Tautologies have a bad reputation. They are often dismissed as mere definitions. People get scolded for trying to draw causal implications from tautologies. They are viewed as being simplistic.

It is true that tautologies are (implicit) definitions. It is true that they are simplistic. It is true that they have no direct causal implication. Nonetheless, tautologies are one of the most important parts of economics. They promote clear thinking and thus make it easier to see how the economy functions. They do not establish causal relationships, but they make it easier to see which causal relationships are plausible and which are not.

Consider this rather banal tautology:

The number of shares of stock sold equals the number of shares of stock purchased.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the news media attribute a sharply decline in stock market indices to a “selling wave” hitting Wall Street: The Dow fell 800 points as investors sold 15.4 billion shares of stock. Yes, but investors also purchased 15.4 billion shares of stock. Two sides of the same coin:

At one time, the stock market was closed at night and yet market indices often changed dramatically, even without a single share being traded. A hundred years ago, the Dow might close one day at 243 and open the following morning at 227, reflecting bearish overnight news. In that case, it is fairly obvious that the market moves on new information, not trading activity. To the extent that trading activity has any impact on prices, it is due to what the trading reveals about information held by various participants in the market.

Here I’ll look at six tautologies:

M*V = P*Y = NGDP
M = k*P*Y = ~~NGDP~~ k*NGDP
Saving = Investment
Aggregate quantity demanded = aggregate quantity supplied
GDP = GDI (gross domestic income)
[Domestic] Saving - investment = Current account balance

Proponents of various policies often use tautologies as a sort of intuition pump—a way of making their model seem more plausible. I will show that the first (and most famous) tautology listed above is actually the least useful, whereas each of the other five offer valuable insights into macroeconomics

Part 1: Monetarism

Tautologies #1 and #2 show the relationship between the money supply and nominal GDP (P*Y). In a mathematical sense the two equations are exactly equivalent, as V = 1/k. But the Equation of Exchange (M*V=P*Y) is less useful than the Cambridge Equation (M=k*P*Y), as the latter has a common-sense explanation that is intuitively appealing, while the former does not.

The variable V in the Equation of Exchange is often described as “velocity”, the average number of times a unit of money is spent in a given year. But that is not actually what V represents, as money is frequently spent on goods that are not a part of NGDP, and some purchases of goods do not involve money.

The Cambridge equation says that if k is the share of gross income that people hold in the form of cash balances, then the level of nominal GDP is the ratio of the money supply to k. Unlike V, the variable k really does represent the variable described in the textbooks. The k ratio is a variable that you can visualize. You can imagine holding a larger or smaller share of your income in the form of cash balances. And you can also imagine the central bank directly changing the money supply through policies like open market operations.

The Cambridge equation tautology tells us that anything that changes NGDP does so by influencing one of two variables; either the stock of base money, or the share of gross income held in the form of base money. You can model NGDP by modeling each of those two variables.

I believe that M = k*P*Y is an especially illuminating tautology because most people have no idea that these two variables (the stock of base money and the share of income held as money) determine total national income. I doubt if one person in a hundred could explain this fact. And the reason is simple—most people don’t understand the distinction between nominal and real variables.

Think about the fact that for any economic variable X, it is true that:

X = k*P*Y, where k is defined as X/P*Y

Thus, X might be the total stock of gold, measured in dollars. Why is this not an interesting tautology?

If we were on the gold standard, then that sort of equation would be quite interesting. Suppose the public held a stock of gold equal to 3.5% of GDP. If the stock of gold rose by 20% due to a new discovery, and if the public’s demand for gold as a share of GDP were unchanged, then NGDP would rise by 20%. That’s an interesting fact to know, even if in the real world the public’s demand for gold as a share of GDP is not exactly constant.

But suppose that gold is not money. Now consider the same example, a 20% rise in the physical stock of gold due to a new discovery. If we are not on a gold standard, then, the nominal gold price of gold might change. If so, then even if the public continued to hold exactly 3.5% of gold as a share of GDP, the enlarged stock of physical gold need not have any impact on its value in monetary terms, and hence NGDP.

Thus, the Cambridge Equation is enlightening due to three critical assumptions:

Nominal GDP is priced in money terms.
The stock of base money is directly controlled by the central bank.
It seems plausible that the public’s demand for base money as a share of income is at least partly determined by factors that are independent of central bank policy, especially in the long run. After all, do you let Jay Powell determine the amount of base money that you hold as a share of your income?

