Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 12 Mar 2025With the Ides of March a few days away, we take a look at the final months of Julius Caesar’s life and the conspiracy led by Brutus and Cassius. Both had fought against Caesar at the start of the Civil War, but later surrendered and were treated well by him. They were joined by men who had served Caesar in Gaul and during the Civil War, like Decimus Brutus and Trebonius and Sulpicius Galba. Why did they want to kill Caesar and how was the plot organised?
March 15, 2026
Killing CAESAR – the Ides of March and the conspiracy against Julius Caesar
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Jobs and new technology – the example of the ATM
In Saturday’s FEE Weekly, Diego Costa looks at the classic example of how the role of the bank teller changed when automated teller machines (ATM) were introduced:
“Pulling out money from ATM” by ota_photos is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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[…] Those are important findings, but the study of capitalism in the age of AI is larger than labor-saving technologies inside a fixed institutional world. It’s the study of market processes that change the world in which labor takes place.
David Oks gets at this in a recent essay on bank tellers that has been making the rounds. For years, economists and pundits used the ATM to illustrate why technological progress does not necessarily wipe out jobs. In a conversation with Ross Douthat, Vice President J.D. Vance made exactly that point. The ATM automated a large share of what bank tellers used to do, and yet teller employment did not collapse. Why? Because the ATM lowered the cost of operating a branch. Banks opened more branches. Tellers shifted toward relationship management, customer cultivation, and a more boutique kind of service. The machine changed the worker’s role inside the same institution.
That story was true. Until it wasn’t.
As Oks puts it, the ATM did not kill the bank teller, but the iPhone did. Mobile banking changed the consumer interface of finance. Once that happened, the branch ceased to be the unquestioned center of retail banking. And once the branch lost that status, the teller lost the institutional setting that made him economically legible in the first place. The ATM fit capital into a labor-shaped hole. The smartphone changed the shape of the hole.
Vance looks at the ATM era and says: technology does not destroy jobs. Oks looks at the smartphone era and says: it does, just not the technology you expected. But if you stop there, you are still doing what economist Joseph Schumpeter called appraising the process ex visu of a given point of time. As Schumpeter wrote, capitalism is an organic process, and the “analysis of what happens in any particular part of it, say, in an individual concern or industry, may indeed clarify details of mechanism but is inconclusive beyond that”. You shouldn’t study one occupation within one industry and draw conclusions about how technological change works.
The obvious question you still have to answer is: where did those former bank tellers go? What happened to the capital freed when branches closed? What new institutional forms, fintech, mobile payments, embedded finance, neobanks, emerged from the very same process that destroyed the branch model? How many jobs did those create, and in what configurations?
The lost teller jobs are seen. They show up in BLS data and make for a dramatic graph. The unseen is everything the mobile banking revolution enabled, not only within financial services, but across the entire economy. The person who no longer spends thirty minutes at a branch and instead uses that time to manage cash flow for a small business. The immigrant who sends remittances through an app instead of through Western Union. The fintech startup that employs forty engineers building fraud-detection systems. None of that appears in a chart titled “Bank Teller Employment”. The unseen is the world that emerges.
When economists say the ATM was “complementary” to bank tellers, what they usually mean is something quite narrow: the machine performed one set of tasks, such as dispensing cash, and freed the human to concentrate on others, such as relationship banking, cross-selling, and problem-solving.
But the ATM did more than substitute for one task while leaving others to the teller. It made the teller more productive inside the same institutional setting. This is the comparative advantage layer that Séb Krier touches on when he says that “as long as the combination of Human + AGI yields even a marginal gain over AGI alone, the human retains a comparative advantage”. The branch still organized the relationship between bank and customer and the teller still inhabited a role within that world. The ATM simply changed the economics of that role, making the branch cheaper to operate and, paradoxically, more worth expanding.
But the branch is not just a building with unhappy carpet and suspicious lighting. It is an institution. It is a set of roles, expectations, scripts, constraints, and physical arrangements that organize how a bank and a customer relate to one another. It tells people where banking happens, how banking happens, and who performs which function in the ritual. The teller made sense within that world. So did the ATM. They were both playing the same game.
