imperative. The “scientific method” supports determining if a change results in improvement. See also the Taguchi Loss Function.
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Ironically, the new methods for managing variation were once classified and, although declassified, remain a well-kept secret.
Welcome
W. Edwards Deming, whose contributions to teaching about quality methods were recognized by Fortune magazine as being “among the 20 that have shaped the modern world of business” and by U.S. News and World Report as “one of nine turning points in history,” concluded that improvement has all to do with reducing variation.
Article”
“In this era of poisonous and sometimes violent political polarization, when even discussions of our history threaten to divide us, we must find a way to put differences aside and celebrate, with gratitude, who we are. One way to achieve this would be by appreciating anew that sentence, the second of our Declaration of Independence, which may be the greatest ever written by human hand.”
Link: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, by Walter Isaacson, The Free Press, 11/23/2025
PDF: Things Worth Remembering_ The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
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- We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
“By writing about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” they helped define what became known as the American Dream, which is that we should be a land of opportunity for all. If you play by the rules, there should be good jobs at good wages, decent schools, safe streets, and—most important—the prospect of an even better life for your children”
What is the purpose of an economy? To increase wealth? Yes, that’s good. Growth? Yes, also good. But the purpose of an economy is also something deeper. Its purpose is also to create a good society. A good, stable society where individuals can be free and flourish and live together in harmony. That requires nurturing the sense that we share common rights, common grounds, common truths, and common aspirations.
“At the signing of the Declaration, John Hancock wrote his name with his famous flourish. “We must all hang together,” he is said to have insisted. Franklin replied, alluding to what would happen to them if their revolution failed, “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
“As Franklin pointed out, our life-or-death challenge as a nation, whether it be in 1776 or 2026, is this: When there are so many forces dedicated to dividing us, how can we best hang together?”
“One way to do it is by reflecting and giving thanks for our fundamental principles, the ones proclaimed in that sentence worth remembering.”
Some Comments to the Article
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- The more I read through this the more it annoys me. There is so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start. It’s like listening to an unemployed trust-funder liberal activist explain economic principles. The economy has no social purpose; it is not a government program. Industrious people create wealth. Economies are simply an organized measure of that wealth and how it circulates.
- If we simply stuck to the initial idea that everyone get equal rights under the law, we would do just fine. Unfortunately we have instead tried to equal the playing field so that we have no losers. Now we have entire generations of them.
- Prosperity and other benefits of our society emerge from individual liberty, not from the designs and manipulations of our betters.
- Mr Isaacson makes the case for, among other things, stopping willy-nilly immigration and not allowing Muslims into the U.S. As we know, Muslims believe that non-Muslims should be killed, and it is an act worthy of martyrdom to do that to another human being. This barbaric tenet of a religion incompatible with any other puts Muslims outside the lines of the American Dream. What should we do about that?
- This barbaric tenet of a religion”. Here is a clue: It is not a religion, it is an ideology of conquest, with a patina of belief in a supreme being, commanding violence by the adherents/. It is incompatible with the very sentence being written about in the article. What should we do? Recognize the the 1st Amendment does not guarantee the practice of ideology, particularly violent ones. Communism in practice, Socialism in practice, Islam in practice.
- But giving an economy a “purpose” puts the cart before the horse. Society has an economy, not the other way ’round.That may sound like a nitpick, but that one, tiny reversal has huge implications for what kinds of governmental interventions are allowed. Let me elaborate.
If an economy is what creates society, then the government is authorized to command the economy to produce the kind of society that is desired. Whether that desire is expressed by an authoritarian impulse (China) or a democratic one (USA) matters not, the results are the same.
OTOH, if society merely has an economy, then government is authorized to command citizens directly, and any effects on the resulting economy are a kind of litmus test of how well that governance is working. In this case, the form of government hugely matters. People can vote out politicians in a democracy, but not in communist countries.
- The lack of perspective and absence of humility in teaching our children on what it took to arrive at this moment is a crime, an intellectual failing that puts the greatest thinkers of Western Civilization in a box that is wrapped in suggestions of evil intent and oppression. What has happened to us? We are failing the next generation on a massive scale.
- The Declaration, like the Constitution, was a promise that recognized the rights of the individual over the collective.
- I was taught early that “all men are created equal” was understood to mean “equal under the law.” None of the founders believed that all men were equal in smarts or inherent abilities.
- The Smithsonian should feature an exhibit on the woke cultural revolution, which shredded the Declaration and the Constitution while smearing and tearing down statues of the founding fathers: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/smithsonian-woke-exhibit
Independent Voters of Brown County IN 