Part 2: S = I and the Paradox of Thrift

The savings = investment relationship is often misunderstood. At an aggregate level, saving is defined as the funds used to finance investment—the construction of capital goods. Don’t try to construct counterexamples. If society decides to redefine a good formally viewed as investment as now being a consumer good (let’s say something like pickup trucks), then the funds used to pay for the good get redefined from saving to consumption. If I save money by lending it to a neighbor who blows it all in Vegas, then the neighbor’s actions are treated as negative saving, exactly offsetting my positive saving.

Don’t bother trying to find real world examples of where saving doesn’t equal investment; by definition they are equal. Saving is the portion of income used to finance investment. Period, end of story.

So, what are we to make of the often-stated fear that increased saving might cause a depression. In fact, no depression has ever been caused by increased saving. That’s because saving equals investment, and if saving increases then investment increases. By definition. And depressions generally feature declining investment, often sharply declining investment. So stop worrying about too much saving.

In The General Theory, Keynes worried about a slightly different problem. He worried about an increase in the propensity to save, i.e., the intention to save, which is a radically different concept from an increase in actual saving. Keynes worried that if people intended to save more money, it would lead to less nominal spending and a fall in national income. Keynes argued that because of the fall in aggregate income, the public would not actually save more. National income would adjust (downward), rather than S and I adjusting upward.

Unfortunately, many people misinterpreted Keynes’s “paradox of thrift” as a claim that more saving is bad for the economy. That’s not what Keynes said! Keynes argued that a decline in aggregate demand (basically nominal spending or NGDP) is bad for the economy, and that this sort of decline might be caused by an increase in the public’s desire to save. But Keynes never said that more saving is itself a bad thing, as he understood that in equilibrium there is an equality between saving and investment. And since Keynes was very much pro-investment, that means he was also very much pro-saving.

By combining the Cambridge Equation with the S = I identity, we can finally begin to understand Keynes’s paradox of thrift. In plain English, Keynes was saying that if the public tried to save a higher share of their income, it was likely to lead to an increase in the Cambridge k ratio. And the Cambridge Equation tells us that if the k ratio increases at a time when the money supply is constant, then NGDP must decline. That’s why Keynes worried about a higher propensity to save. But that fear has nothing to do with an actual increase in saving, which is generally associated with rising investment and a strong economy. What Keynes called the “paradox of thrift” should be called the problem of money hoarding.

When we combine the Cambridge Equation with the S = I identity we can also see why Keynes’s paradox of thrift fell out of style after the 1960s. When we moved to a fiat money regime, it became clear that the central bank could offset any decline in the k ratio by increasing the monetary base and thus prevent a fall in nominal GDP. Now there was no longer any reason to worry about the public becoming too thrifty. Saving is good, actually. Moving from a gold standard to a fiat money system removed the worry that saving was bad for the economy. (A point I should have made in my previous post, which critiqued the gold standard.)

Part 3: AS = AD and Say’s Law

Here’s AI Overview:

Say's Law, often summarized as "supply creates its own demand," posits that the production of goods generates the necessary income (wages, rent, profit) to purchase that total output. It implies that general overproduction or widespread "gluts" are impossible in a market economy, as total demand always equals total supply.

When defined this way, Say’s Law is true. The Great Depression was not caused by overproduction (as Franklin Roosevelt believed), rather it was a case of too little production. On the other hand, Say’s Law does not mean that we need not fear a situation where nominal spending is falling. Even if aggregate supply equals aggregate demand in a Depression, the equilibrium may occur at a undesirably low level of output and employment:

[Graph courtesy of ChatGPT]

Much of the confusion is due to the use of the term “aggregate demand”. I wish the model were called the nominal spending/real output model, not the AS/AD model. It has nothing to do with “demand” in the ordinary sense of the term as used in microeconomics.

Classical economists understood that if the government were to pass a law setting a very high minimum wage rate—say $40/hour, it would lead to less employment and output. Most economists would call this sort of policy an “adverse supply shock”.

Now consider a big drop in “aggregate demand” such as occurred during 1929-33, when NGDP fell by roughly 50%. Because nominal wages are sticky, this drop in nominal spending did not result in a 50% fall in wages and prices, leaving output unchanged. Instead, nominal wages were sticky and remained above equilibrium. Firms responded much as they would to a higher minimum wage rate, by reducing employment and output.

