No. 20: Meritocracy, the invisible hand, and brownies

Douglass/Du Bois/Jesus/Lincoln/MLK/Smith/Tocqueville

Here's some things people have been writing:

Douglass’s 1852 speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? praised the founding fathers and their stated ideals before damning the gross injustice, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy of slavery. Seeing at once such good and evil in the same man is also the right way to look at Columbus. reason

MLK’s I’ve Been to the Mountaintop and Jesus’s “house divided” which Lincoln chiseled into American history show up in RFK Jr’s rhetoric as he eyes a run at the white house orthogonal to left and right. theatlantic

Du Bois launched The Brownies Book, a magazine for black children, in 1920. Its pages were the first to see Langston Hughes and others before it folded in late 1921. A new version—called The New Brownies’ Book—launched on October 10th. nytimes

Tocqueville,in Democracy in America, wrote of 1830s U.S. as a place where anyone could get ahead. It was a romanticized—if useful—view; the reality was far more mixed. thereader.mitpress

Smith’s “invisible hand” felt complete when I was young. Now I see that, though efficient, it needs guidance. ycombinator