The iPhone did something different. Instead of automating tasks within the branch, it challenged the premise that banking requires a branch at all. It shifted the game to another board. Call this institutional substitution. When a technology is designed to operate within existing rules, the institution can often absorb it, adapt to it, metabolize it. The real threat comes from technologies that are not even playing the same game. The ATM was a move within the branch-banking game. Mobile banking was a move in the higher-order game, the game about which games get played.
Most discussion of AI stops at the level of task substitution and complementarity. Those are necessary questions, but ATM questions.
Joseph Schumpeter understood that entrepreneurship is not simply about making institutions more efficient. It’s about unsettling the institutional forms through which those efficiencies make sense at all. If you ask whether AI can do some of the work of a lawyer, a teacher, a customer service representative, or a junior analyst, you are asking an interesting question. But you are still mostly asking an ATM question. You are asking how capital fits into an existing human role. The more interesting question is whether AI changes the institutional setting that made that role intelligible in the first place. Now we are talking about institutional substitution. It’s a more dangerous territory and a more interesting territory.
And if the bank teller story is any guide, the technologies that bring about institutional substitution will not necessarily be the ones designed to automate an institution’s existing tasks. They may come from somewhere orthogonal, from applications and configurations that incumbents were not watching because they did not look like competition. The iPhone was not competing with the ATM. It was playing a different game, and it happened to make the old game less central.
So the real question is not whether AI will destroy jobs in the abstract. The real question is how AI will reorganize the architecture of production, consumption, and coordination. Not “AI does what lawyers do, but cheaper”, but rather “AI enables a new way of resolving disputes or structuring agreements that makes the current institutional form of legal services less necessary”.
Update, 16 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
How to Go From President to King – Death of Democracy 07 – Q3 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 14 Mar 2026In Q3 1934, Adolf Hitler completed the transformation of Nazi Germany from a dictatorship into an absolute Führer state. In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the destruction of the SA leadership, and the consolidation of Hitler’s personal rule after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg.
From the creation of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) to the rise of the SS under Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi regime tightened its grip on the state, the press, and everyday life. Meanwhile, propaganda, economic control under Hjalmar Schacht’s New Plan, and growing antisemitic persecution reshaped German society.
Using contemporary voices from Victor Klemperer, Luise Solmitz, and other witnesses, this episode explores how Hitler’s popularity soared even as terror and repression intensified. Watch the full Death of Democracy series to understand how the Nazi regime consolidated power step by step — and how ordinary societies can slide into dictatorship.
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Using US gun statistics to argue against Canadian gun owners
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada respond to a troll post trying to confuse the legal situation for Canadian gun owners by using statistics from the US, where the laws are significantly different:
Typical. He blocked without further discussion.
But, he’s wrong.
There is a fundamental flaw in using that 1998 [US] DOJ literature review to argue the Stand on Guard Act will lead to more gun deaths. The claim relies on a completely broken comparison between U.S. and Canadian law.
Here is why applying that specific American data to this Canadian bill proposed by the CPC simply does not work.
The DOJ report relies heavily on American statistics where firearms kept for self defense are typically stored loaded and unlocked. That specific environment, meaning immediate and unrestricted access to a loaded weapon, is the primary driver for the increased rates of accidental shootings and suicides highlighted in those U.S. studies.
The Stand on Guard Act does not create that environment in Canada. Saying it does such is just fear-mongering.
This proposed legislation is strictly an amendment to Section 34(2) of the Criminal Code. It establishes a presumption that force used against a violent home invader is reasonable. The goal is to spare Canadians from years of legal limbo for defending their families.
Crucially, this bill does not amend the Firearms Act and it does not repeal Canada’s strict safe storage regulations.
A legally compliant Canadian firearm owner must still store their firearms unloaded and secured with a locking device, or locked inside a sturdy cabinet or safe. Ammunition must also be stored separately or locked up securely in the same safe.
The specific risks identified in the U.S. data, like a child finding a loaded gun or someone in crisis having instant access to a weapon, are mitigated by our existing storage framework.
Debating the merits of self defense thresholds is perfectly fair. However, importing U.S. data based on a completely different regulatory baseline to predict Canadian outcomes is a clear misapplication of the evidence. We need to ground this conversation in actual Canadian law rather than American statistics.