From the perspective of Say’s Law, these sticky wages create an aggregate supply problem, analogous to higher legal minimum wage rates. Thus, the fact that a fall in nominal spending in an economy featuring sticky wages leads to high unemployment in no way contradicts Say’s Law; indeed, it is a prediction of classical economics.

Keynes was wrong when he suggested that perfectly flexible wages would not solve the problem of falling nominal spending. But he won the intellectual battle anyway, as there is no way to make nominal wages perfectly flexible, so the sort of nominal spending shortfall that Keynes worried about really is a problem, a problem that must be addressed public policies that stabilize nominal spending.

I once wrote a paper entitled The Real Problem is Nominal, where the term “real” meant “actual”. Say’s Law teaches us that all economic problems are real, meaning supply side problems, even if the ultimate source of the problem is nominal wage rates that are too high relative to falling NGDP, triggered by a shortfall in “demand”.

Part 4: GDP = GDI (Gross output equals gross income)

The production/income identity is useful in a couple of different areas. First, it provides the intuition for one popular argument for NGDP targeting. In the previous section I alluded to the fact that a stable path of NGDP helps to stabilize the labor market. That’s because NGDP is the nominal revenue that firms have to pay nominal wages. The production/income equality suggests that stabilizing NGDP will also help to stabilize the financial system, as nominal income (NGDI) is the resource that individuals, firms and governments have available to pay nominal debts. Falling NGDI often leads to a financial crisis (as in 2008-09 and 1931-33.)

This identity is also useful when thinking about the impact of AI on the economy. Some fear that intelligent robots will eventually provide almost unlimited labor, leading to mass unemployment. But this hypothetical outcome would also imply almost unlimited output, meaning the economy would experience extremely high levels of gross income, despite near 100% unemployment rates. That’s not to deny the fact that AI might present important challenges for public policymakers, but it does suggest that policymakers would have an extremely powerful tool should they use to utilize it—the fiscal space to easily provide every single citizen a UBI equal to at least an upper middle-class lifestyle, if not higher.

When the public envisions mass unemployment, they also envision mass poverty. But that’s because technological progress over the past two centuries has not resulted in mass unemployment. Rather, occasional periods of high unemployment have been due to the interaction of falling NGDP and sticky wages, which really does impoverish a nation. In contrast, a mass unemployment produced by near limitless technological progress would enrich a nation. The GDP = GDI tautology helps us to understand that fact.

Part 5: Saving, investment and the current account balance

Do trade policies cause a change in the gap between saving and investment, or do policies that influence domestic saving and investment cause shifts in the trade balance? By itself, the S - I = CA balance tautology doesn’t prove anything about causation. But it is highly suggestive.

[Update: In the original post I should have indicated domestic saving minus domestic investment, as total saving equals total investment.]

Suppose you asked a protectionist to explain why they thought that trade barriers would improve the current account balance. How would they explain this outcome in terms of saving and investment?

There are only two ways that a country can increase its current account balance, either by reducing domestic investment or by increasing domestic saving. Protectionists would almost never point to lower domestic investment as the preferred explanation, for obvious reasons. Higher investment is almost universally viewed as a good thing, even among protectionists. The argument that protectionism will increase the trade balance almost always hinges on the question of whether it will increase domestic saving. And it might!

For instance, a tariff might increase government revenue, leading to higher government saving (or at least less dissaving) and this could increase the current account balance (i.e., reduce the deficit.) I’ve generally been skeptical about the impact of the Trump tariffs, but that’s not for purely theoretical reasons. Rather it is because Trump has aggressively cut taxes in other areas, thus the net effect of his fiscal policies has not been a boost in government saving. (BTW, quotas don’t even bring in government revenue, so they are especially unlikely to boost domestic saving.)

Of course, an extremely protectionist trade policy with prohibitive tariffs would almost certainly reduce America’s current account deficit by dramatically reducing both imports and exports. In that case, however, the most likely mechanism would be lower domestic investment, hardly the desired outcome.

