■ The real villain, it turns out, was a haughty institutional culture that refused to assess external threats, demand self-improvement, or engage with the likely consequences of its actions. Success bred complacency, and complacency poured accelerant on the flames of willful ignorance. Had the book been written later, it could have treated the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies of 2009 as natural and predictable extensions of the original story.

■ Reality doesn’t often forgive long-term, structural obstinance. The saying goes that if you find yourself on the wrong road, the first step is to turn around. The funny thing about ego is that it often keeps people from admitting to mistakes, even when those mistakes are obvious in the immediate short term. But what makes that behavior even daffier is that the longer people choose to compound their bad decisions by doubling down, the worse those mistakes end up tarnishing their legacies.

■ Certain things should be staggeringly obvious by now, because they were made obvious to everyone half a century ago. One of those obvious things is that a chronic vulnerability to the output of petroleum from the most tempestuous parts of the Middle East makes for instability in the entire economy. With on-again, off-again exchanges of fire with Iran underway and a still massively unsafe Strait of Hormuz still crippling the Persian Gulf, it should long ago have become obvious that much more than environmental interest weighs in favor of breaking the economic dependency on petroleum.

■ For certain goods and activities, there’s no substitute -- but for any role where an alternative can be found, it’s a matter of national security to break the chains to oil. Whether the nation involved is petro-rich (like the United States) or oil-dry (like Japan), the same volatility has been in the air for more than 50 years. Complacency doesn’t work.

■ Many nations have declared independence. Few have maintained a continuous democratic regime without interruption for longer than a century. And the US Constitution deserves vociferous praise, not because it is, was, or ever will be perfect, but because it contains both a brilliant perpetual framework for checks and balances and a humble acknowledgment of its own need for evolution and reform through the amendment process.

■ Scalability is the real brilliance of the Constitution. It’s not only a document fit for 4 million people (the census-counted population in 1790), it’s fit for 400 million or more, so long as we take care to preserve the framework. Far from decrying the Constitution (as some radicals are inclined to do), we should spend the next decade or so reviving our appreciation for what James Madison and his co-creators established.

■ Congress, for instance, should be larger. The House should probably have double its current membership, allowing for closer representation, smaller election stakes, and a better diversity of membership (not just in terms like ethnicity or gender, but in life experience, vocation, and education). Congress should also act like it belongs in Article I of the Constitution, not in the back seat.

■ Regional, voluntary inter-state cooperation ought to happen more, as well. The Constitution contains several provisions meant to keep one region from dominating the Union, but it doesn’t prohibit states with common interests from coordinating among themselves. Nearly any multi-state region you could identify contains more Americans than the entire country held in 1790, and we ought to expect real state capacity not just from the Federal government, but from the individual states themselves (and from clusters of them). Multistate arrangements shouldn’t be limited to lotteries and NCAA conferences. We ought to consider having regional weather services, regional scientific alliances, and regional retirement-savings programs, among many other public goods. Washington shouldn’t be a chokepoint for worthwhile endeavors.

■ If we truly want to reinforce the good that comes from scalability, then states ought to be the primary level for hammering out most truly contentious policies. Really divisive arguments shouldn’t be subject to wild swings due to changes in the White House, the Capitol, or the Supreme Court. The national government ought to strive for less enforced uniformity and more effective delivery of what really demands a national scale. We should know more of our governors and fewer of our Senators, because state-level innovation and execution should be just that good.

■ When officers of the military and of the Federal government swear to support and defend the Constitution, not only should they mean it, the rest of us should hold them to their word. We place too much strain on the Constitutional order when we foolishly act like the quadrennial Presidential election is some kind of parliamentary mandate. Reaching 250 years of Constitutional order will be a milestone well worth celebrating, but as with any good celebration, we ought to do a bit of housekeeping first.

■ Behind those complaints -- all quite justified -- is an underlying guideline for anyone who wishes not to be a tyrant (whether as a monarch or merely a manager). A book on leadership might label it “ABC”: Always Beckon Criticism.