So, as a reminder — welcome to Canada — let’s buy Canadian, support Canadian and recognize Canadian facts.
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QotD: The Roman Empire “worked” for centuries because it was run like the Roman army
The Roman Empire is a good example. It worked because they ran it like the Army.
A Roman legion is technically a “manipular phalanx”. A phalanx — that is, a tactical formation — that can detach parts of itself to pursue smaller tactical objectives. As far as I know, the Legion was an administrative unit, not a tactical one — the largest tactical formation was the cohort — but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, the Romans were accustomed to independently-operating tactical units. So long as they maintained formation, the sub-commanders had very broad latitude to do whatever they needed to do. They were expected to be able to command what we’d call “combined arms” (a vexillation). Ancient Auftragstaktik.
They ran their Empire the same way. So long as the sub-commanders (the Governors) “held formation”, they could pursue the agreed-upon tactical objectives (peace, revenue maximization) as they saw fit. They could put together what amounted to an administrative vexillation, using whoever was available at the time. The Emperor basically dealt with personnel problems, like a general — he had his broad policy objectives, but most of the stuff he ruled on boiled down to personnel matters; he’d direct his sub-commanders to fix a problem in whatever way seemed best to them.
We run our polities like bureaucracies — businesses, not armies. The Army’s basic problem is how to keep itself occupied in peacetime — it assumes that it exists, and always will exist, because it’s necessary; should the Army cease to exist, so will the State. Business’s basic problem is to generate enough output to keep itself in existence — a very different proposition, requiring a very different mindset.
A State bureaucracy is the worst of both worlds — it assumes it always will exist, like the Army, so it needs to find a way to keep itself occupied during “peacetime”; but that means it needs to produce enough output to justify itself in “peacetime”, because it’s never not peacetime — the business mentality.
Severian, commenting on “Means and Ends”, Founding Questions, 2025-09-04.
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March 14, 2026
What a Mickey Mouse idea!
In my far-distant youth, a “Mickey Mouse idea” would be a way of disparaging someone’s notions and hopes, belittling and ridiculing it to prevent it from being realized. In spite of that somewhat dubious association, Ted Gioia has a Mickey Mouse idea to save Disney, and it might just work … except that the studio seems to think their most famous creation is somehow tainted and disreputable:
Do aging sports stars still get hired to shake hands with tourists at Las Vegas casinos? It happened to Joe Louis. It happened to Mickey Mantle. What a sad final chapter to such illustrious careers.
Once they were great. Now they merely greet.
I fear this is Mickey Mouse’s fate today. He does his meet-and-greet routine at the theme park, then goes home to a trailer park in Orlando. Here he gripes to Minnie that he deserves better than this Walmart-ish door-tending gig. She tells him to stop whining and take Pluto for a walk.
Ah if I ran Disney I’d bring Mickey Mouse back from exile. I’d give him a movie contract, a record deal, and a tickertape parade down Main Street USA.
I’d tell the shareholders: Watch out K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Mouse is Back!
But that’s just my dream, not reality. This little fella is just as charming as ever, but his corporate overseers don’t want what he has to offer. Disney is pushing ahead on hundreds of projects right now, but none of them involve Mickey Mouse.
Back in 2002 there was some buzz about a new Disney full-length animated film entitled The Search for Mickey Mouse. This was a big deal. It would be the studio’s 50th animated feature film, and release was scheduled for Mickey’s 75th anniversary.
But the studio pulled the plug. Two years later, Disney tossed a few cheese scraps in Mickey’s direction via a 68-minute reunion with Donald Duck — but they sent the film straight to DVD after a few showings in a Hollywood theater.
It was a low-budget affair. But the theater was packed to the brim, and audiences loved the movie. That didn’t matter. The studio had other priorities.
That was our beloved mouse’s last moment of glory. Since then Mickey has appeared in a 6-minute cartoon — back in 2013 — and been granted a few on-screen cameos in low-profile short films. I’m tempted to say That’s All Folks as I contemplate Mickey’s prospects for future, but Bugs Bunny owns that line. So I’ll simply note that this is what extinction looks like when it happens onscreen.
Why is he getting cancelled?
Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse (Source)
Not long ago, Mickey Mouse was the most famous storytelling character in the world. Time magazine claimed that he was better known than even Santa Claus. Everybody in the world recognized his face — not even Winston Churchill or Greta Garbo could make that claim.
Mickey’s exile is, of course, due to his problematic copyright status. Some aspects of Mickey are entering the public domain, and even though Disney could protect his more updated modern look, it’s possible that some outsiders might earn a few coins from a Mickey Mouse resurgence.
Disney would rather go mouse-less than let that happen. That’s a bad decision — a triumphant return of Mickey would go along way toward charming audiences and fixing Disney’s tarnished reputation. He is, after all, the most beloved character in the company’s entire history.
In two years, Mickey Mouse will have reached the ripe ago of one hundred. That would be a great time for a comeback — not just for Mickey but for the whole Disney brand.
Belgian Aces in Exile – Belgian Fighter Aces – WW2 Gallery 10
World War Two
Published 12 Mar 2026Belgium might have been quickly overrun by the Germans in 1940, but many Belgian airmen continued the fight by flying with Britain’s RAF, and quite a few of them were good enough to score five or more aerial victories and become Flying Aces. Here are a few of their stories.
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Quid pro quo – something that is given in return for something else
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper considers what the Parliamentary floor-crossers got in exchange for their loyalty:
Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
Nunavut MP Lori Idlout has now become the fourth opposition member to join the Liberals in just the last five months, joining three Conservative MPs.
While there have been more than 100 MP floor-crossings since Canada’s 1867 founding, the circumstances have never looked quite like this. In any prior instance where multiple MPs shifted party loyalties in a short period of time, it was almost always because of a seismic political issue such as First World War conscription or Quebec separatism.
But in this case, all four floor-crossers gave vague reasons for the move, if they even tried to explain it at all. Idlout’s statement, issued by the Liberal Party, explained her switch as endorsing “strong and ambitious government that makes decisions with Nunavut — not only about Nunavut”.
Unmentioned is that the four also saw personal benefits for their defection to the government benches. A cursory summary is below.
Thus far, there are no tangible goodies to d’Entremont’s surprise November floor-crossing. He hasn’t received a position in cabinet, a pay raise or any special titles. What he did seem to secure, however, was his job.
When rumours first began to leak out that the Liberals were actively seeking floor-crossers among the Conservatives, one commonality emerged among the MPs being solicited: They all represented tightly contested ridings that were now polling for the Liberals.
This was particularly true of d’Entremont’s Acadie-Annapolis riding in Nova Scotia. He won it for the Conservatives by just 536 votes in 2025. And given a surge in Liberal popularity across the Maritimes in interim months, it now seemed likely to swap back to the Liberals; which it had done as recently as 2015.
D’Entremont’s former Conservative colleagues would allege quite directly that the defection had been done purely to remain as the MP for Acadie-Annapolis.
After the floor-crossing, Conservative MP Rick Perkins would allege that d’Entremont had told him the weekend prior, “If an election is held now, I will lose my seat. I might as well not run.”
“There is nothing in his floor crossing about principles. It was about keeping his job,” Perkins wrote in a Facebook post.
Ma also represents a tightly contested riding. Markham-Unionville had gone Liberal as recently as 2021, and he won in 2025 with just 50.65 per cent of the vote as compared to 47.05 per cent for his Liberal opponent.
But it only took a few days after the floor-crossing before Ma was conspicuously added to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s delegation headed to the People’s Republic of China and Qatar.
As noted by National Post‘s Chris Nardi at the time, Ma was the only member of the delegation who wasn’t a minister or a parliamentary secretary. His highest applicable rank was that he was vice-chair of the Canada-China Legislative Committee, a group comprising 11 other MPs and senators who didn’t similarly receive a seat on the plane.
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Palmer Cavalry Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Jun 2015The Palmer was the first bolt action firearm adopted by the US military — it was a single-shot rimfire carbine patented in 1863 and sold to the US cavalry in 1865. The guns were ordered during the Civil War, but were not delivered until just after the end of fighting, and thus never saw actual combat service. The design is very reminiscent of the later Ward-Burton rifle, using the same style of interrupted-thread locking lugs. The Palmer, however, has a separate hammer which must be cocked independently of the bolt operation.