Tautologies are some of my favorite economic tools. They force us to see connections that otherwise might be hidden from view. They allow us to see why certain causal relationships are likely to be true, or why they might be highly implausible. The Fisher Equation tautology (i = r + inflation) doesn’t prove anything about causality. But it points us in the right direction—it helps us to organize our thinking about the likely impact of inflation on interest rates. That’s because we know something about the world. Our views regarding the real interest rate are not a blank slate, just as our intuition about the public’s demand for cash balances as a share of income is not a blank slate.

Some tautologies are obvious in one sense, but not in another. The amount of money that people pay in interest is exactly equal to the amount of money that people receive in interest. The amount of money that people pay to buy homes, is exactly equal to the amount of money that people receive when they sell homes. Duh!! But keeping these truisms in mind helps to prevent the fallacy of reasoning from a price change.

And while it is true that tautologies, by themselves, do not prove any causal relationships to be true, isn’t that true of all social science models?

PS. To see some examples of tautologies being misused, check out my two posts on MMT (here and here.)

PPS. Slightly off topic, but I’d like to point readers to one of my favorite weekly summaries of the blogosphere, provided in David Levey’s substack.

GIMME SHELTER is a summing-it-up newsletter I do maybe three or four times a year (infrequent and sporadic). I send it out to via email to about 6,500 people and, also print it out here on my Substack. If you want to be on the list of recipients, send your email address to: lloyd@shelterpub.com. (It won’t be used for any other purposes.)

(In this case, it’s getting Substacked before we send out the full email.)

Going It Solo

I haven’t been single since I was 12 years old.

(When Gloria asked me to hold her hand as we walked back from the beach on the Russian River.)

Girlfriend after girlfriend, 3 of them serious, then 18 years the first marriage, almost 50 years the second.

As I’m shifting to being a soloista, I’ve at the same time — journalist at heart— been observing the process,

It’s way different, let me tell you.

I have a ton of solo friends, and they all seem to be doing fine. They’re not bitching about living alone — and they know stuff that I don’t.

Sure, I miss Lesley, but focusing on that gets me nowhere. And she appears unexpectedly now and then. One day I was walking along the brick path and came across a red flower, and got a jolt — there she was! Or a picture of her Shari handed me that I hadn’t seen before. She’s still here.

Plus:

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

-William Blake

Weeping cherry tree (by pond) in full bloom

What’s different about the solo life?

Day-to-Day Busyness

• Doing all the shopping, cooking, dishes; washing and drying clothes (in the fresh air or by the fireplace); sweeping, composting, recyclable and non-recyclable garbage

• Getting firewood, kindling, splitting, stacking

• Gardening, which is huge around here. Tomatoes, cucumbers, KALE, chard, potatoes, zucchini (for first time ever, I kept ahead of the zucchini’s prolific production last season, picking a zuke every day or two — went on until December), hot peppers, artichokes, asparagus (20-year-old bed), strawberries raspberries, apples, plums, parsley, chives. Plus my friend/chef/neighbor Kate and I are planting a robust garden…

Old chicken coop, now storage, with living roof. When we cleared away weeds, here were succulents Lesley planted maybe 10 years ago

Adobe wall greenhouse planted with peas, beans, tomatoes, herbs, cucumbers Roof is double wall polycarbonate, a great greenhouse material.

Raised beds with various seedlings, hoop greenhouse with three hot pepper plants, asparagus, tomato. Seedlings are just starting in the raised beds.

Pump house, 15’ deep well provides garden water for most of year

• Ongoing homestead maintenance: pests like termites, ants, skunks; leaky valves; roof leaks (7 roofs); septic system maintenance, weeding, grass cutting, pruning (4 apple trees, 1 plum, raspberries, red currants), watering (most of the year from shallow (15’ deep well). Everywhere I walk on this 100x100’ piece of land, I see things to do, to maintain, to fix.

Pepé Le Pew, the homestead’s latest *zorillo, handsome devil, nightly visitor enters property via quail opening I made in front gate*

• No one to curb my enthusiasm

• More time for introspection

I feel like — at 4 years — I’m still testing, learning, groping, adapting, but things are finally starting to sail smoother on this ship of a homestead. It’s taking years to reconfigure the garden to something I can manage. I can’t picture what it would be like to live in a city apartment — life on a piece of land is so different.