■ Criticism, when genuine and legitimate, is a wonderful tool of improvement. The true critic is usually someone who cares authentically about the good of the institution he or she criticizes. In calling for something to be better, they reveal a deeper belief that the institution contains at least some underlying good.

■ An openness to criticism, codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution, is one of the key reasons America has succeeded for so long. Hostility to authentic criticism is a telltale indication that someone in a position of power is unfit to lead.

■ The smart leader isn’t just open to fair critiques, they beckon it, inviting the feedback that makes positive change possible. If we want to see a great experiment in civilization make it another 250 years, we should be clear to all: We’re not perfect, and we’ll never achieve perfection, but we can only steer towards something better if we always beckon criticism.

■ The government didn’t create ranch dressing. The real secret sauce to America’s magnetism is that our country is a colossal, long-running experiment in what it means to be left alone. It’s a thought that even left an artifact in the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson stealthily replaced the word “subjects” with “citizens”.

■ Subjects, as documented in the Supreme Court decision about birthright citizenship, owe something to the person of the sovereign in return for protection. Citizens, on the other hand, owe one another. And in the United States, what we owe one another is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

■ This, too, is why it sounds so reflexively un-American for anyone in high office to expect or demand gratitude from the public. We don’t owe our fellow citizens grateful thanks and praise for doing their jobs.

■ And because we are all citizens -- including Presidents -- we are all entitled to equality before the law. Equally, too, we should contribute in our own ways to making the country great. But the country is much more than its government, and most of the ways we achieve greatness happen voluntarily and free from coercion. That, even more than ranch dressing, is the secret recipe.

■ It is no undersized triumph that the world’s longest demilitarized border spans about 5,500 miles -- as the crow flies, that’s the distance from Paris to Beijing. In the course of human history, that kind of peaceful coexistence is beyond extraordinary. And it ought to be a model.

■ Not all neighbors start with such a good common framework for mutual understanding, but like all good relationships, the handshake across the boundary requires continued effort and willingness.

■ Despite some of the preposterous and unenlightened things that have been said, the United States doesn’t need Canadian territory, just Canadian friendship. And vice-versa. Economic, political, defense, and cultural ties as close as ours should be a model of mutuality to the world, not a source of anxiety to anyone. Trade should flow almost as freely as the air, enriching all involved and making further proof of Adam Smith’s case that commerce is a terrific door to friendship.

■ But because some people forget or ignore the obvious mutual advantages to the relationship, we ought to make more of a regular public affair of celebrating it. A little bit of difference is quite OK as long as goodwill prevails. Some regular reminders may be necessary.

■ The opinion hinged on the notion that effectively the only children born in the United States who would not be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” would be those belonging to very specific carve-out exceptions, like the children of foreign diplomats. It’s valuable that Chief Justice Roberts connected the notion of citizenship to its origins in British common law, noting that, “With protection came allegiance, and with allegiance came the status of a natural-born subject.”

■ Birthright citizenship establishes reciprocity of both rights and duties. Anything else is insufficient. We need not be selfish with citizenship, because it is not a one-way gift. It imposes burdens as much as it implies rewards, and none of us who are citizens should take our own view of those burdens so unseriously that we treat citizenship like a lottery prize.

■ Besides, we can prove with very little friction where a baby was born. It most often takes place with third-party witnesses around anyway, whether those are hospital employees, midwives, or other helpers. It takes much more to establish paternity, or parents’ domicile, or parents’ intentions regarding citizenship.

■ We, who implicitly proclaim that government is instituted to secure natural rights of birth in an uncertain world, ought to be inclined to look at every new birth on our soil as an opportunity to further buttress democratic principles, classical liberal ideals, and republican virtues. As the Chief Justice wrote, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights -- to freely participate in our political community.”

