Exactly one month from today, the United States turns 250. To mark it, the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets @Penn_Exchange is offering a free online course on the economic foundations of the American Founding. I will lecture on June 23 and July 28, alongside Alan Taylor, Woody Holton, Joseph Wallis, and Jack Rakove, among others. The course follows the story from colonial settlement to the early republic, showing how economics and institutions shaped political choices at every turn: the road to independence, the Revolutionary War, the Constitutional Convention, and the rival visions of Hamilton and Jefferson. This is one of my favorite subjects in economic and legal history. Details and registration here: american-founding.org/

One of the more frustrating trends in public life over the past decade is how people who lead failing institutions blame social media for their failures. A university president whose faculty have become political activists instead of educators and whose administrators multiply like rabbits will tell you that “misinformation on social networks” is eroding public trust in higher education. An editor whose publication lost its readership will claim that the real problem is X, rather than consider that the publication became boring, that the writing was uniformly uninspired, and that it stopped covering anything that mattered. A politician who loses an election will blame Meta algorithms rather than admit that voters simply did not like what was offered. A central banker whose institution missed the worst inflation in 40 years will worry publicly about TikTok videos spreading financial illiteracy. The pattern is always the same. The institution fails at its core mission. The public notices. The people in charge, rather than examining what went wrong, identify an external force that is “polarizing.” The diagnosis is never “we did a poor job.” It is never “we lost our audience because we gave them nothing worth reading.” The diagnosis is always “bad actors are distorting the conversation.” This is not new, of course. Before social media, talk radio was the scapegoat. Before talk radio, it was television. Before television, it was tabloid newspapers. Every generation of leaders has found a communication technology to blame for people’s loss of trust in them. What is new is the intensity and the shamelessness. Over the last few years, “social media” has become a universal excuse that requires no evidence and tolerates no scrutiny. It is deployed reflexively. The people who make this argument never seem to ask the obvious question: why are people on social networks so receptive to criticism of your institution in the first place? If your university were delivering excellent education at a reasonable price, no number of tweets would persuade parents otherwise. If your publication were covering important questions with clarity and substance, readers would not have migrated elsewhere. If the work you showcased were serious rather than trivial, people would still be paying attention. Trust is not destroyed by social media. Trust is destroyed by poor performance, and social media makes it harder to hide. That is a different thing entirely, and the people running these institutions know it, which is what makes the excuse so cynical. The honest version of the argument would be: “We used to be able to fail quietly because there was no mechanism for people to compare notes. Now there is, and we do not like it.” That, at least, would have the virtue of being true.