by Charles C. Jett

The Man in the Reading Room – Will He Be Right Again?

In 1916, the top one percent of American households held 45 percent of the nation’s wealth. By 1978, after four decades of New Deal regulation, antitrust enforcement, and a strong labor movement, that figure had fallen to about 22 percent. By 2025, it had climbed back to 31.7 percent — within striking distance of where it stood in 1916. This essay traces the American economy across one hundred and twenty-six years: the trust era, the Crash, the Depression, the New Deal, the postwar Great Compression, the deregulation that followed, and the present moment of platform monopolies and gig labor. The patterns are striking. They were also predicted — by an unexpected observer, working in the Reading Room of the British Museum in the 1860s, with no knowledge of America at all.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – An Enslaved Poet Wrote to the Generalissimo

A slave ship called the Phillis. A child in the hold. Eighteen prominent Bostonians forced to sign their names to certify she had written her own poems. A forty-two-line ode mailed to General George Washington in October 1775, before independence had even been declared. That was Phillis Wheatley’s case for entry into the public sphere of the founding. Washington answered. He praised her talent. He invited her to Cambridge. He sent her poem to the press. Then she married a free Black grocer, lost three children, took work as a scullery maid, and died in a boarding house at thirty-one with her infant daughter beside her. The Constitution that arrived four years later counted three-fifths of her in the House. She wrote her way into the founding before the founding had decided she was a person. Phillis Wheatley needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

A Nuclear Submarine, a Spy, and a Thesis: Forty Years on the Close Aboard Bastion.

Scorecard. A 1988 master’s thesis predicted today’s Russian and Chinese naval strategy. The world has confirmed most of it, revised the rest, and demonstrated something more important than either.
Answer. Walter M. Kreitler, then a Navy lieutenant, argued in his Naval Postgraduate School thesis that the Soviets would tuck their ballistic missile submarines inside the twelve-mile territorial sea, defend them with mines and coastal forces, and free the blue-water fleet for other work. Forty years on, the bastion is the operating doctrine of the Russian Navy and increasingly of the PLAN.
Pivot. The Soviet fleet collapsed before it could execute the strategy. Sea-based deterrence split into two families. Project Harmony, revealed in October 2025, has filled in exactly the kind of defensive architecture Kreitler’s thesis said Moscow would need. New START’s central limits expired on 5 February 2026.
Closing Claim. Kreitler’s thesis is a demonstration of how a young officer, using only open sources, can reason from hardware and geography to a doctrine whose shape four decades largely confirm. The method outlasted the prediction.
My thanks to Walter Kreitler for the work, to Jan Breemer for guiding it, and to my shipmate Bob Mhoon, who sent me the thesis. Ray is long since decommissioned. The questions she was built to answer are not.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Critical Skills Got There First. Alex Karp Got There Loudest.

Alex Karp says only two types of people will survive AI: tradespeople and the neurodivergent. His Neurodivergent Fellowship drew 2,000 applications in days. His Meritocracy Fellowship pays high schoolers $5,400 a month — provided they scored 1,460 on the SAT.
Karp is right that something has inverted. He should be commended for saying it loudly. The Critical Skills pointed us this way about forty years ago.
In 1994, working from approximately 900 executive-search position specifications and roughly $36 million in real search fees, the Critical Skills framework identified eight learnable skills common to nearly every senior corporate role. Then Congress let School-to-Work sunset, and the country chose standardized testing instead.
Karp is on the right track. The piece the framework adds: a skill is something you do. Not something you are. The Critical Skills pointed us this way about forty years ago.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – He Did Not Run. He Walked.

The enslaved man whose lawsuit removed the law from beneath slavery in Massachusetts. This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Quock Walker needs to be remembered. * * * On […]

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