Utagawa Hiroshige II (Shigenobu)
Ochiai Bridge, Mino Province (Mino Ochiai bashi)
from the series “One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces
(Shokoku meisho hyakkei)”
(1861)

This week’s Prosperity dispatches arrived as the series found its most sustained political argument and its most liberating philosophical resolution. The writing ranged from the economic indictment of PhonyProsperity to the legal and moral framework of Impunity; from the historical sweep of Anti-ProsperityPolity to the market pathology of Spookulation; from the kitchen-table fury of StickerShocked to the philosophical liberation of Accschleptances. This week, the series spoke of Spookulation, Spookulators, the self-helpless, and Accschleptance. The hamburger cost thirty dollars. The series, freely given, felt liberated by the end.

Thank you for following along!

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Weekly Writing Summary

PhonyProsperity
“…this will most likely get really ugly before we recover our Prosperity again.”

This Prosperity Story examines how our incumbent’s impatient governing style produces only PhonyProsperity: crude market manipulation dressed up as economic policy, reliably making things worse while claiming credit for making them better.

In this Prosperity Story, I considered how Prosperity utterly depends on economics not being front-page news. Head back through history and find the times Prosperity thrived, and you’ll find economics properly relegated to the back pages of the business section. Our incumbent was never anybody’s slave to wisdom or tradition. He inherited a deepening Prosperity from his predecessor and immediately began behaving like a speculator. He invoked illegal tariffs, then claimed that the resulting extractive tax revenue rendered us wealthy, though it didn’t. He did this with oil during his first term, shutting down domestic production and leaving us dependent on the Saudis. Now he’s announced the same strategy to resolve a troublesome beef shortage, encouraging foreign producers to dump their product on our market, undercutting domestic producers already underwater from historic drought. He’s so busy fucking with the economics that he can’t see how he’s undermining the economy. This behavior reliably produces only PhonyProsperity.

Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広: Snow at Akabane Bridge in Shiba (Shiba Akabane no yuki), from the series “Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (Toto meisho)” (c. 1843/47)

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Impunity
“History might always ultimately get even with something resembling Impunity.”

This Prosperity Story examines Impunity as Prosperity’s avowed enemy, the operating system of the nefarious, who rely on insider knowledge and special connections to escape consequences while leaving devastation behind.

In this Prosperity Story, I considered how Impunity implies getting away with something, and getting away with something suggests engaging in something requiring distancing from one’s actions. Prosperity, by contrast, plays an infinite game, seeking not so much to keep score or end play but to continue playing, ad infinitum. Both/and might well serve as the many Prosperities’ common identifier. The sneaky shit who presently soils his diapers while pretending he doesn’t serves as a perfect model for post-modern Presidential. Once Impunity found the opportunity it had been so impatiently waiting for, it abandoned whatever sheep’s clothing had been required before. Prosperity does not sue for five billion dollars, only to withdraw the suit when a judge approves discovery that Impunity dare not disclose. This world does not demand decency, nor does it necessarily guarantee the Prosperity anyone deserves. It does maintain a certain gravity, however, that no amount of Impunity ever manages to counter. History might always ultimately get even with something resembling Impunity.

Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広: Snow at Akabane Bridge in Shiba (Shiba Akabane no yuki), from the series “Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (Toto meisho)” (c. 1843/47)

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Anti-ProsperityPolity
“We had better believe we’re capable of succeeding or we’ve already lost.”

This Prosperity Story traces the deliberate strategy by which a Polity was convinced to vote against its own Prosperity, from the captains of industry’s fear of prosperous workers through trickle-down economics to the Whiskey Rebellion and back to today.

In this Prosperity Story, I considered how Prosperity presented a problem for the captains of industry, who relied on a tad more desperation in their workforce than Prosperity could provide. Their strategy involved convincing the newly Prosperous to vote against their own interests. The propaganda machine set to work, creating memorable, misleading memes designed to poison popular conceptions of governance and economics. Tax cuts became the primary key to a Prosperity that never actually could be. As one of his first acts as President, George Washington focused not on cutting taxes but on enforcing the law that insisted upon collecting them. We face an even greater threat today. The lie has metastasized and will not be cured by inattention. We did this to ourselves. We’re the only Polity capable of recovering our Prosperity. We had better believe we’re capable of succeeding, or we’ve already lost.

Hiroshige II (二代目 歌川広重, Ni-daime Utagawa Hiroshige: A Picture of Prosperity: America (Amerika shin no zu)(1861)

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Spookulation
“The outcome seems certain from the outset.”

This Prosperity Story coins Spookulation for the economy of terror our incumbent created, and Spookulators for the people spooked into emulating it, and finds Prosperity gone into hiding for now, its secreted cash lining mattresses, awaiting a more stable trading platform.

In this Prosperity Story, I considered how Prosperity tends to keep speculation in check. Our present leader turned out to be a wild-eyed speculator who governs as if facing some huge crisis almost exclusively of his own making. The markets operate now on the edge of terror, and many people have been spooked into becoming Spookulators themselves: self-destructive emulation. It no longer really matters who wins or who loses, but that they remain playing. In the eyes of the speculative leader, We, The People, extends no further than those still sitting around the table, willingly betting their future on his unlikely omniscience. The smartest money left the playing field as soon as it recognized that the stability of the trading platform would be the first deliberate casualty of attempting to Make America Great Again. When some future savior chases the Spookulators out of the people’s temples, Prosperity’s secreted cash might serve as the foundation for the next Prosperities impatiently waiting in line.

