The Latin phrase Quis custodies custodies warns that it's pretty hard to find anyone you can completely trust. Investing for your retirement, you must be careful to avoid transaction fees to pay your agents, and taxes to pay your government to watch your agents, who in turn watch the companies they invest in.
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The Pitcairn Financial Group
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Gradually, the world is coming to accept John Bogle's idea of a market index fund as the best most people can do. Investing in the whole market, it doesn't do much trading, whether buying or selling. Therefore, it has minimum costs, minimum taxes. As a by-product, it has maximum diversification, hence maximum safety. Low costs and high safety don't automatically give the best performance, except that somehow they do. The Index Fund idea just relentlessly outperforms the vast majority of investment advisers, in both up-markets and down-markets. Investment advisers just hate index funds, bad-mouthing them constantly. But if you buy anything else, you had better have a very good reason to do so.
Well, it's just possible that a second Philadelphia-born idea can do it. The Pitcairn Foundation was created for his family by John Pitcairn, one of the world's all-time champion investors. About fifteen years ago, the Johnny Appleseed spirit caused the Foundation to open up its investment approach to non-family members; they created a public mutual fund company based on the collective ideas and experiences of the Foundation. John Pitcairn bought the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, nurtured it to success as PPG Industries, and then eventually sold it, based on the observation that almost no firms, family owned or otherwise, survive more than seventy-five years. Companies should be bought with the intention to sell them, even though they are managed expertly throughout their existence.
The Pitcairn Foundation observed that (although the managers wouldn't always admit it) continuing dominance by the founding family almost always proved beneficial for the running of the company by hired expert managers. Nepotism was often a bad thing in the managers, but a very useful thing in governance. But if you go too far with this idea, you may get into the stifling arrogance of family control in European and Oriental firms. Founding family control keeps the managers from over-paying themselves or worse still, under-working themselves. But if you allow the inevitable minority of worthless family members to pilfer the company, you get the same thing at a different level of control, where it is just harder to fire them.
After a great deal of intense scholarly work, it was observed that there are about six hundred major American corporations where the founding family maintains control. About a quarter of them have no outside directors other than the family, and the performance of these companies is about 15% worse than the market (i.e. the index). In the remaining group, family members only constituted about half of the outside directors.
Now, that group of companies regularly perform 15% better than the index. Guess which one you ought to buy as an investor.
So, now we have the Constellation Pitcairn Family Heritage Fund, open to the public as a no-load mutual fund. Its portfolio consists of fifty-five of those six hundred families dominated companies (with a market capitalization of at least $200 million each), selected by the Pitcairn Financial Company, entirely owned by the Pitcairn family. As long as it continues to outperform the index by 150 basis points, you can be fairly confident that the principle of family domination will endure, up and down the line. But not exclusively; it must be mixed with professional management. The family owns the fund manager, which is run by professionals, who watch the governance of the portfolio components, which are run by professional managers, overseen by founding family members on the corporate board -- themselves overseen by an equal number of non-family independent board members. It's like a Calder mobile, which by the way, is still another Philadelphia idea.
If you are looking to get rich fast, this isn't much of an idea. But since the Family Heritage Fund has consistently outperformed the index by 1.5%, it looks as though the advantage of selecting better corporate governance in the portfolio distinctly outweighs the disadvantage of reduced diversification.
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Israel Pemberton, Ben Franklin satire l
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Ralph Pemberton was an English Quaker well before 1650; he may have been a Quaker before William Penn was one. As an old man, he accompanied his son Phineas to Pennsylvania in 1682. They established a farm on the banks of Delaware in Bucks County called Grove Place,
and Phineas soon became one of the chief men in the colony. In the next generation, Israel Pemberton became one of the best educated, richest merchants in the colony. But it was Israel's son also called Israel, who earned the title of King of the Quakers. He was one of the founding Managers of the Pennsylvania Hospital along with Benjamin Franklin and one of his brothers, James Pemberton, and was a generous philanthropist and leader of a number of other civic organizations. Just exactly what provoked his famous political disputes with Franklin is not clear, but he was a leading friend of the Indians, whom Franklin never much liked. Israel Pemberton strongly and effectively argued William Penn's policy of friendship with the Indians, particularly insisting that sales of land to colonists should be prevented until there was a clear agreement with the Indians about the ownership. Unfortunately, pressures built up as Europeans immigrated faster than this policy could accommodate smoothly, and Franklin mostly sided with the impatient immigrants -- and squatters. This disagreement came to a head in 1756 when Pemberton negotiated a treaty of peace with the Indians at a conference at Easton. Although this treaty seemed to settle matters, it came against a background of the descendants of William Penn abandoning Quakerism. They, however, remained the proprietary owners of the Province with a more narrow focus on speeding up land sales to maximize their investment. Much of the internal dynamics of these quarrels before the Revolutionary War remain unclear and possibly somewhat misrepresented.