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QotD: “Bludgeonspeak”
Bludgeonspeak is the use of invented terminology, or historical terminology that has been hijacked and corrupted, and then emptied of all meaning except as an attempt at moral blackmail.
Here are some notable bludgeonspeak items in 2025: “racist”, “fascist”, “homophobe”, “transphobe”, “islamophobe”, “far-right”. Also, the term “genocide” might not be quite there yet, but it’s being pushed in that direction pretty hard.
Some bludgeonspeak terms, like “fascist” and “racist” and “genocide”, used to have substantive meanings which have been destroyed by persistent abuse. It may be appropriate to recognize and use those meanings if you are reading or writing or speaking about history.
Others, like “homophobe”, “transphobe”, and “islamophobe”, were bludgeonspeak from birth. There are no circumstances in which these have substantive meaning, and it is unwise to treat them as though they do.
The only way to win is not to play. When somebody throws bludgeonspeak at you, call it out. State that you will not be controlled by their language, and you refuse to be assigned to a category you reject.
The key thing that people who employ bludgeonspeak don’t want you to grasp is that these words only have the power over you that you allow them.
Once a term has been generally recognized as bludgeonspeak, it not only loses its power as direct moral blackmail, it can no longer be used as a social attack.
So: learn to recognize bludgeonspeak. Shut down the people who use it by refusing to give it power. And educate other people about this manipulation tactic, so that they too can reject it.
You can prevent semantic manipulation. All it takes is the will to do so.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-04.
Update, Ides of March, 2026: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
March 13, 2026
Argentina shedding decades of mal-investment in uncompetitive industries
Argentine President Javier Milei didn’t promise an economic revival for all of Argentina, because significant chunks of the Argentine economy were invested in low-profit or even loss-making industries as the country followed “traditional” South American economic advice. Tim Worstall celebrates some of the belated losses in those deadweight areas of the economy:
Argentina has, for decades now, been making itself poorer by following — effectively — fascist economic policy. That whole process of trying to make everything at home, not importing, being self-reliant in manufactures and so on. The effect being that everything is made by companies of sub-optimal size and therefore consumers can only gain access to expensive shite.
So along comes a liberal — Milei — who lets consumers buy what they wish to buy from whoever, whereever. The result is that those inefficient, expensive, manufacturing firms close down as people buy the better, cheaper, stuff from abroad. The people are better off because they get better, cheaper, stuff. Not that expensive shite from the domestic producers.
Now, true, those jobs go. But those workers can go and do something else. Which they will too. In fact, they are — the unemployment rate is falling.
So, who loses out here? Obviously, the domestic capitalists, the people who own the now bust factories. Which, well, the correct reaction is probably Har Har. If your wealth is based upon producing expensive shite your customers are forced to buy then why shouldn’t we celebrate when you lose the lot?
We can — and should — take our analysis that one step further too. If the absence of the trade restrictions harms the domestic capitalists then who benefitted from the trade restrictions? The domestic capitalists, obviously. Which is how that infant industry protection, that insistence upon self-reliance, how fascist economics always does work out — the people who benefit are the domestic capitalists. And why in buggery would we want to protect them from the effects of free trade?
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The Raj – a cut-and-dried case of plunder?