■ Anyone who wants to understand why both stories are going to come back perpetually, “Groundhog Day”-style, needs to read William Baumol’s book “The Cost Disease”. Right behind death and taxes comes the certainty that higher education and health care budgets will remain large, growing, and contentious from now until the end of foreseeable time.

■ To condense the argument to its essence, demand for both health care and education seems poised to grow indefinitely. Meanwhile, the supply of each is tightly constrained by the need for lots of human-centered, person-to-person interactions, from diagnostic counseling to reading stories written by second-graders. Unless a substantial number of patients want to sign up for do-it-yourself blood draws or emptying their own hospital bedpans, these constraints are inevitable.

■ On the surface, it’s a little grim to say, “These problems are both intractable and virtually certain to get worse with every passing week”, but it’s much worse to approach them as if they are solvable in the sense of “If we just apply enough brainpower and effort, we can find a permanent answer”.

■ The problem is that both health care and education are hugely influenced by public policy and public funding, which invariably draws them into an arena of discussion where patience, strategic thinking, long-term viewpoints are especially hard to sustain. This means every resulting policy discussion is more or less bound to involve wishful thinking, impossible promises, and frothy arguments among highly interested parties. And that’s exceptionally unlikely to change in anyone’s lifetime today, even when all parties involved are of good character and mutual goodwill.

■ Sleep is the one time during every 24-hour cycle when a person can escape the conscious concerns of waking life and go unbothered by others. Sleep is nature’s “do not disturb” setting.

■ This has obvious effects on stress. Everyone has stress responses, driven by cortisol and other chemicals we cannot avoid. And having a basic escape function in the form of sleep, whatever else it does for us biologically, at the very least offers the theoretical opportunity to go for a few hours every day without new stressful inputs being applied.

■ The proof that we fail to take this seriously can be plainly seen in two places: One is with the omnipresence of smartphones, tagging along with us into bedrooms (often by necessity) but all too frequently following people literally into the bed itself.

■ By nature, the phone is a stimulant, and while it’s every adult’s right to make the ill-advised choice to let phones interfere with the psychological cordon of sleep, it is a tragedy that many adults let those phones into juvenile bedrooms at night. If anyone deserves the sanctuary of sleep, it is the child who needs escape from social pressures, adult-sized worries, or bullying. If a conduit of alarm is always present, how can the brain ever fully de-escalate from a state of anxiety?

■ The other case is that of homelessness. As a society, we can hardly expect rational behavior and good decisions out of people who aren’t able to safely let down their guard for a few hours every night. This is, at least in theory, the rationale behind the “housing first” approach to homeless assistance.

■ While we’re eager to work our way through a thousand pressing social, economic, and political concerns in our waking hours, someone needs to speak up for straightening out some of the errors we’re making that don’t fit neatly on the editorial page. Just because a problem doesn’t seem immediate doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

■ Other times, medicine succeeds in overcoming a chronic problem for a particular population. That’s the case with a new method of functionally curing sickle cell disease, using gene therapy. It’s a genetic condition mostly found among African-Americans, so the benefits of this research are concentrated within that community.

■ Some research -- medical, social, scientific, educational, or otherwise -- needs to be concentrated on particular communities. Some gullible or uncritical people will complain that this looks like favoritism toward the targeted group.

■ In reality, it’s analogous to some public-works efforts: Sometimes, you resurface a heavily-traveled road driven by everyone. Doing so benefits the many in modest ways. Sometimes, you repair a segment of road in front of one cul-de-sac that collapsed because of a water main broke. Doing that benefits fewer people, but the need is disproportionate and unevenly distributed.

■ Allocating resources among the many options takes thoughtful human consideration and a knowledge that scarcity requires that judgment calls be made. Keyword witchhunts are a poor substitute for careful consideration. A victory over a cruel affliction like sickle cell is a win for everyone, even if the immediate benefits are concentrated.