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Shenandoah Valley
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When the Revolution came, Pemberton viewed it with disfavor, mostly for pacifist rather than purely Tory reasons. Feelings ran high since the Pembertons were influential citizens with the potential to dissuade wavering neighbors, which made it difficult to tolerate them as invisible bystanders. However that may be, the three Pemberton brothers and twenty other wealthy and influential Quakers were arrested and, without hearing or trial, thrown in the back of an oxcart and sent into exile in Virginia for eight months. Their journey was a curious one, along a trail up the Schuylkill to the ford at Pottstown, and then down the Shenandoah Valley, an area in which they were well known and highly respected, greeted with great sympathy as they traveled. Isaac's brother John, who had spent several years as a missionary, died during this exile.
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John Clifford Pemberton
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In some ways, the most curiously notable Pemberton was John Clifford Pemberton, who applied to West Point on his own initiative and was appointed by Andrew Jackson who had been a friend of his father. In itself, it is curious that so combative a person and so vigorous an enemy of the Indians -- as Jackson certainly was -- would have Quaker friendships. But he did not misjudge John Clifford, who became a diligent professional warrior for his country in a number of military incidents with the Indians, the Mexicans, and the Canadians, rising to the rank of captain in the regular Army at the opening of the Civil War. In spite of personal efforts by General Winfield Scott to dissuade him, he resigned his commission and volunteered in the Confederate army. He was quickly promoted to major, then a brigadier general and eventually to Lieutenant General. As such, he was the commanding Confederate officer at the fifty-day siege of Vicksburg where he was finally forced to surrender to Grant's army. In a prisoner exchange, he was returned to the Confederate side, which they had no openings for Lieutenant Generals. He resigned and re-enlisted as a common soldier, but was quickly promoted to the rank of Colonel, in charge of the artillery at the final siege of Richmond. After the war, he became a farmer in Warrenton, Virginia, but was visiting at the family home in Penllyn when he died in 1881. John Clifford Pemberton, the highest-ranking general on the grounds, lies buried in Laurel Hill cemetery right next to Israel Pemberton. In some sort of triumph of the South, he here out-ranks George Gordon Meade, the hero of Gettysburg. Just how his pacifist family reconciled itself to his heroism can only be imagined.
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Galapagos Islands
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The Galapagos islands are on the equator, so the sun comes up at 6 AM and sets at 6PM, every day of the year. There are storms and changes in the currents, but this place comes as close as anywhere to being a constant-weather environment, useful for observing more complex places by comparison. That's part of the scientific method -- limit the variability under study. Jack Nixon just took an extended vacation there, and told the Right Angle Club about it, with slides.
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Charles Darwin
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Charles Darwin, the guides relate, didn't spend much time there, and investigated very little, possibly because he suffered from incapacitating migraine all his life. He took home a collection of 13 dead finches, which after the study were from different species with subtle differences, and led Darwin to develop his theory and write his book about the origin of species. Although some people will never forgive him for upsetting the conventional view of things, it may help to know that he was a disciple of the Scottish philosopher Hume. Hume was an important factor in the American Revolution, with particular influence on Princeton and hence Scotch Irish settlers in America. Hume taught that philosophy and religion are best advanced by demanding proof that anything in nature has a purpose, because most things don't. There's a difference between having a purpose and having a utility. To Darwin, the small differences between species must have some utility to endure, and those with most utility survived better than others.
The Galapagos are volcanic peaks sticking up out of the Pacific Ocean about six hundred miles from Ecuador, to whom they now belong. They have experienced a number of small eruptions, even in the past twenty years. When the bare rock cools, birds rest on it, deposit what is delicately called guano, start vegetation, allow migrant fish and animals to survive. The islands, geologically speaking, are comparatively young, started fresh and new, and have the world's most constant climate. Many of the animal species are unique to the place, and traces of how they got to be what they now are like, still persist.