Celina considers the claim that the period of British rule over India was a period of British plunder of Indian resources:
The historical evaluation of the British Raj has increasingly become a battleground for competing political and academic narratives. In the 21st century, the discourse has shifted significantly toward an oppression narrative that characterises the period from 1757 to 1948 as one of singular depredation. This perspective, popularised by public intellectuals such as Shashi Tharoor and economic historians like Utsa Patnaik, posits that British rule was defined by systematic deindustrialisation, engineered genocide, the intentional dismantling of educational systems, and the looting of wealth on a scale that defies standard economic modelling.1 However, when subjected to the rigours of aggregate statistical data, comparative institutional analysis, and a sense of historical proportion, these claims frequently reveal themselves as founded on misleading anecdotes and founding myths rather than objective economic realities.2 To accurately understand the trajectory of India under British influence, it is essential to move beyond evocative stories, such as Winston Churchill’s peevish marginal notes and examine the underlying population trajectories, industrial output figures, and the structural transition from a traditional to a constructed capitalist economy.3
“Political Map of the Indian Empire, 1893” from Constable’s Hand Atlas of India, London: Archibald Constable and Sons, 1893. (via Wikimedia)
Chronology and the Context of the Great Divergence
A critical assessment must begin with a precise periodisation of Indian history. The interaction between Europe and the subcontinent can be divided into four distinct phases: the pre-European period (before 1505), the era of initial coastal contact and Portuguese outposts (1505–1757), the transition under the East India Company (1757–1818), and the era of English domination and formal Raj rule (1818–1948).4 The central contention of modern critics centers on the final period, arguing that India’s share of the global economy collapsed from approximately 24.4% in 1700 to roughly 4.2% by 1950.5
While these proportions are grounded in data, most notably the work of Angus Maddison, the interpretation of this decline as evidence of absolute impoverishment is a fundamental statistical fallacy. The decline in India’s share of world GDP was not the result of a shrinking absolute economy, but rather the consequence of the Great Divergence. During this period, Western Europe, North America, and eventually Japan experienced explosive, intensive growth through the Industrial Revolution, while India remained largely stationary.6
Between 1850 and 1947, India’s absolute GDP in 1990 international dollar terms actually grew from $125.7 billion to $213.7 billion, representing a 70% increase.7 The stagnation in per capita terms, GDP per capita was approximately $550 in 1700 and $619 in 1950, reflects a classic Malthusian trap.8 The unprecedented population growth stimulated by the introduction of Western medicine, increased land cultivation, and the relative political stability of the Raj absorbed almost all economic gains.9 Far from being genocided, the Indian population expanded from 165 million in 1700 to nearly 390 million by 1941.10
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor%27s_Oxford_Union_speech
- https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l9nve2/he_peevishely_wrote_on_the_margins_of_the_file/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India
- Ibid
- https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
- https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
- Ibid
- https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/tharoor-inglorious-empire/
- https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
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Enacting the original proposed 12th Amendment
At Astral Codex Ten, guest writer David Speiser discusses the two “extra” proposed amendments that didn’t make it into the Bill of Rights, but crucially, didn’t have an expiration date. The 11th did eventually make its way into the Constitution as the 27th Amendment in 1992, leaving only the 12th original still in limbo. The proposed 12th was a doozy:
Here is the text of the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, the sole unratified amendment from the Bill of Rights:
After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
In other words, there will be one Representative per X people, depending on the size of the US. Once the US is big enough, it will top out at one Representative per 50,000 citizens.
(if you’ve noticed something off about this description, good work — we’ll cover it in the section “A Troublesome Typo”, near the end)
The US is far bigger than in the Framers’ time, so it’s the 50,000 number that would apply in the present day. This would increase the size of the House of Representatives from 435 reps to 6,6412. Wyoming would have 12 seats; California would have 791. Here’s a map:
This would give the U.S. the largest legislature in the world, topping the 2,904-member National People’s Congress of China. It would land us right about the middle of the list of citizens per representative, at #104, right between Hungary and Qatar (we currently sit at #3, right between Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Would this solve the issues that make Congress so hated? It would be a step in the right direction. Our various think tanks identified three primary reasons behind the estrangement of Congress and citizens: gerrymandering, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors. This fixes, or at least ameliorates, all of them.
Gerrymandering: Gerrymandering many small districts is a harder problem than gerrymandering a few big ones. Durable gerrymandering requires drawing districts with the exact right combination of cities and rural areas, but there are only a limited number of each per state. With too many districts, achievable margins decrease and the gerrymander is more likely to fail.
We can see this with state legislatures vs. congressional delegations. A dominant party has equal incentive to gerrymander each, but most states have more legislature seats than Congressional ones, and so the legislatures end up less gerrymandered. Here are some real numbers from last election cycle1:
So for example, in Republican-dominated North Carolina, 50.9% of people voted Trump, 60% of state senate seats are held by Republicans, and 71.4% of their House seats belong to Republicans. The state senate (50 seats) is only half as gerrymandered as the House delegation (14 seats).