Planetary impact: I’ve got rooftop solar panels, generating more electricity than I use. Most of my heating is from scrounged eucalyptus firewood. I dress in (sometimes 5) layers, merino wool, once in a while use a low-wattage electric heater. Dishwater gets dumped in the garden, virtually no grease goes into the septic tank. Every scrap of leftover food (banana skins, coffee grounds, chicken bones, spoiled food), has gone into the garden for over 50 years now. When I stay in a city, I have a hard time putting food in the garbage can.

Living a solo life makes me realize how efficient it is for two people to live together. Two people to pay the rent, two people to divide up the chores, two people to amuse each other.…

The nuclear family, subject to much disparagement since the ‘60s, is nevertheless an efficient setup, especially if you’re doing something like building a homestead.

Soaking up the soloism: around mid-March, I bottomed out with people. Day after day, lots of people to deal with. All good people, friends, interesting, fun — but I started craving alone-ness. The first night solo in a while, I cooked a wild duck, played Shorty’s Bunkhouse on our local (world-class) radio station KWMR, and danced around the room, using Indian clubs, dumbbells, and kettle bells to do various exercises to the beat. Fun!

That night, being alone was sweet.

I’m up and down. Lesley was very balanced (a Libra), but I swing from depression to ecstaticness. Just her calm presence would provide me a measure of balance, but now I’m on my innate solo roller coaster of emotional ups and downs. So be it.

Was the goin’ up worth the comin’ down?

-Kris Kistofferson

When I’m having an extraordinary day at the beach, or running on one of the beautiful Mt. Tam trails, driving home on Highway One with kick-ass music! — well, sure! Worth it.

But when I’m in the dregs of depression? Galumph! I’m having to learn toleration and patience — wait it out, not worsen things by bitching. Sloopy hangin’ on.

And furthermore, heh-heh, there’s this:

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

-William Blake

Aging

The Substack posts I do on aging are by far the most popular. Probably the boomers — closing in on their ‘70s, ‘80s — are curious about what’s coming.

This Gettin’ Old Sure Is Gettin’ Old

-Song by Mick Kolassa

I Lost a Day

The latest gorilla in my life of getting older:

The other day— Sunday, I thought — I went down to a barbecue at our boat club at noon. Funny, building crews were at work on a big downtown project, and there were plenty of parking spaces. Odd for a weekend.

Ulp! It was Monday, not Sunday. It gave me pause. Jesus! Like some sort of time machine, I’d lost a day! Discombobulating.

The Experiences in Getting Old Are New Experiences.

We’ve never been this old before, and the various decreasing abilities inherent with aging are happening for the first time.

• Forgetting names

• Malfunctioning of various physical parts

• Health issues

• Getting out of the car

• Losing strength, agility, flexibility

• Loss of manual dexterity, like buttoning shirts, threading needle

• Worsening depth perception

• Being out of touch with the stunningly fast-changing world

• Doing increasingly stupid stuff

What Did I Come In Here For?

It’s now happening a couple of times a day: I get into the house, cannot for the life of me think what I came in for, and walk back out to the studio, then remember and hurry back before I forget again.

Misplacing Phone and Car Keys

Happens all the time. Thank heavens for Apple’s “Find My.” Even so, sometimes it takes a lot of searching.

Missing calls, texts, DMs, WhatsApp’s

I can’t keep up with all the different forms of incoming messages. Often, I’ll recall a message, like someone asking for something and I check my texts or phone messages but can’t find it. So if I don’t respond, that’s what’s happening. The best way to contact me is by old fashioned email: lloyd@shelterpub.com.

Also, I don’t have my phone with me even half the time — hey, I’m 91 — I don’t have to be connected 7/24.

Forgetting Your Name

This happens daily. I remember faces but not names associated with those faces (or context of what this particular person does or how we met). When we meet, tell me your name.

Here are my previous Substack posts on aging:

A Night on the Beach

The other night I grabbed my backpack and headed for the beach. Normally I’ll walk about 2 miles to a somewhat distant long sandy beach but this time, the pack felt really heavy, so I set up my tent and built a fire closer by, where a creek flows into the ocean.

Been years since I’ve done this, so it was a bit awkward setting up, erecting (Nemo) tent, inflating (Nemo) (v. comfortable) air mattress. Cooked some venison on the coals plus potato and onion in foil. I’d left on an unseasonably warm afternoon, and didn’t take enough warm clothing or my warmer sleeping bag, so was pretty cold. But getting away from electricity and phone/computer/TV screens left me refreshed. This is what life used to be like!