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Big Dodo Bird
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Along came two waves of predatory human beings. The pirates and whalers in the first wave dumped the big tortoises into the hold of their ships as fresh meat, more or less preserved. The great big dodo birds had no wings, so they were easy to catch, delicious to fry; and like the tortoises, were comparatively easy to carry along as shipboard supplies. The dodo is extinct, the tortoises almost so. However, most tourists quickly observe that tortoises spend most of their waking hours making love, so perhaps their survival can be traced to that.
The second wave of human predators were the local South American fishermen, who brought along goats and rats to devastate the fragile environment. Ecuador prizes its tourist revenue, so it has made a nearly-successful effort to eradicate goats and rats. Furthermore, immigrants are strongly discouraged; prove you have to be here or get out. Even Bill Gates had trouble getting permission to dock his yacht.
This is a place to see lots of funny birds. Blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, flamingos, cormorants, pilot whales, tropical penguins, porpoises, and albatross. The albatross keeps flying all the time, and only lands in order to mate. There's some sort of recurring theme, here.
www.Philadelphia-Reflections.com/blog/1419.htm
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Theodore Roosevelt
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The Progressive movement of the early 20th century is most concisely viewed as a futile social reaction to the vast changes in America caused by urbanization and industrialization after the Civil War. The transcontinental railroad threatened to destroy the wild, wild West, but the enduring environmental movement had overtones of even greater hostility toward industrialization, the cause of it all. In this sense, it joined forces with socialist and labor reform movements, in hating the newly rich, the spoilers, the Robber Barons. It briefly shared sympathies with anti-immigrant groups, while simultaneously expressing great sympathy with the decisions of the people, as opposed to corrupt politicians. There was a strong Calvinist streak in Progressivism, linked back to New England and Harvard its intellectual center. Regardless of any other contradiction, it reflected the viewpoint of Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt, "that damned cowboy" in the view of conservatives, did not invent the ideas of Progressivism, but he surely personified them, illustrated them in action. This confused turmoil of resentments was knocked off the front pages by a real threat to European civilization, the First World War. A terrifyingly well organized German war machine took the place of Robber Barons as a symbol of what was wrong with the world. The crash of 1929 and its ensuing long depression finally put an end to older controversies; it pushed the "reset" button.
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Henry Brooks Adams
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To understand the position of Philadelphia's upper crust during the Progressive era, four or five names need to be fleshed out. Owen Wister and J. William White would be important Philadelphia links to the Bostonians Henry Adams and Henry James. All of them were leading literary figures, and all of them were close friends of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt, it might be recalled, was the author of thirty-four books. This little group of literary giants were members of the leading families of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; what they said, mattered. Although today Owen Wister is mainly known as the author of The Virginian, the first of the cowboy stories of the Wild West, he was, in fact, an observer of the social climates of not only the West, but the deep South (Lady Baltimore ), and the East Coast ( Romney). Some idea of his political leanings can be gleaned from his presidency of the Immigrant Restriction Society, and the authorship of an article called Shall We Let the Cuckoos Crowd Us From Our Nest . Wister has been called "the best born and bred of all modern writers", referring to his descent
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Columbus and the Egg
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Let's summarize. We started with the classical Health Saving Account (C-HSA), which may need a little updating, but appeals to millions of frugal people as a simple way to avoid the tangles of present-day healthcare financing. The law hasn't changed much, but used by millions of subscribers has turned up many surprising features, all good ones. Deliberately overfunding them has unexpectedly useful results, for example, in providing retirement income if you have been lucky with your health.
On that foundation then was devised New Health Savings Accounts (N-HSA), combining six more innovations, each of which is easy to explain, but in combination utterly transform the basic design. The extended longevity of the 21st Century makes compound interest in passive investing into a powerful investment tool and is used to reduce healthcare costs to the consumer, markedly. Secondly, improved healthcare for the working years has unbalanced the employer-based model, so sickness costs are getting crowded into retirement years. For this, the accounts permit extraction of the first year and last years of life, transferring their heavy costs to the working generation where employment-basing still makes sense. And so on. With very little new legislation, most of this package is ready to go.