In many states, the new CAA-compliant delegation would be about the same size as the state legislature, and so could also be expected to halve gerrymandering.
As a bonus, the Electoral College bias towards small states would be essentially solved. Currently, a Wyomingite’s presidential vote controls three times as many electoral votes as a Californian’s. Under the CAA, both states would be about equal.
Money: This one is intuitive. If you can effectively buy 1/435 elections, you’ve bought 0.23% of Congress. If the same money only buys you 0.02% of Congress, you’re less incentivized to try to buy House elections and more incentivized to try to buy Senate seats or just to gain influence within a given political party. Money in politics is still a thing, but it becomes much harder to coordinate among people. This makes it easier for somebody to run for Congress without having to fundraise millions of dollars. Because it’s less worth it to spend so much money on any one seat, elections to the House become cheaper2.
Polarization: Some of the think tanks that want to increase the size of Congress by a few hundred members rather than a few thousand claim that this increase will fix political polarization by making representatives more answerable to their constituents who tend to care more about local issues than national ones.
I’m more skeptical of this claim, mainly because it seems that all politics is national politics now. There’s one newspaper and three websites and all they care about is national politics. My Congressional representative ran for office touting her background in energy conservation and water management, arguing that in a drying state and a warming climate we really need somebody in Congress who knows water problems inside and out. Now that she’s actually in Congress, it seems that her main job is calling Donald Trump a pedophile3. The incentives here are to get noticed by the press and to go viral talking about how evil the other side is, so that people who are angry at the evil other side will give you money and you can win your next election.
But maybe Big Congress can solve that. Maybe in a district of less than 50,000 there will be less incentive to go viral and more incentive to connect with your constituents. At the very least, it seems that people trust their state representatives more. And when my state representative and my state Senator tell me about the good work that they’ve done and ask for me to vote for them again, they point to legislation that they’ve passed, not clips of them calling their opponents pedophiles.
- In case this smacks of cherry-picking, here is a breakdown of the “error” in every state’s Congressional delegation, state house delegation, and state senate delegation. “Error” here is defined as the difference between the representation of each state’s delegation and the percentage of that state that voted for Trump over Harris (or vice versa). In only two states, Florida and Virginia, is the error greatest in the largest body, and both of those states would have Congressional delegations larger than that largest body. In the case of Florida, their delegation would be nearly quadruple the size of their state house.
- There could also be an effect from the structure of the TV market. Stations sell ads by region, and each existing media region is larger than the new Congressional districts. So absent a change in market structure, a candidate who wanted to purchase TV advertising couldn’t target their own district easily; they would have to overpay to target a much larger region.
- And just to harp on this more, we just blew by the Colorado River Compact agreement deadline and now the federal government is going to start mandating cuts; everybody’s going to sue everybody else. Lake Powell is quite possibly going to dead pool this year, and as far as I can find the congressperson who ran on water issues is saying nothing about it.
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What did ordinary Tudors do for work? Inside the 16th-century daily grind
HistoryExtra
Published 4 Nov 2025From sunrise in the fields to the heat of the brew house, Ruth Goodman reveals the untold story of how the Tudors really worked.
Forget silk-clad courtiers – most people in the 16th-century toiled from dawn to dusk just to keep food on the table. Men ploughed, hedged, and hauled in the fields while women brewed ale, milked cows, churned butter, and raised children – often all at once. Every Tudor household was a finely balanced machine of survival.
In this episode of her new series on Tudor Life, historian Ruth Goodman explains how every pair of hands mattered. It wasn’t as simple as “men’s work” and “women’s work”. You’ll hear how the two worlds were completely intertwined. And what about those who were unable to work? This video sheds light on an innovative 16th-century welfare scheme that made all the difference.
Filmed on location at Plas Mawr – an Elizabethan townhouse in Conwy, North Wales, now in the care of Cadw – this series with Ruth looks beyond the royals who often dominate the headlines, and considers the everyday routines of those living in England and Wales in the Tudor era.
00:54 How did Tudors earn money?
03:20 Where did men work?
08:15 What if you were unable to work?
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QotD: “I was one-shotted in my teens by Guns, Germs, and Steel“
Jane Psmith, “BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-11-03.
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