Compulsion To Communicate

I’m a curious person, and I love telling people about extraordinary things I see going on in this world.

Lover of all things alive, wonderer at all he meets…

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1885

Now that I’ve sold my publishing company, my main forms of communication are Substack, which I love, and Instagram, which unfortunately Zuckerberg has kidnapped and downgraded in pursuit of profit.

I do about one post a week on Substack. Take a look (subscriptions are free):

(Plus the very occasional email such as this one.)

Artificial Intelligence

Perplexity AI has changed my life.

OK, OK, I’m aware of the present and scary future evils of artificial intelligence. I have a friend who won’t use it because of the enormous energy costs. AI can imitate voices and is already being used for scams. And who knows what will happen — in the creative arts — if AI gets beyond the present state of artistic slop?

BUT AI research – for me — is enormously useful.

Examples:

1. Recently I had written something about how my friend Paul Wingate learned how to be a carpenter, but couldn’t locate it. Perplexity pulled it right up:

“In his November 2025 article ‘Game Plan for Young Builders’ on lloydkahn.substack.com, Kahn describes how in the 1960s, his friend Paul Wingate wanted to become a carpenter.…”

2. I’ve done a ton of research on the harm that so-called “environmentalists” are doing to local economies: shutting down organic food production, eliminating blue-collar jobs and homes, and in the case of Bolinas, attempting to ban fishing along 8 miles of our coast. (See more on this below.)

3. What’s the best rootstock on which to graft apples?

4. It will give me one page, one paragraph or whatever length I designate summary of any book.

I always check out the referenced URLs.

It’s an extraordinary tool.

I loved Once Upon A Time in the West. This is what the West was really like, not the romanticized Hollywood versions. Look at the deck here.

My Next Book

It looks like I’ll be doing my first book in four years later this year, titled: Breaking Free in the ’60s: An Autobiography of Sorts. (Formerly titled Live From California.) It will be published by AdvetureKEEN

I grew up in San Francisco and went to high school in the Haight-Ashbury district and what I saw happen in the city in the ’60s differs from all the many books and articles and videos on the subject.

In writing it, I decided to outline my background: growing up in SFO, Lowell High School, Stanford, surfing in Santa Cruz before wetsuits, running a newspaper on an Air Force Base in Germany, building two houses in Big Sur, etc.

Me at age 24 with Peter, age 3 months while I was in the USAF in Germany in 1959, with my Rolleicord camera (it was the low-cost Rolleiflex).

It’s not really an autobiography, since it ends in 1973 (when we did the book Shelter) and also, I don’t feel comfortable getting deeply into my personal life, as most autobiographies do.

I’ll be serializing it for paid subscribers on my Substack platform, plus there will be a real hold-in-your-hands book for sale. Stay tuned.

Whatever you do today, do it with the confidence of a 4-year old in a Batman cape.

- Anon

Stewart Brand’s New Book

I hung out with Stewart a lot in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, working on the Whole Earth Catalogs and sharing excitement about countercultural changes; then in 1974 when we spent several weeks exploring (and pouring a house foundation) on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

Flash forward 24 years: at his 50th birthday party in San Francisco in 1998, he seated me next to R. Crumb at dinner (for which I will be eternally grateful).

Flash forward another 25 or so years, :

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/25/tech-legend-stewart-brand-on-musk-bezos-and-his-extraordinary-life-we-dont-need-to-passively-accept-our-fate

This Guardian article was a couple of months ago, just discovered it now.

Regarding Stewart’s health:

“In terms of physical maintenance, Brand has always been a healthy, active, outdoorsy person – he was a keen sailor, he was hiking up mountains with rocks in his backpack in his ’60s, and he started going to CrossFit when he was 75 – ‘that built a pretty strong constitution.

“Now, though, he has a respiratory illness, he says, ‘…which is progressive, incurable and fatal’. He’s in a stable condition, and still exercises, but uses supplementary oxygen as well. ‘I’d be very surprised by making it into my ’90s,’ he says, seemingly without regret: ‘Imagine the luck, to get to be 87 – it’s just fantastic!’”

-Steve Rose, The Guardian, Feb 2, 2026

And more recently, this insightful and timely interview by Ezra Klein in the New York Times on April 26, 2026:

He was in good spirits at a small party in Sausalito last week, signing books and talking to maybe 50-60 people. He seems clear headed and in his skin.