Lifetime Health Savings Accounts (L-HSA), patterned on a whole-life model. L-HSA won't work without some new legislation to edge around recent regulations and some outmoded premises. Multi-year coverage is cheaper but requires a longer commitment, so it needs to be precisely designed. Starting fresh, it directly addresses a host of problems hiding behind a century of habit. Its flexibility accepts a range of designs, stretching from self-insurance out of a bank's safe deposit box, stretching all the way to letting life insurance companies run everything.
We conclude insurance of every sort "shares the risk" for expensive problems but generates extra expense when little problems get insured that don't need to be. Little medical problems swamp the fixed overhead of insurance unnecessarily. When you only insure essentials -- as true catastrophic insurance does -- it costs far less than insuring everything. So, here's an outline of a major variation, adding features, one by one. It's a Health Savings Account, on steroids.
Proposal 25A: Let's combine the high cost of the first year of life with the really high-cost last year of life, as a basic foundation of minimum health insurance.
The dual combination could surely include everyone. What I am technically trying to achieve, I admit it, is to combine one life situation, which sometimes generates a surplus it can't use, with another situation, where every baby creates a difficult debt for someone else to pay. And whereas 100% of the population experiences birth and life at the two ends of life, there is ancient uneasiness about sharing liabilities outside of families, and even, how far the boundaries of families will stretch. Ancient fear of violating obsolete family boundaries sometimes hinders useful proposals. Because of increased longevity, grandparents are now real people, not just a picture on the wall. And by no means are they all senile.
A sly feature of all this is, people still alive are willing enough to overfund the costs of the terminal care lying ahead of them, but few still alive have their own birth costs on their minds, even if they were never paid. That lopsided initial generation might generate sizeable reserves for a circular program, if we imaginatively link accounting between generations, carrying those birth costs forward. Another unrecognized feature is the costs of these first and last years of every life are in fact both paid in retrospect, and often not by the patient.
Furthermore, most of the heavy expenses of both ends of life are created within a hospital, which often delays final billing until the issue of responsibility is settled, creating blind spots in which final responsibility is unclear. Nevertheless, the hospital aggregates many services in a total hospital bill, so bulk payments by diagnosis or even by age, are tempting but as yet crudely perfected. When all these matters finally get standardized, reimbursement from one insurance entity to another should become commonplace. The final transaction in both end-of-life insurance as well as the beginning of- life insurance easily and more naturally evolves into who reimburses some other entity who (temporarily) paid the bills.That's about all, there is to say about the funds' flow, which should become very simple, but come in larger lumps. At such esoteric levels, no one cares whose money it is, so long as it gets paid. At the local patient level, family transfer issues can be troublesome. It can be recalled we have gone into detail about grandparent/grandchild transfers in the section on New Health Savings Accounts, and indeed it emerges as the main innovation of that effort. Still earlier, we described the compound interest hidden in the background, paying for a great deal of it. As an aside, most people will eventually find it is desirable to use overfunded accounts as a basis for tax-sheltered retirement costs, and will therefore often die with a small surplus, which is the basis for closing the loop between generations. That may take time to evolve.
Proposal 25B: And then, add catastrophic coverage regardless of age, less the cost of overlaps. Title: Tri-Challenge Basic Coverage.
Here's the universal catastrophic coverage we promised in the first chapter, minus the first and last years of life overlaps.
Overlaps. One passing word about overlaps. Reducing overlaps is one of the main mechanisms for reducing costs, but the insurance entities will fight fiercely over who gets the reductions. For example, what about a six months old child who dies with an expensive hospital bill? My suggestion is that the beginning of life insurance pays first, the end of life insurer pays second, and then the catastrophic insurer pays for the balance. This gives the savings to the catastrophic carrier, but most of the cost is given to grandpa, who is dead, and anyway, most of it is investment income, leading to fewer complaints.
We thus design the basic coverage to include two universally-unavoidable costs, plus the universally-inescapable risk of unpayable health costs at all ages in-between. It is clearly superior to less universal, and more unaffordable, coverages.
Proposal 25C: Require the unused birth coverage to be transferred, either at the time of death or optionally at other times, to either a designated grandchild by inheritance or to a designated pool of unassigned third-generation recipients. The grandchild's Health Savings Account would begin at birth, capturing 21 extra years of compound interest, compared with employer-based insurance.