■ Renters show up for the time they’re around and are mainly inert. They fill the space, but they don’t transform what’s around them. Just as nobody washes a rental car, no renter does much to enhance the social organization. Extractors, on the other hand, are active about withdrawing from the accumulated value of the organization. Extractors see what’s in front of them as a pile of treasure to be used for their own gain.

■ Different times call for more or fewer builders and renters. Homesteaders had to be builders, whether they liked it or not. Renting tends to be a luxury of success; as things get better, more people can contribute less from day to day. Social renting, like its counterpart in housing, creates a convenient distance for the renter, who generally finds it easier to move away than the builder.

■ Progress has made it much easier for America and American institutions to tolerate lots of social renters. But a lot of people have gone from renting to outright extraction. It’s not a sustainable path. Some extract literally, by doing things like taking oversized pay for underwhelming service to important institutions. Others do it indirectly or even figuratively, by actively pursuing a policy of “Whatever is best for me” anywhere they go.

■ Letting this go on for much longer without some kind of course correction would be a grave mistake. Lots of knowledge is embedded within our institutions, from government agencies to social clubs, and letting them decay is a way of erasing that embedded knowledge, which was often won through hard and costly experience. Ben Franklin wrote, “Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other.” Ending that foolishness requires a step further upstream, convincing those who would be renters or extractors to become builders instead.

■ The shock comes in adulthood, when the realization dawns that things like these matter because people decide that they should matter and take steps to preserve and promote them. The good news is that it’s always possible to establish new traditions and institutions where they are needed, as long as enough people are willing to participate and sustain them.

■ The bad news is that institutional decay can set in quickly if nobody undertakes the efforts required to stop it. That starts with persuading people to care enough to act, oftentimes at some expense of time, energy, money, or other resources.

■ Whether the institution in question is a church, a museum, or a radio station (not to mention thousands of other categories), there is no such thing as inevitable survivability. This goes double for abstract principles like the peaceful transfer of power or the freedom of navigation. Perpetuity is a matter of choice.

■ These observations are self-evident. And yet, it is hard to build these things into ordinary life, no matter how necessary the process may be. The durable things that really matter in life, like character and integrity, can’t be flipped on like a switch. They run on a wholly different timeline than much of the rest of life.

■ A significant hazard of our particular era is the way we’ve invited phenomenally powerful ultra-short-term feedback mechanisms into our lives, designed and engineered to pull our attention to what’s popular right now. Social media and smartphones, full of “likes” and daily trends and torrential notifications, are the creations of people with a lot of money riding on the outcome of whether they can get lots of people to react like circus animals to constant stimulation.

■ But the odds are close to zero that anyone is going to be driven towards the durable things that are worth having by the engagement of the moment. Virtually nobody’s going to build good character traits while trying to trend on TikTok.

■ If people are overstimulated into caring about what other people think of them right now, there’s not going to be much attention left over for caring about what we’re making of ourselves in the long run.

■ It’s doubtful there are easy answers, particularly because great character traits don’t have much of a marketing budget. But the longer it takes us to put some real thought into the matter, the greater the danger that we will look back from the future on this era and lament that nobody took sufficient action before hollowing out the mechanisms that could have saved us.

■ In realiy, the root cause of the problem is almost certainly one of nutrients, wherever they’re coming from. And those nutrients have fairly well-established solutions which experts are capable of assessing and addressing.

■ In an especially ironic turn, the problems at the Reflecting Pool are happening just as 10,000 of these water experts are converging on Washington for the American Water Works Association’s Annual Convention and Exposition. Some are even presenting on algae issues.

■ Expertise is a two-way street: Experts have to make themselves available for the good of the public, and the public has to be willing (sometimes through agents like government officials) to seek out that expert advice. If nobody in the Federal government manages to take the short drive to the Washington convention center to see if any of the 10,000 conference attendees could be recruited to make a quick field trip and offer some advie, then there’s little hope for getting the problem resolved. Wild conspiracy claims rarely have it right.