In fact, (with profound help from his wife Ryan), he’s kickin’ ass!

His First Book in 15 Years

My big surprise here: it feels somehow like the early Whole Earth Catalogs.

He’s got these very cool publishers in SF, Stripe Press, who’ve created an author’s dream of PR and swag. There was a cool book-signing party at Fort Mason in San Francisco, at which Stewart said that back in the day, as a writer AND photographer, he wanted to tell stories graphically. Rang a bell with me.

Witty swag for Stewart’s book (this is a cloth patch about 3” high).

The book has a refreshing words-with-graphics look.

Kevin Kelly calls it “…an instant classic.”

Environmentalism Has Become A Business

A war of the elite on fishermen, farmers, homebuilders and the working class

At first this seemed like a local issue. But lo and behold, it’s going on nationally.

Locally

Our small seaside town, Bolinas, a fishing port (among other things) for over a century, is currently being threatened with a ruling that would ban all fishing along 8 miles of our coast. Not only fishing from shore, but yet another onerous restriction on our small local fishing fleet.

The plan is sponsored by the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin and is not based on any scientifically valid data and was put forward with scant local input and in an underhanded, sneaky way.

Nationally

With the environmentalism started by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, then rising ecological awareness of the ‘60s counterculture, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970. Environmentalism was real. The first Earth Day was in 1970 and it eventually became the world’s largest civic observance.

But as the years progressed, starting with the Reagan administration, businesses rebounded by creating groups calling themselves environmentalists, but actually using environmentalism as a tool to — among other things — further an elite approach to wilderness.

Groups like the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin are actually businesses. The EAC has a big budget ($800K donated in 2024), hires lawyers, has political connections, and has contributed to shutting down local food production in West Marin — oysters, dairy, beef — much of it organic — eliminating jobs and homes for 30 people at the Drake’s Bay Oyster farm and 90 tenants on the ranches on the Pt. Reyes Peninsula (mostly Latino).

We were blind-sided by their petition to the California Fish and Game Commission filed in 2023 to make our home beaches a Marine Reserve. We are fighting it (Save Duxbury Access) with a petition of our own.

I’ve gathered a tremendous amount of information on the “environmentalists” of today and am looking for an investigative reporter who’s interested in what I think is a big national story. I just don’t have the time to do it myself.

It’s way too big to cover here, but if you’re interested, I suggest doing some of your own research.

Especially if you contribute to the EAC or other “environmental” groups; are you aware of their anti-local, anti blue-collar, anti-country people actions? Do you want to be contributing to shutting down local food production and causing local people to lose jobs and homes?

And if you know of an investigative reporter who might be interested, let me know. I’ve done a ton of research, glad to pass it along.

BTW, The Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental organization, has $8 billion (!) in assets and pays its CEO $900 K annually. It’s been criticized for its corporate alliances and locally disruptive land decisions.

Hummingbird Week

Last week I discovered a baby Anna’s hummingbird on the ground. Located nest, put it back in (with a sibling), but mother never returned, so brought them into house and starting feeding them, keeping warm with light bulb.

Here they are in their nest. Note the camoflauge exterior.

One of them died, but this one had a fierce desire to survive. Fed it sugar water through eyedropper and added mashed-up aphids (Lillian’s idea) and flies for protein, but after 5 days, I was exhausted from feeding every hour, so took it to Wildcare in San Rafael, where they are way better equipped for bird survival — which I should have done in the first place.

It was a unique experience having a roommate for 5 days. Every time I’d walk into the room, its tiny heart was still beating and it would be bright-eyed and open its beak for food. I’d get up every few hours at night to feed the hungry critter. It was a real responsibility.

Update: Wildcare says it has survived and is perky. They have a lady who specializes in hummingbirds and is giving it proper food and heping it learn to fly.

Strangely, I got attached to this tiny (weighing 1/10 of an ounce when fully grown) being and am so glad it’s thriving. I wonder if Widcare will allow me to visit.

Closing with this song, recorded live in Tokyo in 1975. I know, I know, I’m prone to over-enthusiasm, but that said, I think this may be my favorite song of all time, not just for Ray’s heartbreaking voice, where he bends the notes, but trumpet player Johnny Coles’ solo, and the interplay of voice and brass.

Resist much, obey little.

-Walt Whitman

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