The purpose of beginning an HSA at birth is to add 21 years to the compounding while staying within the laws of perpetuities.
A 1:1 ratio of national grandparents to national grandchildren do exist, but so do multi-children families, no-children families, unmarried families, divorces, etc. There is definitely a need for a pool within which, mis-matched funds are administered.
The childhood transfer feature adds about $28,000 to the coverage, but it would only require $42 a year (added to the last year of life premiums, at 6.5% interest compounded from one year of age). Because catch-up transition at age 40 would require $200 annual contribution to catch up with newborns, rising to $28,000 for someone aged 65, it might be better to add $25, or so, at birth to reduce the even greater cost of late joiners (over age 40) to the plan. They must be enticed, however, because they are the ones closest to activating the transfers, and hence are the most important support to enlist to an innovation.
Proposal 25D: This is voluntary Tri-Challenge Basic Coverage. Whether to make it mandatory, whether to subsidize it for the poor, and whether to replace Obamacare with it -- are political decisions, not questions of insurance design.
This coverage probably approaches half of the entire health costs of the nation, depending on how you treat the cost of prison inmates, the unemployable and illegal immigrants. If science should ever succeed in eliminating every major disease and therefore every other cost of healthcare, 18% of present costs would very likely persist. And in fact, the cost of prisoners, mentally retarded and illegals show no signs of changing much, either.
They are costs most likely to be permanent, but what we spend on the rest will depend on where we place the limits on "Catastrophic" care insurance. That cost depends on the size of the deductible, and the upper limit of coverage. You can readily predict the debate: the higher the deductible, the lower the premium, so the out of pocket cost depends on the deductible, too. But while controversy would remain, the great beauty of this design is the lessened political resistance from every voter who would likely benefit, which is 100%.
There is no escaping these realities, and in the meantime, the rest of health costs will dwindle down to the cost of birth and death, which change their nature very slowly. Therefore, although it is not traditional in the health insurance field, I propose it has long seemed an entirely natural thing, for the costs of childbirth to be an obligation of some other generation, usually but not always of the same family.
The problem is indeed complicated by the unusual concentration of malpractice claims in obstetrics, as well as the marginal finances of parents at this stage of their careers. But the hidden effect is to create more, or less, valuable babies, depending on how you judge the impact of emotions versus supply and demand. It was almost an unknown issue a century ago.
Any resistance to this proposal is thus likely to be more instinctive than rational since we have had so many generations of channeling such issues within the family unit. The relatively trivial cost of funding children's health care through 104 years of compound interest does generate a temptation to overfund the program, which if necessary can be frustrated by requiring one or more zero balances per lifetime. That is particularly true in this particular instance when compound interest could generate almost any amount of leveraged money at the death of a grandparent, simply by increasing the modest amount impounded at the grandparent's birth, and waiting long enough for it to grow. People in charge of managing the currency are then drawn into the discussion. Indeed, the relatively confiscatory level of estate taxes (60-70%) is a sign our society is not comfortable with perpetuities, although available remedies are fairly simple. Indeed some states also levy inheritance taxes on the recipients as well as the donor's estate taxes.
Whatever the traditional resistance, it's permanently true that the costs of the first year of life will always greatly exceed what a newborn is able to pay. And therefore it surely follows that this obstacle has hindered health financing for a very long time. There must be some mechanism for inter-generational transfer of funds, or life cannot continue. At present, it's called a family, and families are under strain. Conditions of modern life have evolved to the point where interference with some generational transfers will cause more suffering than the relaxation of such attitudes. There will be resistance, but it must be persuaded to reconsider its position and bilateral compromise must result.
Warning: Start Saving While You are Young. Health Costs for the first year of life are reportedly 3% of the total, and while the last year of life (15%) is worse, those costs laid on young families are particularly disruptive because of still higher costs later if neglected. At best they compete with college, housing, and automobile costs, and probably reduce the birth rate of the middle class. The enclosed graph shows a family of curves based on subsequent investment income from different invested external-contribution levels at birth, to help readers judge how much surplus might likely be generated at the end of a lifetime of average costs. Our goal is to estimate the cost of overfunding grandpa's health costs at birth, so there would remain an incentive for him to spend wisely, but still generate enough surplus to fund a grandchild's juvenile health costs. That is, to estimate the cost of transferring the obligation of grandchild costs from parents to grandparents. But it must ultimately be recognized that the full consequences of such a basic change, are unpredictable.
First, however, we must determine the size of grandchildren's costs. 3% of all costs ($10,500) for the first year of the child's life sounds plausible. But 5% of costs from the first birthday cake to the 21st birthday ($17,200) sounds surprisingly high and needs to be challenged if only to defend it properly from rapidly escalating educational costs. That's one of the great advantages of starting with a demonstration project; you can see where the bills are coming from. But that's mostly a quibble, because even $17,000 is manageable, and the legal boundary of age 21 is strongly defended.
Let's take just a moment to examine the laws of perpetuities, which mostly focus on intergenerational inheritance. Established about three hundred years ago as common law, they permit transfers for 21 years after the birth of the last person to be alive at the time of the bequest. I'm not a lawyer, but those do not seem like a handicap for what is proposed.
The pool would also pay for multiple children in a family or those newborns who do not have a willing grandparent. I never met any of my four grandparents, so I don't know if they would have been willing or not. As the father of fourteen living children, one of my two grandfathers would surely have wanted some adjustments. If it becomes an issue, the government could easily afford to donate the $7 yearly required to avoid the issue. During the early transition phase, it might possibly be necessary to have government backup if temporary mismatches appear, eventually repaid by adjusting the initial cash deposits. It happens the birthrate is 2.1 per mother, which easily matches one-half per grandparent, greatly relieving but not eliminating the occasional mismatches. It would seem a fairly simple task to charge 1:1 (grandparent to child) for the first three or four years, and gradually re-adjust if more precise data becomes available. It could even be possible to pay for the child-generation completely, but this is not entirely desirable. It should not require dynamic scoring to understand that making healthcare free would increase its cost.
Not everything which is desirable to do is desirable to do in a big hurry.
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The
political advantages are wide-spread. Much tax resistance to paying for healthcare would be deflated by knowing that almost all cost was absolutely essential, and for the most part universal. The parent generation would be relieved of the cost of the healthcare of children. During transitions, there probably will be problems with overlapping coverage. Not only is Medicare reducible for overlapping costs, but the U.S. government is relieved of some of the embarrassment of borrowing 50% of Medicare from foreign countries in order to pay for it. But, sorry, we're getting down into the weeds.
If desired, the 1.6% salary withholding for Medicare can be reduced, relieving working people and their employers of about one-quarter of Medicare costs. The tax inequity between employees and self-employed should be eliminated anyway, but this somewhat reduces the disparity. The doughnut hole was a good idea, but it is part of copayments which are a bad idea. It should be self-evident that making hospital insurance free but doctor payment subject to Part B premium, creates unmanageable distortions. Many healthcare financing problems are like the fable of Columbus and the egg -- once explained, anybody can do it. Nevertheless, it would seem much better to proceed slowly according to a defined plan, using demonstration projects and experimental trials, mid-course adjustments, and careful monitoring. Because not everything which is desirable to do is desirable to do in a big hurry.
Finally, someone does need to calculate the cost of adding catastrophic stop-loss insurance to birth-and-death insurance. It isn't possible for an insurance outsider to calculate the overlaps between the two types of insurance, which are probably considerable. But, particularly if there is a lot of overlap making it relatively cheap, that combination would constitute the kind of basic insurance which covers what everyone needs, and very few would be able to fabricate. If you linked it to a more sensible diagnosis related code, as a basis for DRG for inpatients, and firm association with market-based outpatient costs, you might get a firm basic package. It then only requires a relative value index for items which do not overlap, and a firm rule that the same items be charged the same amount, for helpless inpatients and not-so-helpless outpatients.
What are vital but uncovered by this basic package are new scientific discoveries, so self-evidently essential they create temptations to exact extortionate prices. I'd say it would be shooting yourself in the foot to go hard on such discoveries for their first few years. Overall, that which is left uncovered by this hybrid tri-insurance may be hated for its commercial motives, but nevertheless remains something we clearly want to encourage. Managing costs of that sort ought to be left to the Food and Drug Administration, the Patent Office and competition. And silently endured by insurance.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.