■ In theory, these surveys are a clever attempt to collect valuable market data that otherwise might be too hard to uncover before it’s too late. But a truly astonishing number of these surveys fail to ask the right questions, corrupting the data, hiding the information they’re supposed to reveal, and generally wasting well-meaning customers’ time.

■ That’s because most of the surveys ask about a narrow range of judgment points, and far more often than not represent the experience as belonging entirely to the front-line, customer-facing employees. Most reasonable people realize that there are second-order and third-order causes that lead to their experiences, but the surveys rarely probe that far.

■ An airline survey, for instance, might ask about whether a cabin crew was friendly and whether the lavatories were clean. These things matter, of course. But rarely do those surveys go on to ask equally important questions like, “Was everything about the online experience satisfactory?”, “Did we account for enough overhead bin space?”, or “Did you spend too much time waiting for a connection because our crews were mis-scheduled?”.

■ There are countless times when things go wrong beyond the control of frontline customer-service employees, but the surveys are often structured so that they get punished in the scoring for factors well outside their control. Well-meaning consumers then start to pull their punches (not wanting to punish people for problems beyond their control), and solvable issues go undetected.

■ A good guideline in life comes in two parts: “If you see a problem, solve it. When attempting to solve a problem, be sure to solve the right problem.” Surveys all too often look like good attempts to do the first part right while failing miserably at the second.

■ Modern air travel is full of paradoxes like this one: The technical sophistication involved in putting the airplane in the sky and keeping it there is enormous. The precision involved in components like the engines is mind-blowing. But the failure of just one boring system to deliver water can turn the entire aircraft into something as backwards as an unimproved campsite on the side of a mountain.

■ It was a problem experienced by the Artemis II crew, as well: Their incredibly expensive space toilet stopped working until troubleshooting could be done. And since we haven’t yet found a way to escape our own biology, that was a pretty big problem for the astronauts.

■ We are surrounded by illusions of technical perfection all the time, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that “turn it off and back on again” remains one of the main ways we fix our computers when they go awry. Sophistication and advanced functions are easy to recognize, but truly bulletproof reliability remains hard to find.

■ Those are indoor temperatures -- and there’s no number of fans that can possibly be installed to make those rooms tolerable. It’s a plain and inescapable fact that at certain temperatures, particularly indoors, people become less able to get their jobs done -- including the jobs of teaching and learning.

■ The effects of heat on productivity are making news in India, too, where the temperatures are cutting into factory productivity by as much as 10%.

■ There are scolds and puritans out there who would say that humans have created the high temperatures by burning fossil fuels and causing anthropogenic climate change, and thus humans should be punished. But not only is that wildly unfair to the schoolchildren (who made none of the choices that led to the climate change), it’s self-defeating: Things aren’t going to get better if misery is the only outcome that counts.

■ This means that we will have to act in a way that mirrors the classic admonition that “You have to spend money to make money”. In this case, in the process of trying to rectify past wrongs that resulted from burning too many fossil fuels, we will have to accept some accommodations along the way (like spending on air conditioning systems and the electricity needed to run them) on our way to mitigating or reversing the impact of past environmental wrongs. Things aren’t going to get better if we leave students to roast in classrooms where it’s too hot to learn. We can’t expect progress if we subject the next generation to environmentally prohibitive learning environments.

■ There is no reasonable doubt that domestic politics around the world are being shaped in meaningful ways by foreign interference: See, for instance, the riots taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Simultaneously, international collaboration both in the shadows and in the spotlight has had big effects on politics, as well.

■ Meanwhile, this takes place against a backdrop of a general amplification of extremes without interference from abroad, charged heavily by the effects of both social media and algorithmic media siloization.

■ With the G7 meeting looming, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has openly declared, “What one can’t do at this point in a rapidly shifting world order is to rely on one set of institutions, one grouping, one country to provide the answers”. Carney is in many ways a textbook institutionalist, but he seems unapologetic about calling out what he sees as a major geopolitical realignment that moves the United States from hegemon to participant.