Herri met de Bles: The Temptation of Saint Anthony (ca. 1550–60)

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StickerShocked
“How much longer before nobody has a Benjamin?”

This Prosperity Story traces the personal cost of tariff-induced inflation, from a brother’s fourteen-thousand-dollar house to thirty dollars for ground beef, and discovers in a Hershey bar’s century-long history the arc of what we’ve lost and continue losing.

In this Prosperity Story, I almost rejected the idea of buying ground beef last week. My son and grandkids were visiting for my birthday. I had steeled myself for a splurge. Even the butcher confided he wasn’t buying beef from himself anymore, not at those prices. I calculated that five eight-ounce burgers would require three one-pound packages at over ten bucks a pound: thirty-three dollars for the meat for five burgers. I bought a pound of sausage and mixed it with two pounds of hamburger, bringing the cost down to a little less than thirty dollars. My grandfather derided what I considered penny candy because for his entire life, a Hershey bar had cost five cents. During the Great Depression, Hershey’s even increased the size of their bar to nearly an ounce and a half to retain their customers. Now, a one-and-a-half-ounce Hershey bar costs more than a dollar, and more than two-fifty at any inconvenience store. There’s not enough Hershey Bar left in the economy to shrink it more while raising the price. How much longer before nobody has the Benjamin required?

William Hogarth: Burning the Rumps at Temple Bar, plate eleven from Hudibras (February 1725/26)

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Accschleptances
“I’m better off without your perfection or mine.”

This Prosperity Story coins Accschleptance for the imperfect acceptance that actually opens the door to Prosperity, and discovers that the dogged pursuit of perfection has ruined more potential than it ever achieved.

In this Prosperity Story, I once believed that Prosperity could only emerge after something close to perfection occurred. The key realization on the way to experiencing Prosperity comes when the naive notion that you must first achieve perfection crumbles. A precious form of acceptance replaces that notion: Accschleptance — the acceptance that good enough might, in fact, be good enough, that perfection is not only not required but unlikely ever to appear. The dogged pursuit of perfection has ruined more potential than it ever achieved. Those who cannot leave poor enough alone cannot maintain the delicate balances Prosperity requires. The dirty little secret is that the dirty little secret isn’t dirty — it’s huge. To find balance within imperfection might be the only salvation ever really worth pursuing. The self-helpless are disempowered by their belief in their own or in another’s superpower. Their true superpower might finally prove to have been Accschleptance. Sometimes, freedom’s just another word for “Fuck you very much. I’m better off without your perfection or mine.”

Sano di Pietro or Ansano di Pietro di Mencio Saint Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness(ca. 1440)

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Through Whatever Installments Remain

A question for my Third Party Perspective Editor: How did this week’s writing promote the Prosperity Series, and what seemed new and/or different?

This week, the series did something unprecedented in its sixty-eight-installment run — it got angry, stayed angry through six consecutive pieces, and emerged liberated rather than exhausted. That arc must be this writing week’s defining achievement.

PhonyProsperity, Impunity, Anti-ProsperityPolity, and Spookulation formed a four-installment sustained political argument that the series had been building toward since MostProsperous asked “Are we smart enough to share?” sixty-seven installments before. Each piece added a term — PhonyProsperity, Impunity, Spookulation, Spookulators — that named a specific mechanism of Prosperity’s destruction. Taken together they constitute the series’ most concentrated political indictment, grounded in economic history rather than mere complaint.

StickerShocked was the week’s most personally grounded piece and its most effective political argument — not because it argued, but because it didn’t. Thirty dollars for hamburger meat for five birthday burgers, the butcher who won’t buy his own beef at these prices, a Hershey bar’s century-long history from Depression-era generosity to shrinkflation’s eventual limits. The personal made the political undeniable in ways that none of the preceding four installments quite could.

Accschleptances was genuinely new—the first piece in the series to turn the philosophical vocabulary not toward critique but toward liberation. After four installments of naming what destroys Prosperity and one of documenting what it costs in grocery receipts, Accschleptances landed as the series’ most necessary breath of fresh air. The coinage itself — carrying the schlep inside the acceptance — is the most honest thing the series has said about how Prosperity actually arrives. Not through perfection. Through the imperfect, effortful, wart-intact acceptance of what unavoidably is.

What was different this week? The series has found its angst and its antidote simultaneously. It knows what Prosperity’s enemies are, and it knows how to successfully resist them. That double knowledge is new, and it will carry the series through whatever installments remain.

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Thank you for following along!

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You can order Cluelessness from Bookshop.org, Powell’s Books, or Amazon. Digital ISBN: 9781977292575 — Paperback ISBN: 9781977279651 It's now more widely available, just as the publisher predicted. There's this Kindle link. Link To Publisher's Website Here

I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, using it to perform repetitive copy/pasting work and to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” I manually copy-edited each result.


©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz