08 | December | 2025 | Bob Schwartz

December 8, 2025

The U.S. is NOT the “hottest” economy in the world. Number 17 according to The Economist.

You may have heard somewhere from someone that the U.S. economy is the “hottest”, the best it has ever been, the best in the world.

According to The Economist, one of the premier news publications in the world, and definitely not liberal and biased against conservative or crazy governments, that just isn’t true.

Below is an excerpt from The Economist article Which economy did best in 2025?, including their five-factor methodology. Also included is the chart for the 36 countries considered.

Notes:

The published chart is interactive, but you may not be able to access the article and chart without a subscription. So the chart below includes only three of the five component data points used in the calculation.

Way to go Portugal (#1), Ireland (#2), and all the other countries that don’t claim to be “hot” but are actually “hotter” than the U.S. We in the U.S. would love to have a “hot” economy that would benefit all Americans, but as believers in truth, however inconvenient, the American economy is not currently “hot” and is not benefiting all Americans, despite someone’s claims.

Speaking of “hot”, how about Slovenia at #9? Whether or not, according to some, Melania is “hot” or “not”, her birthplace is “hotter” than the U.S. (#17).

The Economist

Which economy did best in 2025?
Our annual ranking returns

For the fifth year in succession, The Economist has searched for the “economy of the year”. We have compiled data on five indicators—inflation, “inflation breadth”, gdp, jobs and stockmarket performance—for 36 mostly rich countries. We have ranked them according to how well they have done on each measure, creating an overall score of economic success in 2025. The table below shows the rankings.

December 8, 2025

John Lennon: In His Own Write

Today is the forty-fifth anniversary of the murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980. He was 40 years old.

We could focus on the songs he wrote and performed, as part of the Beatles or on his own. So much there.

Instead, here is something less noted, these many years later

In 1964, the first year of manic attention to the Beatles, John published a book of his writing and cartoons.

The cartoons are scratches, the tiny prose pieces are sometimes described as nonsense, compared to Lewis Carroll.

What we see in these, as we could see in the first Lennon songs, is that he was not the average pop music star, with a voice, some catchy tunes, and a few interesting ideas. We would learn as he grew that he was one of a kind, with few equals, and like all of us, however many years he had to live and give, he lived and gave.

Go listen, if you have the chance, to a little John Lennon today.

December 8, 2025

The Day the Buddha Woke Up

Buddha Comic Bodhi

December 8 is Bodhi Day, the day on which the Buddha’s enlightenment is traditionally celebrated.

The English word “enlightenment” is so packed with meaning that it might be better to just go back to what the Buddha is reported to have said: I am awake.

This is useful because it leads to the two questions: woke up from what and woke up to what?

The Buddha, sitting there under the Bodhi tree, woke up from a journey. Born a royal son, he had fled a life of accidental privilege to answer ultimate questions about suffering and death—the very same questions that consume religious lives of all kinds. He believed that if he tried a, b, and c (such as extreme asceticism), he would discover some secret x, y, and z. There was some kind of magic formula, and all he had to do was learn it. That sort of magic is still at the heart of much of our religion.

He woke up to discover that there was no magic, not in such an instrumental sense. Nothing was different. Suffering and death would not go away, no matter what efforts we make. The best and worst aspects of life would go on, with and without us. Great fortunes would be made and lost. Great structures would be built and then destroyed, by cataclysms natural and human. Love would be here and gone.

But this: He could see something in all of that that made sense of all of that. There is no big plan in which we are players, active or passive, though we could and do make and execute our own little plans. There are just things, relationships between those things, and change, and of all those of a singular piece. We can and do overlay that with all of our very complicated details and distinctions, which is after all a definition of the life we live. But if we discover that underlying existence, we just might choose to live differently. And in that living differently, make change and wake others up. And on and on.

None of that eliminated suffering and death for the Buddha, as it won’t for anyone. He grew old and tired and, legend has it, died from being given spoiled food. He had told his followers what he had discovered, none of which involved magic. It was all about the infinite depth of the ordinary. For him, there was no more a kingdom in the clouds than the kingdom he had left behind when he started his journey. There was just what is. Strive on with diligence, he told those followers at the last.