■ The risk is grave that Carney might be right. The time of peak global cooperation, mutuality, and barrier-lowering, largely under US leadership, may be over -- or, at the very least, put on hold for a substantial time to come. And that’s a travesty, because such a reversal in policy will hurt the United States more than most other countries, and it’s largely a self-inflicted injury.

■ Other periods of barrier-building and general retreat from international engagement have been costly, as anyone with even a modest exposure to history would know. But it takes trust and patience to lower the barriers, and while those barriers are in place, people like Carney will rationally position themselves around building substitute arrangements for the good of their own countries if it looks like no one will really stand up for the old institutions.

■ Their interaction often played out in front of the national media, and despite their many points of contention in domestic politics, they shared some important goals surrounding America’s place in the world. It left a model for behavior that gets ignored quite a lot today: Knowing that they didn’t agree, they bargained instead.

■ O’Neill wrote a fair amount in his retirement, including a short book on his general view of politics -- not of policies, but of the act of serving in office. One of his lasting recommendations was, “[A]sk your staff periodically, ‘Am I the same person you went to work for?’”

■ That’s good advice not only for public office-holders, but for private-sector leaders as well. Nothing could be more important than remaining grounded and aware of one’s own shortcomings. Lots of people drift from their original principles (even when only in charge of small projects or minor offices). The risk of this happening grows exponentially with power, as does the harm that comes from it.

■ Calvin Coolidge anticipated O’Neill’s advice in somewhat more high-minded language: “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.” But both men had it right: Anyone with great power (not just Presidents) needs great humility, too. Nobody is indispensable, and everyone is at risk of coming untethered without the help of truth-tellers. Real greatness is conditioned on having the modesty to be willingly pushed back into line.

■ Aside from some of the forgettable Chief Executives of the middle and late 1800s, more significant Presidents have also been left out. James Madison, for instance, has a namesake building housing the Library of Congress, but it only opened in 1980 (and isn’t exactly a “Presidential library” of the same hagiographic status as the brand-new Obama Presidential Center).

■ That probably wouldn’t bother Madison, though. He would almost certainly be content with recognition via a functional library building, considering his foundational influence on the Library of Congress.

■ Madison’s was a zealous advocate for knowledge, even pressing Congress to form a national university “on a scale and for objects worthy of the American nation”. Though no comprehensive university of the type was ever built, it’s interesting to consider what that might look like today. As important as bricks-and-mortar residential college life can be, a truly national university today would have to contain a very large online learning component.

■ And despite the rarity of higher education in the late 1700s, there is no better advertisement for the value of very broad access to educational opportunity than the progress of the country since Madison’s time. We live vastly richer in a material sense in large part because so many people in so many ways over so many years decided to get a little bit smarter than they were before. Compounding effects matter in human knowledge, too. America doesn’t need more places to stand in the way.

■ A worthwhile monumental program for our 250th anniversary as a country could easily include some incarnation of a national university. We don’t need vanity renaming projects or more opportunities to sit still: We need people who are eager to keep moving towards greater and greater goals.

■ 1. Don't insult your people by sharing best practices. Best practices are for suckers. Truly talented people are naturally good at everything, including things they've never seen before. It's rude to tell them ways to save time and frustration.

■ 2. Avoid doing anything you've seen anyone try elsewhere. All good ideas are your own original thoughts. If it wasn't yours first, don't bother attempting it. Ignore what peers and admirable leaders have tried.

■ 3. Under-communicate. Begrudge the process of explaining your ideas, do it as infrequently and irregularly as possible, and treat all messages as having the same level of importance. Never differentiate! There's no such thing as a "most important" thing: Your message channels should be one big Facebook-style feed of equal value.

■ 4. Avoid identifying talent. Make people fight their way to the top: Status-seeking and unchecked ambition should be rewarded.

■ 5. Have no transcendent goals. If you must have goals, keep them small and self-serving. Goals should be reserved for tedious metrics that you can use to hound volunteers. Anything bigger is just a hassle.